We got back from Canada last night around 10:30 pm. It was a great trip. Very relaxing. Much fun was had with Catherine's extended family. Much food was eaten. Many spirits imbibed. As always happens, I started speaking more and more en Francais during the week we were there. Now over the next couple of weeks I will gradually lose whatever new words and expressions I picked up. Oh well.

It's funny, when we're in Montreal at P and JR's place, most days are spent indoors on computers working Sudoku puzzles, chatting on IM, or surfing random sites. We just all sit around in the living room and do our own thing on our laptops while random conversations are had. The living room starts to look more like a cybercafe. It's a nice, laid back atmosphere. Kinda cool. Pics are soon to follow.

Last night, back in DC, as we were unpacking the car, one of my old college professors, Ted Adams, walked by our building. I had to do a double take. Turns out he was in town for a conference. We wound up talking to him for about 20 minutes. Such a strange coincidence. Really cool. I love when that sort of thing happens. It was funny that we ran into him, actually. I have been thinking about W&L a lot lately because my 10-year college reunion is coming up in May.

Tonight we'll be heading to E&M's for a New Year's Eve bash. Then tomorrow heading to my aunt's place for more food and celebrating.

Oh, and this is Catherine's 4th day without a cigarette! Go, baby!

Happy New Year!

link to this | comments (0) | File:  Family  Travel 

We're soon to be off to Canada. Montréal, then Toronto, then back to Montréal. Canada is a great place to spend Christmas. It's cold. There is sure to be snow. And it just feels right for this time of year.

My first Christmas in Canada with Catherine (how's that for alliteration) we arrived in Montréal late, after the rest of her family had already gone on to Chicoutimi. So we spent the 24th, just the two of us, at this great little diner in NDG eating corn dogs and poutine. It's one of my favorite Christmas memories.

Catherine and I have spent several other holidays in Canada since then and it's always a great time. Her family is a lot of fun.

Here are a few things I'm looking forward to:

• Montréal bagels
• JR's stories and awesome tea
• Snow
• Just hanging out in Montréal and Toronto
• Christmas Eve at the Basilica
• Boxing day

Here's to everybody having a safe and happy holiday, however it is spent!

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Travel  Family 

After several years of resistance, Cath and I finally broke down and bought a TiVo. I say 'bought' but we practically got it for free, which made the decision easy. Amazon had it on sale for $179.99 and then there was a $150 rebate on top of that, which brought it down to $19.99. Additionally, I had a gift certificate for $25, so I actually made $5 on the transaction (which I applied towards a book).

I set the TiVo up this weekend. There is a rather long setup process which entails activating the service subscription, physically setting up the TiVo, and then letting TiVo download schedules and configure itself. It took a little time, but it went off without a glitch. By that evening, we were pausing live action in the Broncos vs. Ravens game. It felt strange at first. At one point, we realized we had missed an interesting play.

"What just happened?"

"I'm not sure. I missed it."

"Well! Let's just back it up and find out!"

"Yes. Let's!"

It takes some getting used to, this kind of freedom. It almost seems like you're cheating at first, like you're somehow defying the laws of time.

For a moment, an uneasy guilt rushed over me.
Wait! We can't do this! I thought. It isn't right!

Especially for a live event like a football game, where the action goes on without you as you rewind, there's something unnatural about backing up. It makes you feel a little 'behind' or 'out of sync' with the here and now. At least at first. But you quickly get over it as you begin to get comfortable with the new-found carte blanche you have over programming, over time itself. I'm getting in the habit of watching things a little after they actually air, so I can skip through commercials.

My worst fears about owning a TiVo (that I would watch more TV) have not come true, so far. Rather, I'm able to watch stuff I normally wouldn't have because of the scheduling. And when I watch those things, I can do it in less time, without commercials. So I'm a little late to the TiVo party, but I think I'm here to stay.

link to this | comments (2) | File:  Media 

This past Friday, my friend Julie stopped in for a visit on her way to regions farther north. Julie and are kindred spirits in this sense: we are both well in tune with our own neuroses. They are a part of our make-up and we do not hide from them. Rather, we understand and embrace them. We are at one with them. And if an awareness of one's self, an honest insight into one's own personality, signifies a kind of wisdom, then I'd argue we are downright sagely.

Julie and I shared an apartment in Lexington, VA the summer after our junior year of college. It was a difficult summer for both of us. We each were involved in separate co-dependent, completely unhealthy, romanti-- no, that's not the right word, ah!-- purely sexual relationships. Nothing romantic about them really, unless you equate romance with mental anguish. To make matters worse, we were cooped up in a town of less than 7,000 people and were working dull jobs for minimum wage. Not a good scenario. But we made the most of it.

For me, it was a tremendous comfort to have Julie's company that summer, especially when I became incapacitated with one of the worst back-spasm episodes of my life. M-W calls a spasm 'an involuntary and abnormal contraction of muscle or muscle fibers or of a hollow organ.' This was certainly involuntary, altogether abnormal, and the whole experience made me feel like a 'hollow organ.' So yes, I had a back spasm. Until that point, I never thought I'd be 'one of those people' who would be sidelined from life, flat on his back, unable to move, especially not at age 21. I popped Advil like savory little candies and stared at the ceiling in my bedroom until I needed to take a leak, at which point I would crawl toward the restroom door and Julie would help me stand and go inside, then wait outside until I was done. It was not pretty. But to this day I'm grateful to Julie for her help.

Unfortunately, in addition to the minor neuroses that crop up now and again that make us want to analyze and question every decision we make, Julie and I have a talent for attracting minor disasters. I mean, this is a girl who got married in a hurricane - Charley, '04, yo! - and a guy who, despite all his best efforts to be an upstanding citizen, has had to pay almost $1,000 in traffic and parking tickets over the last year.

So it was not a surprise to me when, as we were all about to leave our apartment this past Saturday morning - Cath and I for the mall to do Christmas shopping, and Julie to New York to see more friends - I heard Julie call from the living room in a semi-panicked tone, 'Where's my wallet?'

"Oh, no."

"This is weird. I can't find it."

"Not good."

"Wallet gone."

What ensued was a frantic all-hands-on-deck search for the missing wallet. At least for Julie and me.

Catherine, God love her, tried to be rational: "When did you see it last?" Poor thing. She just didn't understand. This was no time for analysis or empirical investigation. Clearly, this was a time for furious flipping over of seat cushions and frantic flinging of clothes from luggage.

"Did you take a cab home last night?"

"Yes." She had stayed out a little later than us and had come home via cab.

"So you had it then."

"Shit. The cab!"

Visions passed through my brain of what the rest of Julie's week might look like: canceling credit cards, replacing her drivers license, a world of shit. Poor Julie. What a way to start a vacation.

"Either that, or you dropped it between the cab and the front door of the building."

"I'm on it!" I said, and headed downstairs to check the sidewalk. It had been a good 7 hours since Julie had come back to the apartment building. If the wallet was dropped outside, it certainly would not be there now. Still, it was worth checking. I walked from the curb to the front door twice, but alas, no wallet.

When I came back upstairs, Cath and Julie were looking up numbers for cab companies.

Julie called her husband, Jesse. "You'll never guess what I did." There was a long pause. Then an excited gasp from Julie. This seemed to indicate that Jesse actually could guess what she had done. In fact, he had received a phone call from somebody in the dark hours of the morning who had found the wallet. He just hadn't had a chance to call Julie and tell her, mainly because he hadn't woken up yet.

We jotted down the two numbers that this good samaritan had left. It took several phone calls, and a confusing conversation with a concierge, who we thought was a phone operator at a cab company, before we got the full story: one of my neighbors from a nearby building found Julie's wallet on the sidewalk on the way back to his apartment and was nice enough to pick it up, locate Julie's number on the checkbook inside, and call her home.

His name is Tim. He lives in the building where I can sometimes watch TV from my bathroom while I pee. We never wound up meeting Tim because he was on his way to New York that morning. Julie spoke to him on his cell. She let him know that he rocked, big time. They laughed over the fact that they both were heading to New York. "I knew I should have brought the wallet with me!"

The concierge in Tim's building, the one we had mistakenly taken for a cab company operator on the phone earlier, let Julie up to Tim's apartment to get her wallet. I wish I had gone with her, because I'm curious if Tim's is the apartment from which I sometimes catch glimpses of The Colbert Report from my bathroom window. Perhaps it's better not to know.

It's funny how something can happen like a lost wallet and suddenly the world can seem large and malevolent, entirely hopeless. But then all that can change from a single act. A small isolated moment in time can disrupt our insular lives and bring us into contact with the outside world in ways we weren't expecting. It fascinates me: the fact of this wallet, this inanimate object, separated from owner, stranded on a sidewalk in the middle of a large city, found by a complete stranger, ultimately returned to owner. It seems improbable. Serendipitous. Like it was all intended to unfold in just that way, at just that time. Sometimes I think we're all just like the wallet - no control, just existing from one moment to the next. Events like this lessen, to a degree, my predilection for neurotic anxiety and worry. They make me realize that every decision, every action, does not boil down to right or wrong, good or bad. In fact, the 'decision' might not exist at all.

That's easy for me to say now. But it won't stop me from cursing myself for being so stupid the next time I get a $100 parking ticket . . .

link to this | comments (1) | File:  Friends  Chewing 

. . . you're about to take a bite of truth sandwich . . .

As the opening metal-guitar sounds of The Colbert Report come on, I head to the bathroom for a pee.

The window in our bathroom affords a view of several apartment buildings near ours. In one of the buildings, a rather lavish, high-end building about a block Northwest of us on Mass Ave, there are two apartments a floor apart from one another that each have large-screen plasma TVs in the same exact position in their living rooms. With the positioning of the TVs, and the angle of their windows, I get a great view of the screens from our bathroom. Both are displaying the Colbert Report. At that distance, it's kind of like watching TV on an iPod screen.

As I stand there peeing, listening to the opening music sequence of the Colbert Report coming from my living room, and watching it on two plasma-screen TVs a block away, I feel a true sense of connectedness with my neighbors. Thank you plasma-screen neighbors, with your well-positioned TVs. Because of you, I don't have to miss a minute of the Report.

I love this city.

link to this | comments (1) | File:  Ho_Hum  DC 

On Saturday, Laundro got his tattoo. I went along and took some pics to document the event. They are on his site. Take a look. Since I still haven't gotten sign-off on an acceptable image to place upon my body, I sat on the bench for the tattoo festivities for now.

Later that evening, Cath and I saw the new Harry Potter movie. We both really enjoyed it. Though if you were watching me during the first 30 minutes, you wouldn't have known it. I suddenly found myself so exhausted, I nearly fell asleep. Strange how that happens. Narcolepsy, perhaps? It didn't last too long. I soon got a second wind. We walked home in sleet, which was fun. I love winter weather.

I was going to start Christmas shopping on Sunday, but that got down-graded to gift and card list-making. Hey, you've got to start somewhere. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Denver lose to KC - ughh, payback is a bitch - and moving the rest of my sites to a new hosting provider. I have gotten sick of my old Web host because they haven't made one significant improvement in the last 3 years that I've been with them. Also, there have been more and more incidents involving unexplained downtime, and sometimes my mail stops working. On top of all that, their customer service has really been lacking. So most of my sites, including this one, have now been moved over to a new host, which I'm really happy with so far. Everything on this site seems to be working fine, except my RSS feed, which is strange since nothing has changed in it. The feed validates here and I'm able to view it using sites like newsgator. However, when I try to add it to my Google homepage, it tells me no feeds are found. Maybe it's a temporary glitch. Thoughts?

Now I'm eagerly awaiting the coming of snow. Yee-haw!

link to this | comments (3) | File:  Ho_Hum 

I hate picking up my mail. You might say I have an aversion to it. Like a cat to water. There is very rarely anything good in the mail, unless it takes the form of a magazine. But mostly it is filled with bills and other statements to inform you that you owe people money. It is not really the expected bills that bother me - the phone bill, the credit card bill, or the bill for my monthly supply of mayonnaise (don't ask). But it's the unexpected bills that get to me, like the $100 parking ticket, which is now $200 because I did not pay it. The reason I did not pay it is because it never appeared on the DC DMV's handy ticket-payment Web site, so I thought maybe it 'got lost.' (A word of wisdom: parking tickets do not 'get lost.' They simply 'age,' and get more expensive, like a fine wine.) Then there was the letter I got informing me of the $250 I owe for a doctor's visit that was denied by my insurance company because they have a temperamental automated phone system that likes to tell doctor's offices that I'm no longer covered. A simple direct call to a live person will rectify the situation, but most doctor's offices won't do that, even if you tell them ahead of time.

Yes, the mail can single-handedly cause my day to come crashing down around me. I might be having a perfectly fine day, full of good smells, pleasant scenery, and a tub full of mayonnaise (oops, I gave it away). Then I'll get a letter like this and I'll spend a good 30 minutes to and hour cursing, gnashing my teeth, and generally making Catherine's life a living hell.

For this reason, I tend to let the mail pile up until it reaches a critical mass where it can no longer be avoided and when I know that certain bills are due. This strategy doesn't really decrease my level of anxiety so much as it lessens the frequency of it.

The US post office prides itself on delivering the mail come rain, sleet, and snow. Whatever the circumstances, we can all rest assured that the mail will be delivered, no matter the cost. All I have to say is Why? USPS, why? Why this steadfast dedication to delivering us this bad news? Can't you be just a little less competent, a little less reliable, like everybody else. Why don't you go take a lesson or two from the DC DMV? They've got lots of cool tricks they can show you.(Incidently, I'm still not sure if I own the Mercedes or not and I can't subject myself to the torture involved in finding out.)

But let me end on a good note: Even though I normally hate getting the mail, I recently received three birthday cards, reminding me that not all mail is bad. One was from Sarah and Randy (I miss you guys!), another was from Ashley (wish I had been able to visit you while you lived in Chicago), and the third was from my grandmother (she'll never see this, but thanks, grandma!). Cards are fun. Even if I have a mail pile started, I usually go ahead and open the birthday cards right away. Just before relaxing in a tub full of mayonnaise.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Ho_Hum  Chewing