death in holy orders - p d james (2001)

serial killings smart detecting satisfying characters plus the added bonus of a nuanced insider's account of the high anglican church. this is my new favorite murder writer.

chinese dinner

moo goo gai pan used to be ubiquitous on chinese menus back in our NJ days fourteen years ago, along with general tso's chicken. the strange thing is, you don't exactly see this dish any more. it has come, like a mutant concoction from some enterprising immigrant's imagination, and now it has slithered off back into the shadows.

and in truth, for a chinese, here is a cultural offering that clearly is not chinese.

letris

the day irene visited.

the weather channel

one hurricane. one coast. one moment in time.

how do they split this up between four and more newscasters taking turns to talk non-stop over twenty four hours? even if they know what they are saying after a bit i no longer can make out any sense behind the flowing streams of unctuous utterances. and yet we stay glued to the screen, HOM and i, blindly fascinated, wittingly sucked into the swirling morass of senseless statements.

in history

momentous week this:

• worst earthquake here,
• sgp presidential elections, and
• hurricane irene, a misnomer if ever there was one.

obit

Steve Jobs has resigned. i really truly hope, i tell HOM, that apple does not now produce tablets to rival HP's late unlamented touchpad. there is a small group of fastidious non-geeks to whom superior specifications mean less than beautifully executed design, and we found our tech home with Jobs' apple.

terra infirma 2

in the time honored tradition of family legends and folklore, it appears that the zoo animals received an earlier memo about the impending earthquake than their keepers did.

for the record, Dog completed missed it. right up to the point the pounding began, i was dozing off and so was he.

the inescapable conclusion

is that, if you are making shrimp scampi with pasta, white wine works infinitely better than red, even if you have a left-over half bottle of red lying around. red results in a muddily stained sad pasta. also, HOM says good wine works better than budget, but i'm not testing that one yet.

terra infirma

after the earthquake people want to know, were you scared? were you not terrified?

no prior experience, that's my problem. so i think, what is it with J2, stomping up the stairs like that? and by the time we think force majeure, well, it's practically over. slow, that's what we were.

the agony & the ecstasy

what i'm reading this week:

death in holy orders - p d james
ethics - dietrich bonhoeffer

breaking news

we feel strange tremors on a sleepy afternoon, J2 and Dog and i. we know our friends are all affected in the tri-state area. we know it's a 5.9 magnitude quake. our friends in singapore know it too. all within ten minutes of the tremors.

this is the age of facebook.

family trust - amanda brown (2003)

forgettable.

modern living

to be able to integrate conflicting instructions from an outdated gps with real time newly reconfigured roads into coherent directions and arrive at the destination unscathed is, if i may say so, quite a skill. today's driver can choose to either acquire it or to keep paying to acquire the latest incarnations of the gps maps.

safety net

today, for a moment in time, the iMac fails to turn on. this swiftly conjures the image a dreary trudge to the apple store with the offending hardware. but, i tell HOM, unlike other times when other systems have failed to boot, today i do not feel chilly fingers of dread around my heart.

this time around, our lives are safely backed up on the external server. the body is weak but the spirit is in a good place! wait till the server fails, HOM says darkly. why do you think D has five servers on his desk?

new vs. old 4

an alarm buzzes at our workstation. HOM and i scramble to paw through a blackberry an iPhone one iPod touch one samsung and one LG in a race against time to identify the buzzer.

time was when the big black telephone just rang and everybody knew what to do.

turnaround

hey i want my summer back!

six great ideas - mortimer j adler (1981)

truth   goodness   beauty

liberty   equality   justice

you could subtitle this book how to think 101 and make it required reading for aspiring activists and budding politicians, if only to introduce the glimmerings of a nuance to the blood-pumping rhetoric they tend to produce.

this is a humbling book because he takes six words that i like to toss around and shows me there are concepts underlying them. it is an encouraging book because he has this nice uncondescending style so i think, hey i'm reading philosophy! and understanding it! mostly! and it is an interesting book that finally answers the question for me, what is great art?*

*the answer, if you are interested, lies in the difference between admirableness and enjoyableness.

the agony & the ecstasy

what i'm reading this week:

the regatta mystery & other stories - agatha christie
six great ideas - mortimer j adler
indulgence in death - j d robb
double sin & other stories - agatha christie
family trust - amanda brown
ethics - dietrich bonhoeffer

james 1:2-4

it's tough, HOM says to me, when you see your kid struggle with setback and disappointment and can only stand aside. comes a time when a parent comes to a high wall and realizes the child needs go beyond, and on his own.

count it all joy, the apostle says, when you meet trials of various kinds. i would have you know this, i tell my child, but it is a lesson you learn for yourself, and you must learn it alone. 

makeover

here is our trusty old klippan, rescued from three years of dormancy in the basement with a variegated infestation of mildew and loss of its original legs after our move to virginia from texas. 

with many thanks to a removable machine-washable slipcover that actually fits again after the wash and a bottle of fantastik with bleach and the nice people at ikea who dig out a set of compatible legs for me after i tell them my sob story and sell it to me for two dollars.

great service

1. mclean hardware store.
2. b b & b, vienna.
3. calphalon.

b b & b, vienna

when you live long enough in a metropolis your standards for service quickly fall by the wayside. check me out in one piece and for the price stated and i'm grateful, never mind the eye contact. 

today i go to the bed bath & beyond branch to exchange an item. they see me looking lost! they approach! they say, can i help you? and they exchange for me, no questions asked, with a smile. what i say is, i may pay more at this place, but i keep going back anyway. this sort of good cheer is addictive.

caveat emptor

the glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.

- prov 20:29

i lose my youthful impunity 

face my mortality

mourn the limber quickness

acknowledge the pain

become quieter

and gentler

and humbler 

and more broken.

it isn't so bad a deal, thank God.

facebook: evolving practice

according to this, some facebookers are on it for the attention and approbation. good for them, i suppose. i've noticed another couple breeds of facebookers myself:

1. people whose only activity on fb is making new fb friends, and
2. people who only play games on fb, which for them stands for faceboy.

tale bearer

HOM awakens from a long nap to regale me about his dream. it is a wide-ranging and international and protracted account.

there ought to be a rule about inflicting dreams on unsuspecting listeners.

mythical creatures

1. unicorns.
2. pegasus.
3. white horses.

operating instructions

here is how we print a document:

1. click print on the computer.
2. wait five minutes.
3. utter mild imprecation.
4. disconnect printer.
5. wait one minute.
6. reconnect printer.
7. shut down computer.
8. restart computer.
9. click print on the computer.
10. repeat every 5-10* documents.

*depending on time of day the weather or color of grass.

here is how we scan a document:

1. refer to above.
2. substitute scan for print.

my sincere feelings for hewlett-packard are born of intimate personal experience.

snowed in - c bartolomeo (2004)

i like the main character. unlike the rash of enervatingly energetic-slash-charismatic specimens beloved of chick lit authors this one is mostly happy to flow along in her insecurities anxieties and vague dreams. she is even believably quietly uncharitable to people she dislikes. i can totally relate to her.

the pity is that for an anatomy of an unraveling marriage the despair doesn't quite come through. ambivalence short of anguish is rather an anticlimax especially since i enjoy sophie enough to be ready to ride it out with her. and the ending is too pat, as if the writer ran out of pages for her story.

slyly sparkling wit, though, with some really nice lyrical bits. i'm going to hunt out her other books.

perspective

J2's looking at college apps and i keep thinking she's starting high school soon.

J1's been a soldier for a half year, which seems much longer than six months.

last week's nyc escapade is a world and a holiday season away.
i instinctively consider 1998 to be within the last 5 years.

i still get a nice fresh feeling writing the 11 in 2011.

in extremis

J2 has a summer job watering somebody's plants. today she thinks the flowers look a little green around their gills, so to speak. whip out your secret weapon, i tell her. pray. sometimes flowers look tired in the heat.

they don't look tired, J2 says. they look brown, actually.

camera tutorial

big note to self:

1. set the ISO,
2. set aperture priority,
3. shoot.
4. STOP using pre-set programs.

D says pre-sets are for dummies. i figure i'm old enough to admit i'm a dummy who's willing to try climbing out of the pit, mixed metaphors be damned.

national day

my facebook page is full of patriotically aspirational posts by all sorts of people today. very inspiring. it makes me want to sing the anthem from chess: long before nations' lines were drawn/ when no flags flew when no armies stood/ my land was born/ i cross over borders but i'm still there now.

except of course i am of a race as old as time but from a nation floundering to develop a persona. we simply don't do impassioned, principled angst.

error 2

girl talk - julianna baggott (2001)

245 pages of introspective prose segue-ing surreally between 1999 1985 and 1969 are enough to put a girl off books, especially one in recovery from convoluted 18th century satire. 

note to self: stick to nora roberts and agatha christie for a bit.

error

candide - voltaire (1759)

comes a time when a girl needs to move away from chick lit and improve her mind with a classic. wrong book, i guess. voltaire's semi-darkish semi-lurid humor sits poorly after a preferred lifetime diet of dry brit wit. also, i make the mistake of reading over lunch, specifically the part where the old woman loses part of her anatomy to hungry soldiers. after lunch i save myself further agony and simply skip to the final chapter.

note to self: no more frenchies / eighteenth century spoofs.

perspectives

the full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.  - prov. 27:7

which pretty much sums up why anyone would be grateful to finance or endure a trip halfway around the world for a purely discretionary meeting that lasts as long as the time spent on the journey.

kawaii attack

the official reason is i want something to remind me of my trip to nyc.

the real reason is that i fall for the little sucker, hook line and sinker.

my new phone charm besots me.

new times

tiger roar.

wall street

the captains of economy! newscasts!

nyse! the smell of money!

the only problem is, wall street is full of gawking tourists like us, which rather detracts from the whole cachet of being happening and in-the-know.

the sands of time

we cheer a couple of games at central park.

they bring back memories of J1's baseball playing days.

here is a painfully true cliché - children grow up very quickly.

one moment they are chubby angels then they are awkward teens 

and then it only gets bittersweet from there.

broadway action

musical triumph.

dramatic torture.

honestly, does anyone understand this show? 

because i simply DO NOT catch the story line.

reunion

every one of us puts asides other plans to steal three days in the big apple for family time. HOM pretends he is carefree on leave. J1 flies in directly from his jungle posting. J2 comes from beach and friends. Dog goes off to the pet hotel.

we have an unbelievably lovely time together. it's a good thing, J2 says, that i actually like my family, isn't it?

three days are awfully short.

roadtrips then & now

triptik maps
youthful courage
unseeing faith

gps
iphone gps
google map mobile
cellphone back-up

new york, new york

bustle
landmarks
history
magic

sirens
traffic
hustlers
smoke

done!

today i finally vacuum the basement, which i have left untended since our sewerage malfunction. 

i do it to the best of my ability and to the fullest extent of my conscience and for two complete minutes.

hopping mad

today when i open the dryer door i am greeted by a hundred million pieces of frothy frisky fugitive tissue paper. people who stuff tissue paper up their clothes should switch to mechanical noses.

onward bound

not to put to fine a point to it, but these days the weighing machine is registering numbers not previously recorded, not even post-thanksgiving.