“On the first day of my summer vacation, I woke up.”

Yeah, me too. A couple hours later than usual. I was supposed to go for a boat ride with my friend Jim, who used to be my Department Chair and is one of my role models as a retired dude. The rain moved in and we had to reschedule.

This left me in the ideal position of not having to get in my car and go ANYWHERE today.

I went out to get bagels, and stopped to see my friend Joe, who is rebuilding the home of my new neighbor Mark. This was DOUG’s house, but he’s moved to Canandaigua. Joe and Bill did the interior work and some of the exterior work on our house, and Joe is going nuts on Mark’s house.

I would have missed all this if I’d had to go to work.

So I move on to get bagels. On my way up Mechanic Street I pass by the house once owned by Billy Mark, an abolitionist in the 1840’s, who used the house as part of the Underground Railroad. The house has been empty for a while, with all kinds of junk around it and getting overgrown. It was buzzing with activity this morning as contractors worked in what seemed like every room.

I wouldn’t have been able to thank the contractors for bringing that beautiful house to life again if I’d had to go to work today.

I finished planting the ornamental grass we bought a couple weekends ago, and made a rock garden around it. I’ll have to include a picture.

Then I took out the mighty smashing pole Uncle Mike lent me and went to work on the stump of the former cedar tree in the front yard. Joe and Billy insisted on tearing the tree down, mostly because it obscured Joe’s custom made shutters and Dave’s paint job.

Weezy and her human Jim stopped by just in time for Jim to help me pry the stump out. Jim is a science guy, and by using applied physics and a lot of cursing and a small amount of blood ripped the beast out of the garden. He had to go somewhere, and as he is prone to doing, left Weezy behind.

Lately, I’ve been the dog whisperer or something. Weezy is an Irish Setter, a lovely older lady. Fico, my new neighbhor dog, is trying to establish to other dogs my status as HIS human, and was audibly annoyed when Weezy snuggled next to me while I took a break. Nothing more fun than being in the center of such great positive dog energy.

As I replaced it with the tiny little Hydrangea we bought, it poured.

Nap time, coffee, doing laundry with Queen’s “Sheer Heart Attack” album, followed by Portishead live in NY and finishing with Ben Folds’ incredible collection called Stems and Seeds.

What made the day most wonderful though, was what it DIDN’T involve.

It didn’t involved driving an hour to work and back.

It didn’t involve working for somebody else all day.

It didn’t involve driving at all.

It didn’t involve being any more than a half mile away from the Queen of my Universe at any given time of the day.

It’s gonna be a great vacation.

There he is sitting at home all dejected about losing his one man civil war, he’s lonely and vulnerable… he wants his mistress. Screw the ship of South Carolina statehood and fly off to Argentina for a booty call. He’s either madly in love, or the type of horny most men can identify with.

There’s also a degree of come-uppance too. Anything a Republican governor can do to disgrace himself helps even the governor scandal scale, at least in the womanizing department. I’m still bitter about Spitzer and Sanford has done little to balance the scandal scale. Flying to Argentina to be with your mistress is way more romantic than transporting a high paid hooker across state lines to have exorbitantly expensive sex with her.

On a sadder, and slightly more serious note, farewell to Farrah Fawcett. I had the red swimsuit poster in my bedroom from age 13-17. Farrah helped me through puberty. Thank you for that.

There were Farrah haters out there, as I found out in 8th grade art class. Our assignment was to recreate a drawing on a bigger scale using some kind of grid technique, and I chose the Farrah red swimsuit pic. Art class after art class I worked reverently while a host of detractors said she “wasn’t that pretty.” Well, I didn’t really do her justice either. She ended up looking more like George Foreman but Miss Kelly sensed my passion and gave me an A anyway.

The last movie I saw her in was Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women. She was the only good thing about the movie. She also played Margaret Bourke-White in a movie, which is cool because I did my master’s thesis on her. Still haven’t seen the movie though.

And mad karmic points to Farrah for fighting cancer so hard.

And then, completely out of left field - Michael Jackson. I’ve always appreciated Michael Jackson as a freaky artist, but never enough to have bought any of his music. Back in the day, I bought Saturday Night Fever just because I understood it’s historical importance, and could listen to a little bit of it. I could never bring myself to do that with Thriller.

And then he just got so weird. I liked the Howard Hughes angle of Jackson’s weirdness - the “I’m rich I can do whatever weird thing I want” vibe. But then he started doing all the weird stuff with kids, and changing color and all that. That’s when he lost me.

I’ve already seen a lot of sick Michael Jackson jokes resurrected on Facebook, as well as some new ones almost celebrating his death. Goodbye, but certainly not good riddance.

Thanks Everyone! I’m just going to to start with my friends from high school first, in no specific order.

Rick Whipps
Rick is a couple years younger than me I think, but had much older musical taste. He also had no tolerance for shit music as a teenager. Anyway, to be a smartass, he’d play really crappy music on the jukebox before he’d leave Dagwood’s Pizza. One time he played Riders on the Storm. It was the first time I’d heard the Doors. At first I thought it was some easy listening thing Rick put on as a joke. Then I realized it was the lizard king I was listening to.

Rich Merritt
I thought Rich was the shit for much of junior high because he was as into Kiss as I was. He even blew fire like Gene Simmons. But then he got all into bluesy stuff, like the J. Geils Band, which I didn’t come to understand for a long time because I didn’t know they did cool stuff before they sold out.

Matt Russell
Matt is a badass guitar player. I don’t think Matt introduced me to any bands per se, but I remember him playing a Van Halen solo in the band room with his wrist in a cast.

Sheila Haig
I can’t listen to Queen or Adam Ant without thinking of Sheila. There was a time when we were both complete Queen freaks. Sheila had (and probably still has) impeccable taste in music, except for the Bay City Rollers. Sorry Sheil…. never got it.

Sue Olsen
On our way back from a Quiz show competition in Plattsburgh, Sue put a tape of Pachelbel’s Canon in D and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in my boom box. I’d never heard either piece before, and it just sounded so perfect on that day and that time. I wasn’t wild about classical music before then.

Matt Patnode
Matt is the sole reason for any jazz literacy I might have. I listen to Matt’s band all the time now. I’ll never forget him bringing the house down with an amazing solo at the Plattsburgh Jazz Festival.

Jeff Weston
Jeff got me into reasonably serious metal - Judas Priest specifically. Jeff and I listened to a lot of cool stuff together, I just don’t remember much of it.

I guess this is a huge testament to the amount of time music takes rattling around in my brain. Music… and memories of growing up in Saranac Lake.

I’d already had some qualms about mowing the lawn to begin with. It was one of those rare times when I’m really into mowing, so I wasn’t trying to get my lazy ass out of any work. Earlier a lot of bees buzzed around in the clover and generally loving life in the yard.

Since last year we’ve been on a mission of slow, planned destruction of our perfect manicured suburban lawn in favor of clover, which is much better for the soil. Clover has naturally, and gracefully taken over the front yard and is working its way out back.

Alex suggested I wait a few days, because fireflies really love clover and we’d have a spectacular display in our yard if we kept the clover. Another reason not to mow.

So, on one shoulder, I have “crunchy me” and on the other I have old “suburban me”

Crunchy me is in the form of Alex, with wings that make him look like an angel.

Crunchy me: Bees are having a hard time of it lately, and they’re really digging the yard and not hurting anyone. Besides, the flowers look pretty.

Old Suburban me: Fuck that man. You need to bring order and uniformity to this yard. Get out there and show that grass who’s boss.

Suburban man won. A big reason for that is my inexplicable relationship with my lawn mower. But that’s another story for another day.

On the positive side, the lawn has a gorgeous layer of clover mulch to collect moisture. Plus, clover mulch looks really pretty. Even though I set my blade kind of low, a lot of the flowers made it past the blade.

Suburban man won, but with the little crunchy Alex angel glaring over my shoulder, he’s slowly losing ground, just like the pestilential thatched suburban grass that still covers most of the lawn.

This is from an e-mail that’s been circulating….

Ben and Jerry’s created “Yes Pecan!” ice cream flavor for Obama.

Then asked people to fill in the blank to the following:

For George W. they created “_________”.
Here are some favorites:

- Grape Depression

- Abu Grape

- Cluster Fudge

- Nut’n Accomplished

- Iraqi Road

- Chock ‘n Awe

- WireTapioca

- Impeach Cobbler

- Guantanmallow

- imPeachmint

- Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker… Swirl

- Heck of a Job, Brownie!

- Neocon Politan

- RockyRoad to Fascism

- The Reese’s-cession

- Cookie D’oh!

- The Housing Crunch

- Nougalar Proliferation

- Death by Chocolate… and Torture

- Credit Crunch

- Country Pumpkin

- Chunky Monkey in Chief

- George Bush Doesn’t Care About Dark Chocolate

- WM Delicious

- Chocolate Chimp

- Bloody Sundae

- Caramel Preemptive Stripe

- I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of
thousands…with nuts

feel free to add on!

The disadvantage that Dolly (the Cat of my Universe) has, is that she can’t specifically complain about the music playing. She can only stare around the room looking for the origin of all the strange sounds that Frank Zappa makes through my surround speakers.

Whenever anything comes out in surround sound, Dolly kinda freaks out.

And, with the 99% completion of our remodeling project, I have to display the part of the project that I’m proudest of……

I was really geeked about the Superbowl, especially when Queen of my Universe figured out how I could watch it at home. As weird as this may sound, one of the reasons I look forward to football games is that I get a LOT of papers corrected. The sequence of the plays, and the short spurts of attention necessary to follow the game mesh perfectly with my attention deficit.

And what a game. I’ll just go chronologically with the props and drops here:

As soon as I tuned in, the first thing I saw was the etrade commercial with the babies. Too freaking funny.

The Obama interview before the game. It made me feel tingly all over. The O hangin at home before the ball game, takes a minute to chat with Matt Lauer. He favored the Steelers, so did I. He pimped his massive stimulus package, and I stimulated the economy by getting Wings from Luigi’s.

Could you ever imagine W speaking contemporaneously without sounding like a complete idiot?

O is mastering the media.

And….. I’m man enough to admit this…. I have a man crush on Prez. He’s a sexy man, no two ways about it.

Since I know nothing about the players this year, the little profile thingies they do before the game contributed a bit more to my interest level.

I wanted Pittsburgh to win only because my wonderfulest friend Sue is from Pittsburgh, and she, and the rest of the city just LOVE the Steelers. It seems like there hasn’t been a lot of love in Pittsburgh for a while, so that puts a lot of pressure on the Steelers to deliver some happiness.

Then, the game was just SOOOO good. Pittsburgh ripped down the field in the first possession, and looked like they were gonna mop the floor with the Cardinals… but the Cards kept coming back. Both teams just played their hearts out.

Springsteen at halftime was…..ummm….I can’t find a great enough word. Bruce is looking older now, but damn he can still rock. I was hoping he’d make a more radical political statement, but the homage to O was pretty touching, especially with the gospel choir. It was probably too over the top for most rational people, but I actually teared up a little.

I thought a lot of the commercials were overly crass, notably Go-Daddy. The other E-Trade commercials were great too. I loved the horse commercials despite my hatred for the watered-down urine they’re pimping.

And then after a heart-stopping final quarter, the Steelers pulled it off. They went nuts in Pittsburgh… this guy caught it very crudely. I like this video, because he took it before they started burning shit.

I had a great superbowl, great wings and got a lot of work done. Nice job Steelers. Rock on Pittsburgh!

Last spring, when gas was over $4.00 a gallon, I started paying attention to my gas mileage a little more. Queen of My Universe got me a computer to hook up to the Korean Tiger’s brain which computes real-time gas mileage. I was having a lot of fun with it, driving slow and being all smug and self-righteous about saving the earth during my gozillion mile commute to work.

But this summer, two things stood starkly in the way of my being a hyper-miler.

The first is that I pushed a series of wrong buttons on the computer, and it started giving me really outlandish information, and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it, so I disconnected it. Disconnecting it meant that I had to look up the gas tank and engine size again… something that only took five minutes, but for some reason took me several months to do.

The price of gas notwithstanding, the other thing standing in the way of driving slower and doing those things hyper-milers are so famous for is that deep down in my heart, I really hate driving to work. And even when I don’t leave for work late, I want to get off the fucking road as soon as possible, so I drive as fast as I possibly can, mileage be damned. I take back roads that I NEVER see police on for most of my ride to work so there’s no fear of legal consequences.

Now the price of gas has gone insanely low. It’s creeping back up to $2.00 a gallon again and I’m all like, big whoop. With the length of my commute the drop in oil prices caused a similar drop in my desire to be a hyper miler. Another fatal blow to my environmental self-righteousness. Fuck the environment… I’m saving MONEY.

But that was in Bush’s America, and the pre-Obama Rob, brainwashed into complicity with Satan by short term economic gain.

Can we really decrease our dependence on foreign oil even when it’s mad cheap?

YES WE CAN!

Can I spend the five minutes necessary to look up two pieces of information about my Korean Tiger?

YES I CAN!

Can I watch myself get horrific gas mileage because I snuggled a few extra minutes with the Queen of my Universe?

Yes, unfortunately I can. But I’ll try not to.

My New Year’s fitness resolution comes shortly after New Year’s now that I live in Naples. It does for many other people too. This is the time of year when people start training for the Saint J’s 5k. St. J’s is the funkiest looking Catholic Church on the planet.

Around this time people start training for the race. I did too once. It was around 9 degrees this morning, and as I decided to drive instead of walk to get bagels I was plunged into a short fit of guilt as the group of die hard runners came puffing down the street. Sometimes when I see people running, even in the dead of winter, it makes me want to start running again.

But these people were serious. The ones in the back looked as though they might have been having fun, but the ones in front were serious. The woman in the very front had a serious game face on.

I know what would happen though. It happens every time I even think about running, or actually do it. I’ll run for a couple days on fresh legs, and it’s fun. Then any longer than that it becomes a challenge. Then it becomes a chore.

Running, especially in preparation for 5k races, reminds me of my teenage athletic ineptitude all over again. When I was in tenth grade I decided for some bizarre reason to join the cross-country team. I think it was to get into honor society, or my crush on Joyce Ferber. Not sure.

The first few practices were hell. I’d probably never run more than a mile at one time in my life, and here I was running 8-10 miles a day. I got into a groove though, and when we ran in a fun run for one of our practices, I thought I could show the world what a six foot tall one hundred thirty five pound boy could do with a little moxie.

The race was on. I huffed and I puffed. I sped past the race-walkers, really old people, and even Joyce Ferber’s pregnant mom. It was glorious until the first hill and all the spark came out of my legs. Around mile two, Joyce’s mom (okay, she wasn’t just pregnant… she was REALLY pregnant) came cruising past me and I was too exhausted to reclaim my lead over her.

That was the beginning of the rest of my running career. When the season began in earnest, I soon became the third worst runner in the Northern Athletic conference. I arrived at that conclusion at the end of the season when I noticed that I DIDN’T come in last two times, and I beat two different kids each time.

So maybe once this cold snap ends I’ll start training for a week, and maybe actually stay with it for long enough to actually run the race in April. Then I think about the steep hill at the beginning of the race, the steeper hill in the middle, and what we all call Mt. Misery hill at the end.