Goerlitz Family Commentary

The Gentleman Cowboy

2011-06-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

For my birthday this year my dear sister and brother gave me a couple tickets to the annual Lyle Lovett concert at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery in Woodinville. Kim of course was my date, and she wore those handsome cowboy boots of hers that she won from running that darn half-marathon last fall.

These shows used to be "neighborhood" events for us, literally a 5 minute drive over from Novelty Hill. Now from Bainbridge it's a bit of a hike, and we turned the evening into a full on date night complete with dinner at Il Tropea in Redmond.

We ended up coming a bit late because when we read the ticket we thought that we weren't that interested in seeing John Hiatt, the "opening act". Ha! Turns out that this concert was a different format than usual. Apparently there is an old tradition in the Nashville country scene where musicians will share a stage a do a kind of musical dialogue -- one guy does a song and the other may or may not sing back up of play along. Then the other does his song in response, again with some help. Like a friendly duel.

So they did start on time and we missed the first duel or two. Whoops!

There were three things that I liked about this format very much:

1) I find myself in concerts trying to figure out what the band's mood is -- or what their attitude toward their body of work is -- by reading into the set list. I'm sure it's just me over-reading, but I do a bunch of mental noodling during a show, esp. in the downtime when the band plays something I don't know or like. But with this format I liked "solving" the problem of why the second person chose the song they did as a response. Some of the pairings were easy -- two songs about Memphis, or two songs that are standards, etc. Since I didn't know much about John Hiatt, it was an interesting entry point into his work, through Lyle.

2) Usually Lyle has a Very Large Band. For this show it was just him and an acoustic guitar. When I listen to music I'm pretty focused on the lyrics, esp. Lyle's lyrics, so it was great to have his voice dominate his songs. It felt much more Lyle. I was also struck by how not-technical he is, even compared to Hiatt. It's like his music is a sort of rough clean place to lay out his lyrics. I guess I've never seen him that alone and unvarnished for that length of time. I loved it.

3) Because there were just these two guys sitting on chairs up there doing a back and forth musical thing, the whole scene lent itself to quite a bit of banter. It was like overhearing some guys jamming a bit on a porch in Texas. And they almost talked as much as they sang -- no kidding. And there was quite a bit of interaction with the audience too. Lyle came across as a very sweet, country gentleman cowboy. Very polite, very dry and deeply funny.

I think the audience was evenly split between the people that came to see Lyle and the people who came to see John. I kinda got how these two guys might have met up, but there was enough of a demographic difference between their fans -- and they have pretty different world-views -- that I would have liked more back story on how they got thrown together on stage. I came away with the impression of John Hiatt as a hillbilly version of Neil Diamond. So like Lenny Kravitz last week, who was not exactly my cup of tea, he made the "main act" seem that much cooler.

But Lyle is such a dear dude I'd be happy to go see him every year, even if he brought KISS and Peewee Herman and Victoria Jackson.

U2 360 Seattle

2011-06-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

OK, gotta put up a few pictures of the U2 show from Saturday night..

Jeremiah and I conspired to get tickets about 18 months ago and we lived through the Bono ouchie cancellation last summer and all the social calendar peregrinations that eventually resulted in our selling some of the tickets and reconfiguring our loyal viewing crew. Most importantly, Bradley was able to come up from Portland and treat Ewan to his first U2 concert as a birthday present. Above you can see the Bainbridge travelling party walking from the ferry to the venue -- Bryan and Erin had come up for the show and spent a bit of time visiting the island paradise before the show.

We went in the North gate of Qwest -- not sure any other gates were open -- and the crowd was pretty chunky. I think this is the largest number of people I've seen in that venue. Normally for sold-out soccer and football games there isn't more than 65k people, but with the floor configured as a mosh-pit I think they got another 10k people in the door.

Our seats were decent -- not spectacular. Although, as you can see below Ewan, we lucked out because our row was right up against the tunnel where the production crew and talent came and went..

Here's another view of our seats. You can see Jeremiah with his father-in-law. Notice everyone came equipped with earplugs. Since I'm working on enhancing my tendency to deafness for domestic purposes I of course did not partake of the plugs.

We were seated by 7:30ish and by 8 or so Lenny Kravitz hit the stage. You can see him up there on the video screen. From our seats we couldn't see him much unless he was prancing around the 360-degree catwalk. But the lack of visibility at this point was mostly OK -- I only recognized one of Lenny's songs (American Woman) which is ostensibly about Mr. Kravitz's difficulty in communicating the end of a relationship to a woman, but the whole things comes across like an over-generalized faux-dilemna -- the women are throwing themselves at me! Help, I'm just too slithery and cool!!

One thing I learned from Andrea Griminelli delivered as road-wisdom in some sweaty Malaysian backstage VIP room on a random spur of the perpetual LP world tour was this: A successful opening act will not last long if it even attempts to outshine the headliner. I would say by this criteria Lenny exceeded his role.

From my seat you see His Mirrorshaded Wiggleness on his way back to the dressing room. My favorite image of Lenny Kravitz that evening didn't come until a bit later when U2 were on the stage and he was standing watching from the tunnel -- pretty much where this picture is taken -- all "disguised" in a black feather boa and hoodie, and these two fat people in the stands about about 6 feet above him were making wild gestures pointing at him and trying to get their friends (I guess?) to notice that LENNY KRAVITZ IS STANDING RIGHT HERE!!! OMG!! Of course he couldn't see them, and they kept it up for a few minutes. I would have taken a picture but by then the light was too bad. But their slurpee-fueled gesticu-dancing was hilarious and somewhat tempered The Kravitz macheezmo kool.

In the intermission between the ex-Kravtiz-ganza and Bono's band Bradley nipped off to buy some water and t-shirts. Apparently he was forced to make a somewhat harrowing decision while he was away -- one or the other: commemorative shirts or college educations for his children. This was Ewan's shirt. Ach! College is over-rated.

Before the show started I sat looking over the edge of the tunnel rail re-living my few years in show production. Good Lord. It was cool to see all the overlapping crews and coordinators and production people and recording people and various layers of management. I found the U2 version of myself down there, and watched him running around thinking "hey, that could be me..". He was actually a pretty old dude (had white hair!). Sigh.

You can tell the show's getting ready to go when the smoke machines start up. And the guitar techs are doing some last minute tuning.

Bradley and Ewan took over my seat to get the best position for pictures and general brush with greatness.

When the lads came out of the tunnel there was a 70,000 person roar. It almost drowned out the "marching to the stage song", which was of course was Ground Control To Major Tom, in keeping with the space-y theme of the show.

And then we were off! The real thing. Or, as it turned out, Even Better Than The Real Thing. Set list here.

It was a perfect night weather-wise. Early summer evening, not a cloud in the sky. The city in the background.

This is only my second U2 show -- the first was a pair of concerts I attended somewhat reluctantly in Tempe Arizona over Christmas break in '87 -- $6 tickets and a handful of people crashing a single Motel 6 room. It turned out that those shows got turned into Rattle and Hum. If you look closely in the movie during the helicopter pans you can see a sulky dude in the nosebleed section actually reading a book. That was me. This time, however, my attendance was quite voluntary.

In fact, between Jeremiah's steady love of U2 quotes and references and Bradley's love of It Might Get Loud, which features The Edge pretty prominently, I was very much looking forward to seeing Mr. Evans in person. I've come to imagine that if I had been a rock star and had even an ounce of cool I'd have gone a similar direction as The Edge, including a goofy name -- not really going the traditionally musically talented direction but making the most of some technical futzing. (Check out Bill Bailey's version of the same observation).

But any appreciation of U2 means that I've had to come to terms with Bono. In processing some of my exposure to celebrity types I think I understand something of the hunger for attention and the mechanics of entertaining "at scale". Bono even said last night when he was introducing the band members (fifth graf here..) that all he needs are 70,000 people (and 200 trucks and a spaceship) to make him happy. I totally believe that. He's now inhabiting a persona that for me feels like part part David Bowie, part Scottish Inkeeper, and part Ellen G White. Kind of a nutty hyperbolic messianic ball of screaming attention debt. And where his music bridges personal with corporate (as in a lot of people) politics, I think he's a genius lyricist. Where he's the be-sunglassed leiderhosen me-dancer, umm, not so much.

Of course there are stunts to get the crowd involved. The political appeals and Amnesty International and One, etc. I'm not against any of that stuff but I'm not really into organized religion of any stripe so I tend to take a pass there. The International Space Station stunt, though was cute.

But there's no better crowd integration stunt than actually writing awesome songs that everyone wants to sing along with. They played enough from Zooropa and Ach Tung Baby that I got hoarse shouting along with my mangled memory of the words..

The highlights for me, besides seeing Dave bunny hop around the stage was the acoustic version of Zooropa. And I did like the REM + Ach Tung Baby mix of It's The End Of The World As We Know It and Until The End Of The World.. Would have been even cooler to mix in the Nick Cave song instead -- where Until The End Of The World was a couple tracks down on from the best ever Cave song I'll Love You Until The End Of The World on the soundtrack of the whack apocalyptic Wenders movie (surprisingly!) called Until The End Of The World.

And then before we knew it we had zipped through the encores and Bono was saying goodbye to Seattle.

We would eventually amble back to the ferry terminal and get on a 12:45a ferry after eating too much McDonald's (i.e. any McDonalds is "too much") and vowing never to eat there again. But my last impression of the show was watching the four guys troop down the tunnel. They walked in tighter formation than I would have expected, certainly with more togetherness than Lenny's band. And it almost looks like after all these years they're really still 'mates'. I guess to do this 110 times in the last couple dozen months and to be working hard together for 35 years they would have to like each other a little bit, eh? Four guys hanging out that long together is a pretty cool thing no matter what you think of their music and commercial ambitions.

NBA 2011 Playoffs Love Index -- Conference Finals

2011-05-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

Another late love list. I was three for four on my predictions from last time -- Memphis didn't make it past Oklahoma City -- rats. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy that the old guard teams like Boston, Los Angeles, and San Antonio are already home. And that I have two clear teams that I like vs. two clear teams that I don't like. Awesome!

Here's how I think things should stack up:

1) Dallas Mavericks -- These guys took over the top spot, mainly because of Jason Kidd. I like him as much as I like Derrick Rose, and he doesn't have many more shots at a championship. He's an utter rock, he's the moral captain of that team and he deserves a ring. Also, a key narrative arc for the whole finals has been "the Bench", and Dallas has probably the most consistently productive bench in the playoffs. If you look at the game-two road-steals this round already, it was the bench (and D, the other arc) that won those games. In a battle of the benches, JJ and Jet and Peja are all solids. It will be interesting to see if Dallas can figure out OKC, though. I heard Dirk say that Portland and LA were "big" teams and they felt like Dallas ball movement and 3-pt shooting shredded teams built like that. The young Thunder team is making the defensive switches more quickly and coming out to challenge shooters so Dallas has a new animal to figure out.

2) Chicago Bulls -- Hmm.. I still love this team muchly, but I think they may be a little more mentally fragile than the Mavs, if you can imagine that. The loss of Asik in game 2 was the loss of the game for the Bulls, which surprised me that a shot on the Big Turk's chin had that kind of emotional weight, but there it is. A guy I'm starting to like a lot is Gibson. In fact, I think the barometer for this series will be the matchup between Taj Gibson vs. deus-ex-Haslem, both energy 4s. Yeah, still love the Rose, Noah, Boozer, Deng. Thibs is starting to look real to me.. I think they can pull this off.

3) Oklahoma City Thunder -- I flipped the order on my "villain" teams as well. I think the thing that did it was that despite my native Seattle disgust of the Thunder-poops in general, I really like coach Scotty Brooks. I admired him as a player, and I think he's doing a heck of a coaching job. I also like Mo Cheeks his coaching sidekick. The way those guys handled Westbrook so far in this series is classic, at least on the floor. Durant is fine, and I kinda like Hammurabi Harden. The jury's still out on Westbrook though.. not looking good. But the over-riding problem with this team is every time I look at their logo I see Howard Schultz's SEG.

4) Miami Heat -- The way I picked the Heat as my new low was to ask myself -- OK, between the Thunder and the Heat, which team would do the most damage to the NBA in the long run. One team represents Commish Stern manhandling local government and ownership by presiding over what would most charitably be seen as a bad-faith team market transfer. The other team, however, represents an organization flouting the letter and the spirit of the league's anti-tampering laws (and again, a Commish who seems complicit..). As much as I hate the first, the second is worse for the game I think. Barely. Wade and Lebron seem like "nice guys" I guess and I do actually like Udonis muchly. But not enough to overcome the Riley and Spoelstra smarm and the precious take-my-BFF-talents to Miami crew. Blech.

So the dream matchup is Dallas vs. Chicago for the final -- battle of the power benches! I'm predicting -- big surprise, that this is what we'll get. As in, actual team basketball. I would be happy if either team won.

The nightmare scenario is an OKC vs. Miami final. I might not watch something like that. The clash of the soul-less front-office zombies. The other two options would be OK too I gues: Dallas vs Miami -- unfinished business from '04 baby! or Chicago vs. OKC -- battle of the Young Guns. Just as long as the right teams win!

Home Sweet Home

2011-05-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a quick trip to Santa Monica, and I guess this time I was struck by how much that place is getting very familiar. This is our fourth family trip there and I think Kim's seventh trip since January, so it's feeling like another home.

The girls know the drill -- most mornings they take their breakfast in bed (Daddy earning his nap!) and then we all head out to the pool for some sunshine and fast wi-fi. The girls like these little cabana-ettes and they can play in those things for hours. I think they make-believe that they're by a pool at hotel in California. Something like that.

On Saturday we go to church, if by church you mean, the Santa Monica pier. Definitely a religious experience. Here's Maze sitting beside me on the big wheel thingy. Right behind her in the yellow car is Noah Wyle. No kidding. He was standing in line right in front of us and I would have never recognized him except Kim said something to me. His kids are pretty cute, and damn, he does look a lot like a young Steve Jobs.

On the same Ferris Wheel ride Lu and her Mama practice not-blinking. A few minutes later Kim went with Maze on the obligatory ride on Rickety Death (my name for that blasted roller coaster) where she got to practice not-barfing. Maze has this liturgical insistence on the sacrament of roller-coaster, so this time I begged Kim to go instead of me for a change. If you want to see one of the videos I took of a previous ride with Maze, check this out. (Warning: I say "baby" a lot). I don't know what it is with Maze, but she's really into insane thrill rides. I tried to take a video of Kim and Maze this time but you can't see anything as they swoosh by -- mainly because Kim was "hiding" in her seat. Hmmm.. I think I have my old job back next time.

Sunday, while Maze and Kim had a shopping date, Lulu and Deano and I went to the awesome Science museum on the USC campus. We played around in the "creative area" for a while.

Here's what we look like in infrared.

And after looking at all the exhibits we went to see the IMAX movie Born To Be Wild. No it's not a Steve Martin routine, but the baby elephants and the baby orangutans were pretty funny. And the movie was narrated by Morgan Freeman, who if I'm not mistaken, was actually born a poor black child. Close enough.

And then just like that the weekend was over. We got to the airport and for some reason the Alaska terminal (31-35) was jammed full. So in desperation I rifled my wallet and found this card that got us in one of the business lounges, a part of the airport where Kim and I spent quite a bit of time when we worked in the circus. Home sweet home. Ha!

The Noble Elk

2011-05-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

We flew into LA late last night for our monthly pilgrimage to Santa Monica and driving around near midnight in the muggy smear of lights all I could think about was: Phil is no longer the King of Los Angeles.

Then this morning I read a very fine homage to the Zen Master by Mr. Simmons which had the net effect of inspiring me to actually go and read some of Phil's books (I think I saw Seth B reading one over Easter..). The article had two things in it that I found especially excellent:

1) BS gave the best explanation for Phil's smile at the end of that Dallas sweep in Game 4 last Sunday. Some guys are criers, some guys -- especially Van Gundy guys -- let their grief show through like a bald spot, and some guys get stony. Phil just smiled after that undressing by Dallas. Turns out he was prepared -- preparation is his trademark. I should have picked up on the "tell" myself -- the kids all flown in the see this game in Dallas. Of course Phil knew this was it. He knew his team had quit and his career was done. He could smile because he knew, he was right.

2) The other thing that popped in the BS article was just the amount of unsaid loathing Phil has for Kobe. Am I just reading into this? I don't know. Yeah, there was the book a few years ago, but then there was detente. I will do a post sometime about Kobe, a player who has tortured me for years as a possible inspiration for hard work but who is so completely un-coachable -- or un-reachable! -- and self-limited. And I think that's where Phil's emotion for Kobe comes from -- because Phil is all about "reaching" people and Kobe was one mountain that he was never able to climb.

Three things I've read recently have helped me understand The Kobe Problem better -- an article by Saint Henry of Portland that debunks Kobe's claim to be a great clutch player (hint: not even close!), then a prose poem by Sherman Alexie about what happens now that Kobe is no longer an elite player, and finally, this Simmons piece about Phil and how much Phil misses Michael. Hmmm..

If we're lucky, Phil has another couple books in him. And if we're really lucky, someone will talk him into coaching the Knicks. Yeah, I'm dreaming.

Ma!

2011-05-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of Ma from a few months ago in her natural environment -- she's got the cowboy, the garden, and that incredible view.

What you don't see here is all the art and food and books in a home -- not necessarily the house! -- where I grew up. I love you mom -- Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day

2011-05-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

We're having a very quiet Mother's Day so far -- the theory is that Kim gets to do pretty much whatever she wants, which includes sleeping in, taking and receiving Mother's Day wishes from around the world, and getting her coffee and chocolate croissant in bed. I think she's got a couple lady-dates set up as well -- a walk and then a movie in the evening, with maybe a little afternoon gardening..

Yes, a laid-back day is definitely well-deserved for the commander of the Goerlitz household, the mother of my girls and defender of our domestic bliss. Happy Mother's Day bay-bay!

Jumping The Shark

2011-05-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

I love this picture. I don't know where it originally comes from and I'm not sure this is official Shark Tank advertising -- but Barbara had it on her Facebook page today. There is something completely right and about BC as a cowboy in a shark rodeo.

She was definitely one of my best bosses ever, she's an inspiration for b3tz.com, definitely. You don't believe that her and I in the same room didn't make a few bets? Here she is making headlines taking a casual bet on the age of Joan Rivers.

Of course this picture invokes a famous television expression.. Let's hope there's no truth in this omen.

WTD!

2011-05-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

In my research lab I'm currently working toward a theory of betting. Really, I'm not kidding!

Specifically, why do people get such an emotional kick out of speculating on the outcome of some event? There's something deeply human and important about staking a claim on the future, whether you make a comment to a friend about the likelihood of Charlie Sheen to ever find a replacement second-goddess, or whether you "play the stock market". I think this activity -- this impulse to project our views into the real world and then look to see what reality says back -- is very near to the source of every human activity in the broadest sense. I would argue with a somewhat straight face that gossip and politics and scientific research and prayer and cheerleading have this in common.

But I'm not ready to come out of the lab yet with my theory -- and if you have references to working theories on this intersection of play and risk and identity that I may be overlooking, feel free to send them my way. Things like Homo Ludens, especially.

In the meantime, I did come across a very cool theory of humor that was featured in this month's Wired magazine. I found it very inspirational from the viewpoint of my quest for a good betting theory. And the gratuitous Dmitri Martin illustrations didn't hurt either.

Basically the theory featured by Prof. McGraw in the article improves upon some of the classic theories of humor, the theories you learn at university when your parents think you're getting an education -- i.e. watching someone get kicked in the nuts on youtube, that's funny.. when you get kicked in the nuts, not so funny.. therefore: tragedy + distance = comedy. (QED baby!) McGraw's theory is that humor exists where violation and the benign intersect -- like this:

His example: getting tickled by someone you know and trust makes you laugh, it's a benign violation. However, tickling yourself doesn't really give you a boundary to violate, and getting tickled by a creepy dude in a trench-coat isn't benign -- which explains how you need both conditions to arrive a funny.

I'm cool with that theory as a starting point -- and it certainly explains Dmitri Martin's haircut..

..but I think there's interesting work to do in fleshing out the context variables. As in, why is Dumb and Dumber funny to me and not to some other people? And why wasn't Gentlemen Broncos funny to anyone? To be useful as a theory, BVT would need to say some more about what really is really meant by "benign" and "violation", and what are the boundaries of those circles.

This context problem for humor looks a lot to me like something quite similar that you find with the problem of "cool" and and I would hazard that BVT has some application here too. For example, the manufacture of a cool new acronym like WTD (the What The Duck definition specifically..) certainly gets lift from some BVT-like mechanics in its semantic engine room. For example, WTD gets points for violation on a couple levels -- it's a violation of the already violatin' WTF. And it's benign because "duck" here is a relatively harmless non sequitor waterfowl plus it preserves the original WTF benignification by staying hidden in an acronym. But to deliver the "cool" payload in this case there is a damn short contextual landing strip, i.e. people moving on from WTF. Check out the way Chip Kelly, the coach of the Oregon Ducks football team, gets loads of motivational energy from playing a "cool" double game -- a sanitized version of WTD ("Win The Day"!) for the boosters and the school brass, and then the street meaning of WTD as a subtext, a secret meaning with all that cooler-than-WTF freight for the youts on his football team. Nicely done dude!

So anyway, that load of twisty is my caffeinated way of saying I found inspiration in McGraw's theory of humor and if it applies to cool I may be able to figure out how to lift a part of it for betting too. In any case, I will keep chasing my UBT (Universal Betting Theory) and when I finally land it I've braced myself for y'all to say: um, WTD?

Meme: Semantic Drift

2011-05-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'll take a couple minutes out of my day for a geeky little whine. But I promise, no fancy five-dollar words. That word "Semantic" in the title is the kookiest word in this post, although I was tempted to use the word "pejorative" in connection with the whole concept of a semantic web.

I'm all bunchy right now for reasons involving interwebs anxiety. I've been using del.icio.us and twitter and flickr and quora a lot lately, with pinterest on the horizon. You don't have to click those links -- those are just sites for collecting lots of fast moving things, like pictures or bookmarks or answers to questions, and they use "tags" to help you describe categories for your stuff that you're collecting.

This is a really really cool concept. For about 10 minutes.

Then reality sets in, especially if you use any of these systems for any real length of time. And you're as German as me. Inevitably I come up with some cool naming system for things -- lets say pictures from a family reunion.. I put people's names as tags and the event name. And then a few weeks later I decide I should add the location information too once I add pictures from another vacation. And then I wonder if I should go back put those tags on the pictures that don't have them. And then I decide I want to add the year, because there have been more than one of these events.. And then someone gets married or discovers their ethnic roots and a few names change. Or my long-lost step-aunt emails me and says I mis-spelled her name in several places. And then I say screw it! There's no way I'm going to come up with a bulletproof "system" that doesn't need changing and is somehow remember-able.

I was less than 20 bookmarks into del.icio.us and already I'm changing my mind on how I want set up categories. I keep adding layers of tags and feel obligated to go back and re-tag things to keep some consistency. And I can see how this will get unmanageable quickly. Blech! And the wikis I have going are headed the same way -- what happens if you want to take notes on a book with 87 chapters and have a page for each? Oy vey, the overhead, the cross-linking, the epic drop-downs and hand-made landing pages. Mein Gott In Himmel!!

This is my amateur view on why conventional semantic web projects are just goofy -- the cost of maintaining necessary integrity in the face of inevitable change. Imagine the picture above as moving object, with parts blinking on and off and reforming and relinking.

I almost get quora and pinterest (thx Sher for the link!), but not quite yet. I am a huge Wikipedia and Google user so some targetted primitive forms of this stuff make me mostly happy. My working rule-of-thumb right now is -- these model-driven projects are good if you have something specific you want and you have some loose search tools. Or if you're up for some eye-glaze surfing with no real objective. The need (desire! ja!) for too much precision kills, though. And the idea that I'm going to able manage any of these categorizing projects on my own is about as ridiculous as the idea that I'll ever organize my music collection. Or that I'll ever really unclench.

Oh.. Canada?

2011-05-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

Well, thanks to my dear parents I was one of the four or five Americans that heard about the Canadian national elections yesterday. Wow. Those Canadians can sure sneak in an election, eh? Not a lot of backswing there.

Yes, I've come to terms with not being much of a Canadian any more. I still sing the national anthem with "all thy sons command" and "God keep our land" and all the other non-PC bits that I hear have been rooted out and thrown away. I haven't watched much hockey in the last couple decades, although I'm keeping a close eye on the Canucks this year.. But mainly I've just lived in the States for so darn long that I say "prah-cess" not "proh-cess" and nobody winces when I say "about". Turns out there's a lot of Canadian-types living in the US, so I'm in decent company, but I'm pretty much an American at this point.

I do like Canadian politics, though. Even though the elections are a bit furtive, they seem pretty well-mannered -- at least judging from the victory and concession speeches last night. My Ma did send me a funny article earlier in the week about the the guy who eventually won -- Stephen Harper, the incumbent PM -- that sort of mocked any attempt at professionalism in politics, and you can't help but think that whole country thinks of itself chuckling on the amateur moral highground in this regard. Even the comments by Elizabeth May -- the first Green Party MP ever in Canada -- had a decidedly anti-professional tone, especially when she pulled out the old "Remember that the Ark was built by amateurs, and the Titanic was built by professionals" comment, which could have been aimed as much at the American political proh-cess as it was aimed at Mr. Harper. Yeah, nice try at the "no-spin" thing, sweetheart.

Ma and Pa sent out the link to Elizabeth May because it turns out she made big news and she's from their district -- the Gulf Islands! -- and a Green Party victory makes sense there if you think about it for a minute. (BTW, I seriously doubt my parents voted for her when there was a boy from Calgary that needed supporting.. just putting that out there, heh heh). Of course, it probably would have been tactically more shrewd to call it the "BC Gold Party" instead of the "Green Party", but I think everyone got the point. For a little red-underlining check out the comments on Elizabeth's victory speech page, especially the one by "wild-rose":

Sorry to see Gary go, he was a good and honest man, he had family values and a strong working ethic but maybe not so suited to the area anymore. I am unsure how May will serve that area but to my friends and ex neighbors from the San Pen may you do what you do best, ligit [sic] up, look out at the pacific and enjoy having the first Green Party member of Parliment [sic]

Sweet.. party on..

NBA 2011 Playoffs Love Index -- Conference Semi-finals

2011-05-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

OK, we're out of the first round and I better get on the stick with my updated love list. I think I managed to see major minutes in most of the first round games thanks to that awesome lap-desk-thingy I got Kim for her birthday last year. (Hint: it looks like I'm working!)

So remember, this is not a power-ranking list or a list of who I think is going to win, but more a list of who I think "deserves" to win based on my own cockamamie ideas of basketball justice.

1) Chicago Bulls -- yes, the love here is still very strong. Thibodeau now has his Coach Of The Year award tucked away in his not-so-little belt but now things get interesting. I think I would have given the award to Lionel Hollins if it was up to me, but to be fair I still don't have much to judge Thibodeau on at this point so let's see if he deserves it! Da Bulls face a super-pesky Hawks team that has a major chip on its shoulder. No easy out. This will test D-Rose especially -- what kind of player is this guy. I would love to see him step up and take charge. So far -- halfway through the first game -- he hasn't shown up. But this isn't just about Rose for me -- I've always had a soft place in my heart for Boozer (Duke!) despite that Cleveland contract juking thing.. And I love Noah's crazy heart, and Korver the assassin, and Deng the pure shooter.. But most of all these guys play great team ball.

2) Dallas Mavericks -- Wow! In my last list these guys were #13 of #16 -- what happened? Portland in Game 6 happened. I love Portland, and I would have loved to have seen them go on, but Roy wan't Roy and in classic Portland style, they were just not a deep team. But that said, the Mavericks came to town and closed that series out in a hostile environment. Dirk was unstoppable, and Terry (blech!) and Kidd (sweet!) were utter solids. I didn't even see a ripple of collapse, which has been the Dirk legacy. Could Kidd finally be the anchor this team needed? For all my dissing Cuban in the first round, I would love to see him with a championship -- if for no other reason than to tweak Darth Stern. Reality-check: um, I have to admit that my Laker-h8er emotions are back so Dallas might not be getting this much love if they were playing the Grizzlies, let's say..

3) Memphis Grizzlies -- Aw man, I love whatever Lionel is doing with these guys. I'm not sure how much farther they can go, but I'd love to see them play against the Mavs for the West finals. They got a running start against Oklahoma Supersonics by stealing home-court advantage yesterday. It turns out that maybe I can't look past my Sonic tears as much as I thought I could, because when I see OKC play I feel on love. Durant is fine, Westbrook is fine.. But Memphis, wow. These guys are on a tear. They have a super-scrappy defensive mind-set and are getting offensive contributions from people I've never heard of.. And they have a go-to guy in Randolph, and a great "big" in Gasol. If the Lake-n-bakes get past the Mavs (shudder) then I hope the Griz are waiting in the West.

4) Atlanta Hawks -- Just like the Grizzlies' Lionel Hollins, Larry Drew has this team en fuego. Not sure how much more on fire they could be, but apparently being disrespected by the Magic really lit them. I was happy to see them prevail in the first round and if they beat my precious Bulls, I think I'll be OK with that. I'm just not sure they have the grit to deal with a Boston (or a Chicago!) so we'll see. I'm used to thinking of this team as whiny under-achievers (Johnson, Smith, and Crawford -- sounds like a law firm!) so I'd love to remember them for something better.

5) Miami Heat -- The Heat are below my love mid-line (yeah, only 8 teams left) but they've climbed a bit. I watched them play Boston yesterday and damn if I didn't like they way they played. James Jones had a game, and he's not even one of the "big three". Come to think of it, my problems with the Heat are almost all off the court, or more specifically, what the formation of this crew means to basketball (hype before substance, talent over teamwork, clubby BFF collusion, player-first-coach-second mentaility). When I watch them play they look surprisingly like a team. I was hoping that the Celtics would beat them and clean up the bottom of my list.. but now I'm actually hoping the Heat advance past the..

6) Boston Celtics -- ..because the C's are playing (IMHO) less like a basketball team and more like the BFFy core-club with replaceable doo-wops than even the Heat! Von Wafer? Delonte West? Avery Bradley? There's almost no hope that these guys will hang with KG, Pierce, Ray-Ray and Rondo. How can this team develop any chemistry -- the core is too crusty and "indispensible"? Time to mix it up guys, the run is over, this is just pathetic.

7) Oklahoma City Thunder -- Yeah, these guys are drifting to the bottom of my stack. It's not all the fault of Presti's Perkins thing, or even my Sonic tears of rage. I'm just not feeling it with this team. I like Scotty Brooks and want to see him do well, but I think the "darling" expectations here are crushing this team. And they feel a bit soul-less and skelator-like to me, maybe it's just what I see when watch their two best players play..

8) Los Angeles Lakers -- My favorite Laker by a long shot is Lamar Odom. Sure he won 6th man of the year, and I guess the Zenmaster should get some credit for taking some of the pressure off of this guy by making him a star bench player, but I think the Lakers would be nowhere without him. Whenever the second unit is on he gets all the big offensive boards and keeps that unit together. He's the only one who has a chance to bother Notwitzki in this Dallas series, so I expect him to get more first team minutes. Kobe is still a hard-luck whiner, Fish is still a sanctimonious cheap-shot artist, and Pau is still the second coming of Vlade Divac -- yeah, these guy have won a couple championships, but it's been a lot of Phil magic and I don't see it again this year with this tired core unit and un-coachable lead finger-wagger.

So here are some predictions -- now that I've just finished watching each of first-games of this round.. Bulls in 7 over the Hawks, the Heat in 6 over the Celtics, the Mavs in 6 over the Lakers, and Memphis in 6 over Oklahoma City.

And yeah, just finished watching Kobe wishing he was MJ with that last minute three attempt. Nice try dude. Clearly it's someone else's fault that shot clonked off the back rim..

Moroccan Wedding Music

2011-05-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

This looks like a couple guys on their way out for a run. Or just after a run -- we're so fit and we didn't sweat so it's extremely hard to tell from a picture.

This was *supposed* to be a picture of the great Shelby vs. Samir lawn-mowing race. At least that's what we planned last night. In the course of hanging out at our place yesterday we showed Samir around and I made apologies for the somewhat uncut state of the lawn. Since I'm feeling poor I fired the lawn service guys and am doing it myself. So I'm a little sensitive about how the lawn looks and in the course of my long recitation of apologies I might have over-done it because Samir offered to mow the law for me on Sunday. Ha! No, I wasn't going have that. But he persisted and persisted and so finally I said, OK, we could do it together. Dueling mowers!! So I called up Kurt and begged a second mower for the morning and we figured out that to get done in time for brunch we'd have to start at 7:30a. So we hit the hay early.

But then in the morning I got to thinking. Um. What about the neighbors? I went outside at 7ish and walked around trying to calculate the potential ill-will a lawn-mower race would generate at that time of day and I noticed that my shoes were soaked -- the long grass was sopping wet. Double-blast!

So we postponed the lawn-duel and decided to go running in Ft. Ward Park instead. Samir had preached a sermon the day before where the golden rule figured in heavily, so he understood the don't-wake-the-neighbors line of reasoning. But I couldn't resist telling him the story about the time I made a stupid dare with myself to ride to the foothills of Atlas mountains when I lived in Marrakech, and I got home at 11p dead tired only to find a crazy Moroccan wedding taking place in the courtyard of my apartment building with all the dancing and hooting and music and smashing of bottles and general mayhem.. And of course this was a 48hr wedding party so when I had enough energy back at 4a to actually wake up I just remember laying in bed and listening to the same damn song over and over again.. I can still hum that song.

So yeah, ixnay on the lawn-dueling at the crack of Sunday dawn.

A Little Touch Of William In The Night

2011-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

I was pretty unaware of the recent Royal Wedding until one of my favorite American journalists, titled of course -- Sir Charles Barkley -- referenced the event in his comments following an NBA sporting match. And then on Facebook today there was nutty thrash on the subject. Wow, America cares! Even the ladies at the bus-stop were buzzing about The Wedding -- and Bainbridge Island isn't exactly a hotbed of "Loyalist" sentiment.

Rather than go all David Brooks on the complexity of my relationship with the idea of monarchy, and how America harbors deep-seated royalist fantasies, I think I can do my five-person readership the favor of brevity and show my feelings a bit more graphically.

It turns out that my sister -- who made sure the family was up at 3a watching William's daddy marry his own fetching commoner, lo these many years ago -- still has some streak of royal fascination left in her, because last weekend she gave my wife a mounted poster that looks like this..

..and it's been sitting in front of my desk in the home office I share with Kim ever since.

While I think I understand the inspirational charm of this royal advice, I was however, in the course of my somewhat eclectic work researches (ha!) impressed by the re-use of the same graphical form that I've been staring at all week. The same form with a somewhat related piece of royal advice, delivered with a couple layers of commentary.

It occurred to me that this artist (sorry, I don't read tags very well so I can't give credit..) said an awful lot of what I was feeling last night as I drifted off to sleep.

To all of those still wondering, um, nope, I didn't watch the wedding.

NBA 2011 Playoffs Love Index -- First Round

2011-04-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

I get a bit of whiny heat from some spotty-bottomed conservative sports types (you know who you are) about not having a single basketball team that I root for. Yeah, I understand the homer thing -- and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool-since-9-yrs-old Seattle Sonics fan (whoops!) -- but for me in the NBA there are too many plots and subplots going on to be focussed on one team. In fact, when I look at my sports allegiances, where I'm the most rabidly focussed on the same team are the sports areas where I'm generally the most ignorant, where I have a team that I watch to the exclusion of others, where I have narrow knowledge. Like my Souths.

So I'll try not to extrapolate that homer = ignorance argument too heavily, but I bet I could even get nicely-developing Clips fan Jaabal-Abdul Simmons himself to agree with me..

At any rate, to help me keep track of the stories I'll put down (for myself at least) a Love Index for each round of the NBA playoffs. I'd like to look back and see just how prescient I really am -- and have a baseline for some of the playoff stories as they evolve.

So these are the teams that I want to win, and a little about why:

1) Chicago Bulls -- Derrick Rose is a babe. So far he's been tenacious, hard-working, and focussed. And he knows how to single-handedly carry a team. Still TBD if he can *will* a playoff victory a la MJ, but stay tuned. And please, take notes Mr. James. There's a decent journeyman-chemistry supporting cast here -- Noah, Boozer, Deng, Korver, etc. -- and I like Thibodeau (so far so good), but Rose doesn't have nearly the same level of coaching and support that Kobe has had his whole career, so in my book he's clearly MVP material with some big upside. (Random detail rant: Rose got an MRI for his gimpy ankle, negative, he'll play. Granstanding Kobe "refused" an MRI for his gimpy ankle.. Oooohh Willis Reed Jr.? Got the wood piled nicely around your cross Mr. Purple Diamond Ring? Need a light?)

2) Portland Trailblazers -- I know Roy isn't *really* back, but I would love to see All-Star snubbed LMA step up and prove that he's a big part of why Portland is still playing ball and Kevin Love is at home dreaming up more ways to pad his double-double numbers. I love Nate (Sonics!) and this whole team is good guys, a big upgrade from the Jailblazers era. Not sure they have the legs to go far, but this is my wishlist, not some power-ranking nonsense so "Go Blazers."

3) New Orleans Hornets -- CP3 is for real. And his relationship with Jack is very cool. And the Ariza grudge subplot is nice.. Again, not sure how deep these guys can go, but making the Lakers play 6 games is far enough for me. Actually it's not, I'd like them to win a couple more in LA. Yeah, I'm dreaming.

4) Denver Nuggets -- The Nuggets shouldn't even be in the playoffs after trading their two biggest stars to NYC, but guess who's playing deeper into the playoffs? Not Carmello, that's for sure (props to Beantown too..). Yes, Karl is bigger than Carmello. Dude can coach. And the Nuggets played insane-outta-their-mind last night. Frenzied. Birdman, JR, just tattoo-ink-to-the-head nutso. Not sure there are 3 more games like that left in the fridge, but it was nice that they didn't get swept at home. Would love this to be a turning point..

5) Memphis Grizzlies -- WTF? That rag-tag bunch taking the West #1 seed to the wall? No-one's more surprised than the Spurs. Conley looks like a mini-Rose. Marc looks like a mini Pau. Randolph looks like.. the same old ballhog he's always been. Not sure what Coach Hollins is putting the Gatorade, but I'd like some..

6) Atlanta Hawks -- Another WTF chemistry experiment. Awesome. Against a "Goliath" opponent who just looks lazy and entitled. Down with the lazy top seeds already! I started this series cheering hard for the Magic but the largely ho-hum Hawks are actually looking like a basketball team and not just an exercise in overpaying mediocre players.. Wow.. Go dudes.

7) Indiana Pacers -- Yeah, I want the Bulls to steamroll them, but heck, these guys have played their guts out. Sure, they have a little nest of douche-y white guys (Jeff Foster? Tyler Hansbrough? Ick..) but they're playing inspired Butler-esque ball, with a coach that I would swear is Brad Stevens. Freaky, eh? Whatever, chemistry is good, even with all that douche mixed in, so party on gentlemen.

8) Boston Celtics -- Dropping that big turd Perkins at the trade deadline helped me like these guys a bit more. The "young turds" -- Rondo, Big Baby, and Perkins -- were over-nastifying a team that has solid toughness from the big three already. I respect Doc now, finally. And I adore the three amigos. We'll see how I feel as the series moves along, but the C's are at the middle of my love list. Giving the Heat a spanking would probably help.

9) San Antonio Spurs -- Man, I love Pop, and The Big Fundamental, and Ginobli -- Parker, meh.. But this team is cooked. Not sure what it is. Wouldn't be surprised if something crazy is going on, like Pop has cancer or Duncan had leg replacement surgery last week or something. But these aren't the Spurs. Manhandled by the Griz? Wow. I can't wait to find out what's really going on here. Something big is going to happen in the offseason, that's for sure.

10) Oklahoma City Thunder -- Looking past the Sonic tears, I would have had these guys in my top three on this love list easily if it wasn't for Presti snatching up that nasty piece of work Perk -- rhymes with.. Hey you big baby, keep tangling with KMart and you'll be crying on the sidelines with a fresh set of beggin-for-it boo-boos like last year's playoffs. Blech. That said, Durant, Westbrook, even Hammurabi Harden are solids, and I've always had a soft place in my heart for Collison (getting paid double the next highest player on that team, Durant, this year.. Look it up!). I do like Scotty Brooks coaching as well. Just ditch that human skidmark Perkins already.

11) Philadelphia 76ers -- What are these guys doing in the playoffs? WTF-cubed! This is all Doug Collins. I love that guy. Even if Sir Charles doesn't get his coaching tactics (with the "we're not as good at Miami" comment kafluffle). The Heat will finish them off, but I'm glad they didn't totally roll over.. And that Spencer got some minutes.

12) Orlando Magic -- Time for a new formula in Orlando. Stan's gotta go. And Jameer has gotta go. I really want Howard to do well, but he's too nice and too patient.. He's this generation's David Robinson. I started this year's playoffs thinking that it would be a 4-way scrum in the East between Miami, Chicago, Boston and Orlando. I guess when Boston kicked the Magic Kingdom in the nuts last year, that pretty much took the fight out of them. I'm still haunted by Jameer's-heroics screwing up Alston's rhythm and the Magic just going "poof" for the Lakers in the 2009 Finals. I'm done with these guys until they show me they're serious.

13) Dallas Mavericks -- Ha! The Dirkish fold-o-matic express may make it into the second round, but they can't go farther. Kidd is awesome, Matrix -- even a diminished Matrix -- gives me warm fuzzies but these guys aren't going anywhere. Jason Terry is a little prick. Hey dude, unclench the socks already. I think Cuban has made some catastrophic calls with that team -- or at least one big one, dissing Nash and riding Dirk -- and with Carlisle I can't help thinking of Jerry Jones and Barry Switzer. Am I the only one thinking that? I could live with Cuban if he'd rebuild this team around someone with guts, but that floppy German isn't going to get it done, and watching Cuban put friendship above winning is painful.

14) New York Knicks -- Yes, I want the Knicks -- who are already elminiated, and who feature Carmello "Crybaby" Anthony -- to go farther than the Lakers and the Heat. Let's see what happens in the offseason with these numbnutzen. Simmons had a genius idea -- Phil to take over as coach (coming home), Mike to go to Golden State where they actually are equipped to run and gun and Keith "who?" Smart could be his assistant for a few years. Everyone wins. Right now that team has about as much "direction" as LeBron's mother's hot mess of a love life. Dude, the Knicks need an owner-ectomy already.

15) Miami Heat -- Good Lord. Once they summarily execute the Collins 76ers, let's hope that the C's can clock these posturing bozos. Sad that Wade gets drug into LeBron's BFF club, but there it is. I used to like Riley too, but this hype-machinery is laying down some major smirchment all over that organization and sad to say Ol' Slick has his mittens all over the steering wheel. Collusion-palooza! LBJ should have done it in Cleveland if he was ever planning on "doing it", i.e. win a championship. Now he's a freakishly talented goofball, more like a smiley Dominique Wilkens than an MJ. Even when Barkley ended up on a star-studded Houston for his "finals run", that was more like a victory lap for a veteran that earned everything and less like a Cool Kids Club hogging the playground court all afternoon. Or Payton and Malone trying to ring-grab in L.A.? Nice try, but again, earned after a career of carrying teams. I can't wish LBJ enough bad mojo at this point, and I used to be a big fan. I still have my WITNESS t-shirts to remind me of the time before he made his stoopid decision. And to remind me of the time he smiled at me in the elevator at the BH Peninsula when I kept staring at him (hey, he's, um, huge).

16) Los Angeles Lakers -- Last year I dabbled in liking Kobe Bryant. A couple snaps and sneers into the playoffs and I just can't do it. Yeah, Michael snapped at his team-mates too. And maybe I'm remembering it conveniently, but I don't remember Michael getting "pouty" and "frustrated" like I see out of Kobe. I remember MJ like a hungry wolf, competitive, and enforcing order with his teeth. But not this self-defeated lashing out. Maybe that looks like too fine a point, but it seems like a big deal to me. The difference between using your emotions and being used by your emotions. You'd think that after he stunk up game 7 of the Finals last year, and had his team carry him over the finish line that Kobe would have developed a speck of humility. He went the other way. So poop on your Pau+Bynum threepeat I say. If MJ would have had Shaq or Pau he would have won 20 titles. I'm now hoping for Phil to be gone next year and Kobe to have a few nicely terrible years here. I'm looking forward to the day that I feel sorry for him.. Actually, I'm pretty much there.

OK, I'll check back after the next round with an update. Back to work!

President's Day Weekend: Mayne Island

2011-02-21T23:53:00.000-08:00

OK, it's been a while since I've cranked on the old blog. There was the Christmas in the last few months where we were all sick but still plowed through the festivities anyway. There was some Facebook distractionination including a bit of a run on Farmville -- you can see that it was ominously featured only a couple blog posts back. And there's been the travel every other week or so, mostly to California. But enough grousing excuses, let's see if we can make this thing go for a bit.

This weekend we saw that the girls had a long weekend from school so we sorta last minute headed north to see Ma and Pa on Mayne Island.

As you can see the girls are getting to be good packers. Of course, packing for a trip means bringing the dolls, and all their equipment. Oy vey! Here's Maizy with Katie, and Katie's doll and Katie's dog Coconut.

BTW, that pink tape on the floor there in the play room is the Kinect do-not-step-over line. I am intoxicated by pink tape for some reason.

The trip north was relatively uneventful. I think the only excitement was when Kim realized that her passport expired back in December. Ha! She had a few wide-eyed moments there, and I provided a few helpful, "meh, whatever" comments -- which of course made everything all better. Turned out that the border crossing people didn't even notice. Neither side -- coming or going -- no one said a peep.

We rolled in after dark and first thing Saturday morning it was nice and sunny..

This is the view from the deck looking past Navy Channel back toward Whidbey Island and the Orcas Islands in the US. I liked how silver the water looked -- reminded me of Shakespeare's lovely description of England in Richard II (line 48 here..).

We laid around most of the morning -- here's Bea demonstrating.

Bea was by herself on this trip. By herself in the sense that we opted to leave Dante with his relatives for this trip. He still gets up and barks a bunch at about 5ish in the morning, which was why I wasn't crushed when Kim said she had arranged boarding for him and he'd sit this trip out.. Of course, I'm pretty sure she was thinking of the stories by the Invisible Fence guys about finding eagle nests full of dog collars had some impact on the decision. Ha! Just for the record, I think those stories are bull-hockey -- and so does snopes -- but there are some scary birds "bigger" than eagles around Ma and Pa's place, so there is that.

Late morning we decided to take a hike and have a late lunch picnic. For Lucy a "hike" is synonymous with piggy-back ride. Here she is hanging onto my horns.

Here's the little load of angry luggage standing on Point Alice.

Maze, who did all her own walking, stood out on the windy point for a few minutes too.

Here's the whole crew -- minus me -- sitting in a small wind-break getting ready for some lunch.

Grandpa took some great pictures of the ladies before we left. Apparently Pt. Alice is privately owned, and there is a nice house tucked away on the point with some amazing views of the surrounding islands. There's no road in. Pa said he talked to the owners and they're cool with people hiking out there.

The rest of the day was taken up with napping and eating, and that evening we all sat down to watch a movie on the fancy new Netflix setup they have. Nice! We got to watch one of my top 20 all-time movies -- GROUNDHOG DAY!!!

This is such an awesome movie because in a fairly understandable context it explores some pretty deep material -- like, how would you *really* spend eternity if it was just plopped in your lap? And, why wouldn't you live like that anyway? For some reason I find it a hugely spiritual movie and there's not even a scrap of religion in it. Maybe that's why? heh heh..

Early the next morning I got up early and wandered around outside for a bit.

The moon was just going down over Active Pass..

..and the sun was just coming up over Navy Channel. Maybe someday I'll get a real camera.

Those ships were there the whole weekend. My guess is that they're waiting out some paperwork and there's a handful of guys that are playing a lot of cards..

Later that morning Pa and I jumped in the hot-tub. Leaving aside all this fetching man-flesh, what you don't see here is the view that we get of the islands -- see the pictures above. There is something very relaxing about sitting in hot water in the cold cold air and seeing for 100 miles in every direction.

That afternoon we headed to the park (see the obligatory Canadian flag in the background) for some runnin' around.

Maze and Lu are almost heavy enough to counter me if I choke way up the seat. Ha! OK, not quite.

Sunday evening after Lulu and Maze were in bed we got to watch another classic -- BOWFINGER!

Not sure this is top-20, but it is definitely a classic Steve Martin gig. Chubby Rain. Keep it together, keep it together.. Sigh.. I'm currently reading a very cool book about the movie industry -- The Biz -- and this was a nice reminder of how wonderfully sleezy that industry really is.

And just like that the weekend was over and we were back on a ferry (at 7:45a!) headed for the border.

The new border construction is finally done and our wait heading back on a holiday weekend was 5 min, if that. Wow! So combined with the border officials not noticing Kim's expired passport, we were feeling pretty groovy. Until we saw this sculpture. And then we were a bit confused. It's like a negative space "blank" billboard. We weren't really sure what it was supposed to mean. Maybe it's meant to symbolize the "moral vaccum" that is the United States? Who knows..

I do know that the whole trip was haunted by large birds. We saw a pair of impossibly large turkey vultures, some giant Ravens, random herons ambling all over the place, a hawk the size of a Cadillac sitting in a leafless tree, and six huge flocks of swans. Maybe it was just because Kim was driving and I wasn't just focused on finding WASP cars, but I have never seen anything like it. Another inscrutable sign from the beyond.

Puppycam

2010-11-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

So besides digital farming my other ruinous addiction is the Cedar Creek Cavaliers Puppycam.

We've been hoping to get a little companion for our beloved Beatrice even from the moment we brought her home but with all the travel and moving and hyperflux in our lives in the last year the opportunity never really presented. But we are starting to settle into the island routine and it seems like a good time to get another little fellow in our lives. So maybe after the new year? Well, we're all queued up to get one of these guys in the cage..

It's been great being on Bainbridge because Bea's family is right up the road in Poulsbo at Trudy and Jim's farm. And this is how they roll at Rancho Triple C -- heating pads, designer drinking bowls, and puppycams. Only the best! Trudy has a pretty awesome operation and we are very happy to have her nearby -- Bea stays there pretty frequently when we travel, so it's hard to think about going anywhere else for puppy vNext (codename: Dante).

I grew up with a wonderful Newfoundland/Lab named Dinah, and then later with a couple awesome Airedales -- Sarah and Tessa. Kim has felt a bit of big-dog jones in the last few months -- a matching Bernese Mountain dog? -- fueled by visits from Seamus (Stephanie and Jeremy's Irish Wolfhound puppy that's already the size of Montreal) and a good hard think about adopting precious Ruby. But in the end we're looking to stay small..

One of the perks of Trudy's operation is that the kids like to see her dogs somewhat regularly. Maizy even got to spend a couple afternoons this summer with Trudy and another neighbor girl (pictured) apprenticing in dog grooming -- this is the critical ear-brushing and blowdrying phase.

Trudy is a super-careful breeder and this last summer we thought long and hard about maybe taking one of these guys, but the timing was nuts. Here you can see Lulu menacing a nonplussed little dude with a green hairbrush -- the blue facepaint was from a stint at KidiMu..

This was Lucy later in the day when Maizy changed the channel away from Wonder Pets. And you think I'm kidding..

OK, back to work.. Hey look, the little guys are wrasslin' now!

Meme: Farmville

2010-11-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

After resisting the furtive charms of Facebook for many years -- and not without several genuine attempts to make it work -- I think I have finally settled in to what I think might be somewhat normal use of that social thingy. Once again I'm proving that I'm stubbornly mainstream, or in the chasm crossing jargon, plopped at the tippy top of the "early majority" hilltop. Sadly, no matter how hard I try to be an early adopter (forget innovator!) it's just not in the cards.

So it should be no surprise that 55 million people happily playing Farmville would be my cue to check it out. Apparently Farmville is the most popular game on Facebook, and was last year crowned the most popular game in the world. To be fair, I have been actively avoiding game playing, mainly because I get sucked in and misplace whole chunks of my life. My university career was so packed with the Ultima series that I used to claim it as my second minor. But recently I've been working on something game-like on the interwebs for work and figured that to be an educated person I would have to try out Farmville.

Wow. That was last week.

Yeah, I played it a bunch and I feel a little obliged to give some kind of status report, mainly for any Facebook friends who have noticed weird things on my Facebook account. If you got a message from me requesting urgent help in fertilizing my pumpkins, sorry about that. Also, I think I've been suffering from some kind of intense social vertigo, so any of you who has had direct contact with me in the last week -- and I have no idea who you are -- again, apologies.

I started out with pretty innocent intentions. I got the app hooked up to my account and checked out the little farm they give you to start with. But pretty soon it was clear to me that the economy of this little Farmville world runs largely on social energy -- besides the cycles of crop growing and animal husbandry and crafting which produce some basic revenue to grow your farm, the real path to the farm of your dreams is through the recruitment of "neighbors" who must be Facebook friends. Capital is generated out of thin air, as long as you gift it away -- Farmville gives you a pile of giveable stuff and encourages a frenzy of sharing: you can give out tractor fuel, bricks and boards to make buildings, decorations and colletctibles, etc. It has a very weird economic logic that's eerily like the mechanics of the Federal Reserve.

Of course I was flummoxed at first. It turns out that of my 150+ Facebook friends, only a handful were playing Farmville. Like, three. A few more had tried and abandoned it. With the exception of the Man-Cheetah, I couldn't bring myself to recruit people, even though the the game is hellbent to update your entire Facebook friend list with recruitment crap almost constantly.

So I threw myself at the mercy of newsgroups and wikis to see what might be done about the neighbor problem. It turns out that there are message boards for people who are dying to be your Farmville neighbors, so after one fairly productive night of recruiting I had the following conversation with Kim at breakfast:

Her: Um, I noticed you have some, um, new friends on Facebook? Like about a hundred new ones?
Me: Yep..
Her: What can you tell me about the naked guy in the gold diaper?
Me: You don't like gold on diapers?
Her: I did like the picture of Maze and Lu you put up yesterday..
Me: OK, OK, I get your point..

So thus endeth the great Farmville experiment.

I unfriended the gold diaper guy, and the chick crawling across her kitchen table in a witch outfit, and the weightlifting Romanian twins who breed fighting dogs.. Since you can't actually delete a Farmville farm I closed down my bakery, sold my tractors and button collection and my fences, I ploughed up my crops and let everything run fallow. If you go there now all you see is a sign that says: "This farm was sold to Shelbyville Manhattan. He has relocated to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001829152927."

Hmmm.. I wonder what the new owner is going to do with the place?

Belle And Sebastian At Benaroya 2010

2010-10-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Kim pointed out that this is the third concert I've dragged her to this year. I think that's a record for us. If you know anything about Kim's upbringing you might find it weirdly ironic that she's not very fond of attending concerts. But she can be a great sport.

And a hot date! Actually, this is the look you get when you interrupt her at Tetris. She just got finished bragging about how good she was -- do you hear that? That sound? Listen to how fast the pings are.. One of her most reveled and extremely rare pleasures in life is casually crushing me at games. If you want to delight her and angrify me, for example, just bring up the topic of Wii bowling.

The planning for this concert started back in July when B+S announced a Seattle date. Actually, they announced a San Francisco date in May when they were wrapping up recording in LA for B+S Write About Love and I was already trying to work an angle on a combo visit to the then-PB-based inlaws. But machinations aside, I spent the summer in intense anticipation.

The story on how the tickets were announced, released, sold, and distributed is too painful for polite reading, but let's just say that when I walked up to the box office window to pick up my tickets (yes *every* single person who attended had to go to will call!) I was armed with the detritus from my scuffles with the front-of-house "production company" in the weeks leading up to the show: I had sixteen (actual number!) wristbands, three printed receipts, two flyers and all the postmarked envelopes -- my trove of evidence just in case I needed to call my lawyer.

At some point in August I think we made the connection that we wanted to do something with Chris for his birthday (which is today! Pinch him if you're near him -- isn't that a birthday tradition?) and since Chris went with me to my very first B+S concert a few years ago it seemed like a good fit to make it an evening out.

Here we are after supper, waiting for the doors to open. Of course I insisted that we go super-early because I had no idea how the box-office situation was going to work out. I wanted enough time before the show to account for me throwing a ticketing-inspired faux-hipster fit of volcanic angst -- and the subsequent arrest, booking, and bailing out of jail that I was anticipating. But my worry was mostly for naught as it turned out we got decent seats together in about 30 seconds. So yeah, we ended up with some time on our hands before the show.

Which left us targets for scams like this -- the promise of front-center tix. They said, we'll text the winner in the intermission after the opening act. Of course once we got seated I discovered that my iPhone/ATT coverage did not include Row P of the S Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall. Yeah, rub my sketchy ATT coverage my face you bums.

But we had plenty to amuse ourselves with in the wait. Kim had discovered the Killer Otters of Bainbridge (check out her FB posts if you don't believe me) and.. shall we say.. piqued Nat's interest at dinner. You'd be suprised how much milage you can get out of savage otters with razor-sharp teeth and indeterminate morals.

Somehow one or two people managed to get into the auditorium before us. But we were in the first handful, that's for sure. So we had a good chance to scope out the B+S demographic as people poured in. I was surprised at how many yoots were there. This band started its long and simmering heyday in the mid-90s when a bunch of the crowd was in diapers. There were of course plenty of oldsters like us, and even a few people in their 50's and 60's who were probably not relatives of the band-members. Cool.

Once in a while I would see a person with large hair -- like the dude with the monster 'fro or the lady with the gorged-pineapple beehive 'do -- and pray to the seat-gods that they wouldn't plop down in front of me. My prayers were largely answered, although we did have an Asian-themed Iriquois of inscrutable gender sitting in front of us, but they turned out to be very gentlepersonly.

The opening act was The Trashcan Sinatras. I think they came up around the same time as B+S and they're a modest and sweet Scottish band. Three guitars and a groovy percussionist. Somewhere I read that they usually did a four song set before the show, but we got ten songs at least. Since I don't have a deep pop listening pedigree I didn't get some of their stuff -- Chris pulled a some references to George Harrison and and Monkees songs, which was cool. I had heard they wrote songs for Japanese artists and toured there often, even covering some Beatles for Japanese commercials. They just don't have enough lyrical teeth for me, but they're not hard on the ears.

Here we are during intermission. I think we had moved past the Otter Horror and had started talking about something that really scared me -- the tyrannical calculus of babysitter and ferry schedules that would determine our bolting time. Yes, the dirty backside of middle-aged date nights.

But then the lights went down and the place went wild. Well, as wild as seated aging hipsters can get after a large dinner -- applause, a few stray catcalls, and some bellowing from The Drunk Guy.

The opening was pretty gentle -- Expectations, the first track from Tigermilk, an older classic but not a must-have or an anthem by any stretch.

The band played 5 or 6 songs from the new album, which was cool. Of course there were some expected songs -- Piazza New York Catcher and If You're Feeling Sinister and Boy With The Arab Strap -- but there were a couple lovely sleepers, like Lord Anthony (probably included as a commentary on bullying stories in the US media) and Dog On Wheels.

Since this is my second B+S show, I couldn't help but compare. Here are a couple observations from this show:

1) Benaroya Hall isn't a great venue for this band. They sounded muddy for most of the night -- I got a sense that the sound people were struggling with balance the whole time and I'm pretty sure some of that had to do with the super-live acoustics of the largish room. Could have also been just that the venue staff hasn't done much rock-and-roll.

2) They made a larger effort to "get involved" with the audience: Stevie's singalong thing for I'm Not Living In The Real World, and Stuart's makeup theatrics for Lord Anthony. And of course pulling people onto stage for the last couple songs.

3) Dancing -- A lot of the newer songs are not exactly danceable but are certainly much less book-mopey than early B+S. Hmmmm.. Stuart definitely had way more happy feet action this time. Of course that led to a bit of confusion in the audience. A couple people stood and danced through a few of the songs but their chemically enhanced self-absorption kept them from noticing that the crowd generally was happy with letting Stuart do the dancing. So yeah, we got to see a bit of collalateral tortured-jello-tree and drowning-poodle action. C'est la vie.

4) Yes, we are now three for three (or four for four if you count Okkervil River) on this year's concerts featuring Men With Tambourines. Tinkle tinkle baby!! To quote AC Newman from Maybe There Are Ten Or Twelve -- make of that what you will.

But too soon it was over. Chris and Nat left just after Dog On Wheels and Kim and I stayed for a couple more songs, but by then the place was a moshpit. We left after Boy With The Arab Strap and I heard them start Cuckoo.. Looks like that was the last song before two encores (setlist here, but don't trust it completely -- the listmaker missed the Judy encore, and there's no way they played We Rule The School.. I would have cried for that one I'm sure).

On the ferry ride home Kim was fairly generous with her appreciation for the evening, especially being out and about with Chris and Nat. She did point out that this band seems pretty stuck on working out Stuart's issues from high school. Fair enough, but heck, one way or another, aren't we all still working out our high school nonsense? I say: Let he who has not moped a snub cast the first eraser.

Santa Monica in October

2010-10-12T01:21:00.000-07:00

We've been to California a couple times now and I haven't posted any pictures so I promised myself to put up a few "snaps" as Grandma Goerlitz used to say..

On Wednesday afternoon we took off from Seattle. The airport was pretty quiet, and we managed to get a table in the big atrium. I remember having Wendy's.

En route I got to sit in the Maze and Lulu row. I already posted a picture on Facebook of the girls eating and reading.. But I had to include this picture because it combines Lu's generosity and emotional immediacy with Rembrandt light and some larger symbolic themes -- the offer of the blue pill accompanied by the Masonic hand sign for beware! Plus, it reminds me of my favouritest line from Babar: "Alas, the King of the Elephants had eaten a bad mushroom.."

The indie rock band that is the Goerlitz family in the classic LAX tunnel.

I call this photo "The Madona of the Luggage Claim Area."

From LAX we went straight to Tibi and Lee's house, then we all headed to the hotel to have a bit of supper and check in. At Tibi's prompting I had this huge Angus burger served by an Australian in a kilt.

Our hotel was awesome. And it had an awesome tree in front of it that was huge and seemed to invite climbing. Lu wanted to have a picnic in the tree.

This was the plaque in front of the tree to prove its age. Saved me the inconvenience of chopping it down to count the rings.

On Thursday we slept in a bit. I remember waking up and thinking two things immediately. One, I'm in California so I can get In-and-Out burger whenever I want! And two, since I was already two burger-meals into a streak, should I order a burger for breakfast knowing that I would probably have I+O for supper.. But that logic seemed a bit perverse even to someone who is very proud of his 5-burger-meals-in-a-row and his 9-mexican-meals-in-a-row dining streaks. Of course later in the day the happy moment came. No, those were not all for me.

Friday we discovered the hotel pool and the whole family spent quality time lounging.

Tibi and Lee have a great view over Ocean Ave. Here's Tibi in a thoughtful mood, waiting with me for supper. Kim discovered that our hotel would do room-service to go so we were well taken care of..

Saturday we decided to check out the Santa Monica pier. Later in the day on the boardwalk we saw all sorts of jugglers and people dressed up and posing -- there was Catwoman and some dog dude and a random blue Navi warrior queen. Somehow Lu prophesied the kooky vibe and did her own pose-dance for us..

Near the pier there was this artifact, which it turns out is a heavy roller that produces miniature cityscapes of Los Angeles -- repeated of course, which is pretty damn apropos! -- when you drag it over wet sand. It was called an "art tool" which seemed ugly sounding to me. Plus, I already was using that term for Andy Warhol so there was a clash there. But the idea here was definitely promising.

Some things just don't need saying.

The first order of business on the pier was to get vertical in the ferris wheel. I got to sit by Maze and she liked the view muchly.

Lu wasn't so sure.

Emboldened by the fun of the big wheel Maze asked us if she could go on the roller coaster that wove in and around all the other attractions on the pier. Neither Kim or I are real thrillseeker types, but I figured that I should be able to keep up with a 10-yr old girl..

So Kim and Lu went to find kiddy rides and Maze and I strapped ourselves in. We took the very front row for maximum death defiance.

I tried to take some pictures but sadly roller coaster adrenaline is one of those things you can't quite capture on an iPhone camera. Maybe with the WM7 phones though?? But the picture above should give you some idea of our general swoopiness. On the first lap I lost my hat and on the second lap we screamed a bit just for fun.

Afterward we celebrated life by having cotton candy and ice cones. If you zoom in on this picture you can see that Lulu had plenty of both all over her face and hands. I'm surprised she wasn't eaten by seagulls, but we hosed her off before they really noticed.

Here's a picture Kim took from our last supper on Tibi and Lee's lovely deck. We watched the sun set and the sliver of moon set as well. And we argued about the lights on the water -- A ship? Catalina island? UFOs? Oil rigs?

Sunday morning we had breakfast at the hotel and then it was time to say goodbye. Here we are walking out to the cars to go our separate ways.

Ahh, California. We'll be back in a few weeks..

Seahawks vs. Chargers

2010-09-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the annual Alan Birthday Football Game. Alan and Sher and Seth B came up for a long weekend so we could celebrate in style.

Since now we live on Bainbridge the plan was to totally avoid the hassles of traffic and parking by walking onto the ferry and hiking the few blocks from the Seattle ferry terminal to Qwest Field. The ladies gave us a ride onto the ferry, however. They invoked some sort of "shopping privilege" that they said automatically attaches to male football attendance. Hmmm. Sounds sexist to me. And it reminds me of the kind of behaviour you see in naughty cities when there's a fire or a hurricane and the police are otherwise occupied -- looting and such.

Here Uncle Shelby is setting a bad example. Seth and I went to the ferry cafe to get some backswing eating action for the stadium food to come. I of course had coffee and an apple fritter. Seth scored Froot Loops, milk, and my fritter's twin brother. Sher got churchlady lips when she saw our haul and said that for all things food related Seth was NOT to listen to Uncle Shelby. Hey, I wasn't the one who picked out the Froot Loops.

Why is Alan using an iPhone and an Android at the same time? No, this wasn't actually work. Somehow in the morning his Android became "deactivated". The prevailing theory is that Verizon installed an update and reset the machine remotely. Of course this put a crimp in the live football watching plan and was corrected quickly, thanks to Jane!

Once we arrived to Seattle and said our goodbyes to the looters.. um shoppers.. we followed the rest of the ferry walk-on hooligans in a river of people headed to the stadium. We opted to take the waterfront route and were forced to walk under the viaduct because of some emergency at the water taxi stand -- you can only see one fire truckish vehicle above but trust me there were 15 of them..

Sure enough, the taxi boat had plowed into the dock on arrival. I suspect Captain von Water Taxi spilled a bit of his coffee here.. I actually prefer to think that the captain was tied up in the hold and that the boat had been pirated by Seahawks fans that stormed the dock and were in such a hurry to get to the game that they forgot to light the boat on fire.

Here Seth B is pointing out that woman on the left is wearing a Deion Branch jersey and the man on the right is wearing a Max Strong jersey and he wants me to tell them to switch sides so that they'll read "Strong Branch". I'm like dude, drop it already, be happy that the numbers are a palindrome either way..

We jostled our way into Qwest and in the confusion of fighting our way in I ended up with a green and blue Seahawks toque. Awesome! I immediately took a picture of myself in iPhone blurry-gothic.

Our seats turned out to be pretty stupendous. We've been trying out different sections of Qwest and I think these club seats on the home side are the best we've had yet. We had 20-yard line seats that backed up on the corporate boxes so there was no one behind us. Here you can see the Seagals warming up the crowd. The place was packed!

Hello smirky trouble. I must have been explaining the concept of cheerleaders to Seth B. Apparently one of the schools his school plays against has a set of cheerleaders that is not particularly competent. That, my man, is not exactly the point.. But the Seagals have built in a fair amount of discipline in their routines, unlike some random-drunk be-booted floosy cheerleader squads hooting for NRL sides not to be mentioned.. There are 28 Seagals, in four platoons of 7, and they have all these fancy deployment tactics and everything. That said, I do think they undermine their athletic pretensions somewhat with that drumbeat bumwiggle routine.

One of the day's highlights: the Twelfth Man flag raising ceremony by none other than Nate MacMillan! Whoo hooo! Besides Gary Payton the dude pretty much represents the last of the great Sonics and his departure by way of the bumbling machinations of Darth Schultz gives him this saintly patina capable of making 60,000 people overcome their intense envy of past-rival Portland -- who has an NBA franchise! -- and forget that he's the Blazer's head coach.. But how can you not adore Nate?

So after all the fireworks, the dancing, the flag-waving, the pretzel-and-beer buying, the anthem-bellowing and the drum-beating.. yes, there was a football game. Above is the first play. I always take a picture of the first play, just in case.

Not too deep into the first quarter Seth wanted to get started on the legendary Stadium Food Grand Slam -- the four essentials in one meal -- a burger with fries, a nacho, a hotdog, and a slice of pizza. Here he is starting with a nacho and some of my fries..

On the field it was a pretty interesting game. The play above was a Hasselbeck almost-a-touchdown pass to Deion Branch, where a Chargers cornerback punched the ball out of Deion's hands at he was crossing the goal line which resulted in a loss of possession for the 'Hawks. Joy to sadness for 60,000 people in as long as it takes for a referee to review the play. Blech.

The Seahawks were saved by two really long kickoff returns by Leon Washington -- one for 101 yards and the other for 99 yards. Nutty awesome. And the two interceptions by Earl Thomas helped a bit too. On this drive the Seahawks fans shouted so much that they caused two false starts and a delay of game -- 15 yards of damage.

And above you can see the penultimate play of the game, with 15 seconds left, the Chargers down 7 points and taking one last shot at the end zone. This is right before Thomas' second pick that sealed it for the 'Hawks. The place went wild. Kim and Sher, who were hauling their plunder onto the ferry at that very moment, heard the volcano of joyhowling from across the city.

Then half the stadium rushed the field. And the other half rushed for their cars. Most everyone was pretty happy, although it was a pretty scary win. One of the numbers on the stats board in this picture -- too small to see -- is the total offense. I think I remember seeing that San Diego had 518 yards of total offense while Seattle had about half of that. Of course special teams -- Leon's runbacks! -- weren't in that calculation, but that pretty much summed up the day. The Seahawks offense never really felt like it found a rythym.

And the defense, sigh. The Seahawks defense left the middle of the field WIDE OPEN ALL DAY. Rivers could have closed his eyes and thrown into the middle of the Seattle defense and be guaranteed that Gates or Floyd would be sitting at a little table, sipping a coffee and reading a paper looking very melancholy, see the ball coming their way and not noticing any Seahawks in that particular restaurant casually stand up, stretch, and pull in another 20yd reception. It was maddening.

But a win is a win.

Here is Seth taking in the drumming festivities in Qwest's north parking lot..

..and Alan right beside him looking very Tom Selleck. Just outside the frame is a sandwich and a waterfall.

And here we are trooping back to the real world, back to the ferry where we would take the last little bit of advantage of the food-freedom that comes with a complete lack of female supervision. This ferry ride featured Sethie's last cafeteria pillaging of the day, an episode that hopefully taught Alan not hand that dude a pile of money with instructions to "surprise me".

Microsoft Last Day

2010-09-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, today was my last day at Microsoft. And the picture above happens to be the very last swipe of my card key going into Building 36 to turn over my cards and computers.

Yes, almost ten years! Crazy to think that being almost a quarter of my life working in one place, but I'd say I had about six distinctly different jobs or roles over those ten years. The place is so damn big that most of the time it's like being in a nerdcity of 500 little companies. But I loved it muchly, and I got to work with some very bright people so I feel pretty grateful for the chance to be there and learn about building software in the large. As in, thousands of people working on a product for hundreds of millions of people. Nutty hard, that.

The irony of me taking off when I did is that I had recently landed in one of the awesomest teams (Excel) in my favourite building (Building 36 above - flikr shout-out to purincess) at the start of what will be a pretty amazing release (Office 15). But I did make a prophecy on my very first day at MSFT that on the day I exhausted the plaintext for my password hash that I would know that my life at The Empire were over. It was this summer that my plaintext ran out. How freaky is that? The prophecy said nothing about going back, so we'll have to see about that..

As to what's next in the short term, well, trust that I'm happy and insanely busy in my Island Fortress and I'll post more on that later.

The National at Marymoor 2010

2010-09-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night Kim and I had a lovely little date -- she came with me to see a couple of my favourite bands -- Okkervil River which was opening for the super-amzaing The National. Sigh..

To be fair, I think she likes The National too, and during the show it became pretty clear that she was a "Boxer" person and I am very much a "High Violet" person..

We got there plenty early and staked out a little blanket area on the left back hill of the Marymoor venue. I was thinking we might see some people we knew there, having lived in Redmond for ten years, but then I realized that the audience was pretty much all of Ballard and half of Capitol Hill. There were probably more Bainbridge people there than Redmond people, actually..

A bit after sevenish Okkervil River took the stage. I think I've worn a groove in my computer for a couple of their tracks -- their It Ends With A Fall track from Down The River Of Golden Dreams made my Heavy Rotation 2009 list at #17.

Since we were sitting far away I stole some pictures of the show from flickr. I suppose I could have run up and taken some pictures of my own, but I wasn't feeling very frisky that evening..

Will Sheff is a babe. For some reason he reminds me of the Texas version of Adam from the Shouts. This was Kim's first exposure to Will and when she saw him she said: Hmmm... Shelby, what is it with you and guys with tambourines. Hmmm.. Good point.

Finally, at about eightish, after the smoke machines settled down, The National took the stage. And they opened with my current favourite song, Runaway. I almost cried. I don't know what it is about their 40-something depression-rock, but they really hit some kind of nerve with me.

Matt, their lead singer and songwriter, is very spastic on stage. He paces, he shouts, and here you see him fretting. Between songs he would say things like: "We like to walk around for a bit.. I'm trying to build an awkward tension between songs.." And about Okkervil River he said something like: "We are extremely happy to be reunited with Okkervil River after three years apart. I don't know why we haven't played together for three years, maybe it was because of the fight we had.. it was war. And we lost.."

He dedicated the song Brainy to his niece who was just starting first grade, which was very cool. Although he did register some concern that there may some inappropriate lyrics. I think that's where I connect with this dude -- he's very socially inappropriate, but somehow he makes it work.

Bloodbuzz Ohio was the fourth song in the set -- no those red lights weren't for Bloodbuzz, but for the "I'm evil" lyrics in Conversation 16. Nice and sinister!

I went to the show with five "must have" songs: Bloodbuzz, Runaway, Conversation 16, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, and Fake Empire. We got to hear them all except for Crybaby -- which was the second encore. It turned out that my favourite song wasn't even on my list-- number 13 in the set, The Daughters Of The Soho Riots. An Alligator song that both of us liked supermuchly.

We knew we were going to have to pick up kids from Yoon's house at a reasonable time and getting out of that deathtrap of a park would take 90 minutes at least so we made the hard call to leave right before encores.. We actually walked out holding hands in the dark to Fake Empire, which was kinda romantic and seemed to be a good way to say goodbye to our Redmond days.

Jay Smith

2010-08-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Bradley sent me a mail to tell me that Jay -- a guy from our high-school class -- had died in a boating accident Friday night. I've been thinking about Jay a lot in the last week, which is kinda weird because I hardly knew him.

I went to Upper Columbia Academy in the fall of 1983 as a Junior and I didn't really know anyone in a boarding school of a couple hundred. High school for me looked like a collection of cliques -- jocks, geeks, nerds, religious nuts, stoners, party animals, and the beautiful people. Guys like Fred or Kannenberg were almost permanent floaters, and I tried out the geeks and beautiful people myself for short stints, but I was pretty much a nerd with an appreciation for religious nuts and jocks. As far as I could tell Jay was the undisputed King of the Party Animals.

I don't think we had a single conversation in my two years at UCA, even though we were in the same graduating class. I'm a bit socially challenged, to be sure, but my memories of Jay were that this dude was larger than life. Much larger. From where I watched he appeared to have zero regard for authority, especially doofy authority like the boy's dean of the dormintory. I think he always had a car, and access to adult chemicals, and I was absolutely sure he was sneaking girls into his dorm room every night. This was all obvious in the way he walked -- he had a laid back swagger where his pelvis was the first part of his body that entered a room. I remember saying to someone after he sauntered by with his posse that Jay looked he had thirty-pound balls and he manouevered himself around like he was trying to keep them from touching. He was definitely living on the edge and we never spoke -- and I certainly never approached him because he seemed kind of dangerous to a weenie like me.

But then at Walla Walla I think I ran into him someplace completely random, like the library. The way I remember it he started a conversation with me of all things. And he turned out to be pretty shy, and maybe even a bit lost. He was clearly wicked smart, but the college thing didn't seem that interesting to him. I think we talked about computer classes, probably because he knew I was doing homework for some of the cute girls who were getting their computer classes out of the way Freshman year..

Probably the longest interaction I had with him was when Fred and Bradley and I did a road trip up to our twenty year reunion a few years ago (crap! my twenty-five is this Fall..) -- I think we ended up at the same table at one of the restaurant meal events early that weekend, and I think we went deep mostly on construction and the end of the world. The dude was still laid back -- in one of the obits or articles I read about him this week I saw someone called him "Captain Easy" which is about right. But I came away with the impression that while he hadn't renounced his citizenship to The Edge he didn't actually spend much time there any more. And that the whole grown-up thing, like the college thing, wasn't sitting quite right. That the restlessness that made him a high school legend and an SDA school principal's worst nightmare was still prowling around inside him somewhere and he couldn't shake it, like a solider that was no good for civilian life because he never really came back from the war.

Maybe I've been thinking about him this week because I've been projecting on him my own middle-age courage and legacy and mortality issues -- check some of my posts in the last few months on tattoos, extreme pilots, Keifer.. One of the coincidences of the past few days was seeing that picture of him at the top of this post standing with his cousins. Of course you know which person in the picture is Jay. But who was his favourite cousin, the dark-haired boy whose shoulders he's holding? That's right, the pilot from my Due Up post..

Ta Ta Poo Poo

2010-08-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

Had a busy July but let's see what we can do on the blog front in August, eh?

Howabout I start with last night's craziness. So I went to a football game in the middle of August with a Belgian family.. Allo?!! Yeah, here's how it happened:

Our dear friends and new neighbors the NJs have been planning a "home exchange" (something like this) for a while. We've admired their sense of adventure and it looks like a lot of fun. I volunteered to pick up the exchange family from the airport -- Francois the father, with his two children Jonas (14 in a few days) and Julia (10). We had a very pleasant evening drive and ferry ride back to Bainbridge Island and on the way to the ferry we passed Safeco Field and Qwest Field where Francois remarked that he would very much like to experience American Football. I told him that the football season starts in September after they are back in Belgium, and I didn't think much more about it.

The next day -- last Wednesday -- I happened to be listening to football talk on KJR Sports Radio in preparation for beating Alan in fantasy football this year (grin) and I heard the conversation about the first preseason game at Qwest on Saturday night. Ah ha!

It took Francois et famille most of last week to decompress from the trip (les vacances dans les vacances), but on Friday evening we had them over for a little supper on the patio and while we were brainstorming northwesty things for them to do in the next couple weeks, I mentioned that there actually was a football game Saturday evening and I offered my guide services, heh heh. Francois and Jonas were super interested so after we went online and got some killer tickets.

We had a stupendous evening. The weather was perfect -- mid-seventies as the sun was going down, the stadium almost filled to capacity (65k+ in attendence).

I wanted to see the game for a couple main reasons:

1. This is Pete Carroll's debut as the Seahawk head coach. Yeah, it's a meaningless pre-season game, but I really wanted to see him in action. I wasn't disappointed. That little dude was zipping around the field hugging and fiving everyone. It's hard to figure out coaching moves in the pre-season, because the game is really about having the coaching staff evaluate players in near-game conditions, but Pete managed to get a cheer from the crowd when he went for short yardage on fourth down in the first half.

2. Some youngish guys I'm following -- Mike Williams, Justin Forsett, and Russell Okung esp. -- were going to get minutes and I wasn't disappointed. Justin is *always* electric even though he didn't have the awesomest game but I was happy to see him; Mike Williams is HUGE, as in physically large, and his first catch he snagged near the 50yd line, juked his defender and sauntered into the endzone.. awesome; and Russell got major minutes, but I wasn't close enough to the action or observant enough to really get a good sense of his wonderfulness or not.

3. LaGarrette "Suckerpunch" Blount! And he and Chris Johnson scored Tennessee's only touchdowns. Nice..

4. Charlie Whitehurst -- huge gamble at number two QB for Seattle, and he was pretty good I thought. Had a little swagger, especially after hooking up with Williams for a TD right away.

Leaving football aside and returning to the cultural front, I think the Belgians had a pretty good time -- I spent some time w/ Francois explaining the game.

That's him with his hand in front of Julia, with Jonas in the background. Jonas loves manga and had read a series about an American football player, so he had the basics and helped explain to his dad. Julia got a little grumpy before half-time ("mais papa, c'est nulle...nulle..) but after some pomme frites she perked up. And I think they liked some of the crazy stadium games, like the wave..

On the way into the stadium Francois noticed that most of the fans we wearing jerseys of their favourite players. He became fascinated with the different player names, and finally settled on one player that he was going to cheer for -- the most popular player in a jersey count -- Lofa Tatupu, #51. Sadly Tatupu wasn't playing, but that didn't stop Francois from screaming out his name at random times during the game. Except he kept getting the name wrong. Eventually I stopped correcting him, and he settled on something like "Go go ta ta poo poo". Made me laugh, although his kids cringed and the fans nearby kept looking around trying to figure out what this crazy dude was saying. Ahhh... America!

I Trust You To Kill Me

2010-06-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes enough things conspire to force a comment from me, even though I'm in the middle of packing today and we have two thousand things to do before evening. I saw a picture of Keiffer Sutherland waving at someone and noticed a tattoo on his arm. My fascination with tattoos is somewhat documented and I was compelled to find out a bit more.

It turns out that this tattoo is the Icelandic runes pictured above which says "I trust you to kill me" and they have a very cool meaning, at least as told by Mr. Sutherland. You can watch him talk about it here, but the bones of his explanation is that he has accepted that not everyone will appreciate his reasons for doing things, and this expression reminds him that people will want to "kill him" and that if he accepts that he has the freedom to do what he knows in his heart he must do.

In reading a bit more about Mr. Sutherland -- yes, he's Canadian -- I checked out his current projects and one title looked intersting -- Melancholia. Hmmm.. Looks like a science fiction project by Lars von Trier, only the greatest director alive. How cool is that? "No more happy endings." I'm wishing I was in Trollhatten in July..

Toesies

2010-06-11T00:30:00.000-07:00

We are knee-deep in moving -- the second coat goes on our new floors in the new house tomorrow, and the final inspection is ordered for our old house for Monday to make sure we've done all the fixing up we said we'd do. Movers come Monday too. Our house is filled with columns of boxes. We're eating on paper plates. And Aunty Sher was here helping pack as well.

But somehow in the mayhem the girls all managed to take time out this evening to troop on down to the spa? the mall? venus? to get their toes painted.

Above you have photographic evidence of Lulu's very first pedicure. Apparently she was quite proud to be included in the mix with Maze and the big people.

It turns out she has a major crush on her cute kindergarten teacher-man as well, but I don't have a picture of that. Hello!

Deep Twilight Robots

2010-06-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

We are between houses. I'm day two into a new job. My to-do list has action items to update other to-do lists. It's the NBA finals with must-see Lakers vs. Celtics. My family is "ghosty" to me, although not quite as bad as Sean Penn's family..

But ever since I found this web site with super-cool cams mounted on the undersea robots fixing the BP Gulf spill all I want to do is watch the slo-mo action. It's mesmerizing. And surreal. And tranquil. And some of you might find it a bit boring (but it can't be as bad as my 2000-word Shout Out Louds posts..).

Certainly I won't have time to watch this, but someone else sees something really cool, let me know on IM and I'll flash over to it.. maybe there's a Twitter feed for these cams out there so finding the good bits realtime can be crowdsourced.

At any rate, I'm cheering for those dear brave robots in the gloom.

Shout Out Louds In Seattle 2010

2010-05-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Last night was the payoff of a birthday present from back in April: Kim took me to see The Shouts at Neumo's downtown Seatle. The show finished after midnight and by then I was pretty sweaty from jumping around and screaming lyrics. Kim a little less so.

I've been a pretty big fan for a while -- see my posts in the last couple years on my obsession with the band, the song Normandie, their last album recording in Woodinville, and even their prominence in my personal listening chart -- but this was my first time to see them in person. They're from Sweden and sadly I'm not out there much. And just as sadly they're not out here much either. So our schedules haven't really sync'd.

Before I say anything else you have to know I thought they were brilliant, better in person than their videos and recordings. They somehow manage to make danceable pop music sound melancholy. Some of their songs were quieter, but not many -- and even this morning after the show I'm not back to full hearing capacity.

They did most of the new album which is cool, but I'm getting into that one more slowly so I didn't know any of the words except of course to Fall Hard which they dedicated to Phil Ek, the guy who produced their last album.

The best part, though was some of their older work which I have a pretty good handle on. They did Normandie, which was a must-have for me of course. They did Impossible as one of the encores. They did Comeback. They did Please, Please, Please. The nice thing about a tiny venue where the sound is insanely loud is that you can shout the lyrics and since you can't even hear yourself you're pretty confident no one else can hear you either.

Neumo's is pretty small -- I think official capacity is just under 500, but there's no way more than 250 people could have been packed into a floor area about the size of a three-car garage. There probably was another hundred or more in the balconies and then some people listening back in the bar area.. We managed to find a small half-wall to lean our elbows on about partway back so we were about 30 feet from the stage, which worked out pretty good. We only had 20 minutes or so of drunk-fratboy dancing (Kim said he was an HP printer salesman!) in front of us, but other than that the people around us were great. There was this 6'5" guy in front of me with his giant 6'+ girlfriend hopping around a bit, but he was nice enough and I had a decent view so I was cool. I'm not exactly tiny myself.
I didn't take any pictures but I stole some off flickr from the show a few days ago in Chicago. Here's pretty much the view we had of Adam all evening:

He's very dreamy. Carl (guitar) was to his right, Bebban (keyboards) was behind Carl. Eric (drums) was behind Adam most of the night and the band members didn't move around much. It turned out that Ted (bass) didn't make the trip -- not sure what's up there since the band is famously tight. Adam said something about a baby, but I thought that was the new bass guy had a baby. It didn't make sense to me..

Here's the new bass dude, Henrik -- I thought he did an awesome job blending with the band, although Adam had to go over and talk with him a couple times during the set. And I thought he could have been louder for his vocal part in Impossible. Or maybe Adam was depending on the audience shouting out that part? Or was it that the sound guys kinda sucked?

At any rate, I had an awesome time. This was the first time I think Kim and I had been in a smoky bar together. Not really our natural habitat, although we've gone to see shows with friends on and off over the years -- but never together. So it was very romantic. And I think she's actually a Shouts fan now.

Due Up

2010-05-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Flipping through the Walla Walla University alumni publication Westwind last week I came across an "in memoriam" piece on this guy Shaun Lunt. I'd never heard of him, and he's never come up in games of six-degrees-of-SDA, but something about the picture in the magazine (above) made me curious so I chased down the link to his web site -- Due Up.

The site is now a memorial to the life of this young SDA doctor who loved to do adventure bush flying in Alaska, and who died in an accident chasing his adventure.

What got me was seeing some really amazing pictures of the north. There's something very compelling about the north to me -- the wildness, danger, purity, emptiness -- and this Shaun Lunt dude got really really close to all that.

At any rate the site worth checking out and if you're really brave you can check out the memorial video too. Good luck not getting a little misty there.

Beck Road On Bainbridge

2010-05-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

So it turns out we're moving to Bainbridge Island this summer. We've been planning this for a while and have held off looking for a house or putting ours on the market until this April because we wanted to wait until the girls finished their school year at Rosa Parks Elementary.

But after we got back from Grandma's birthday in Canada we started spending time on the weekends driving around the island looking at places. And when we were pretty comfortable that this is where we needed to be, we took the plunge and put our house on the market. We found an outstanding agent -- Chris Sudore -- and in a couple weeks we had the house prepped, photographed, marketed.. and a sale pending!

Of course, in the meantime we were working with our very excellent Bainbridge agent -- Maureen Buckley -- on finding a place to land. We knew we wanted some land that would be girl and dog friendly. After looking in the "fixer-upper" category for a bit, we realized that lots of light and being able to look out and see for a ways were both pretty important to us, as well as a floor plan that made some kind of sense. We actually looked at a cute place that entered through the kitchen, and both bathrooms for all three floors were accessed through that kitchen. Hmmm..

When Maureen first drove us past a the grey-blue house on Beck Road we didn't really consider it since it had an offer pending. But we liked the area since it's very open and pretty and only a few blocks from an elementary school we have our eye on. And when it came back on the market a few days after we first saw it we decided to take a closer look. Sigh. The rest is history.

We now have an accepted offer on Beck Road and we got both the selling and the buy offers finally negotiated yesterday. That was a busy day.

Wish us luck with all the closings and the inspections and the movings. We'll definitely update with all the excitement of the big summer move.

Body Of Work

2010-04-29T03:01:00.000-07:00

This evening in Tangletown I just met Stanley Kunitz kind of by accident. We'll see where the relationship goes -- he's dead and I'm kinda whacked out on caffeine, but we're off to a good start. I just bought a collection of his poems on Amazon.

Here's how I found him: I had a meeting with Tim and Jeremiah this evening at the Zoka's near Green Lake. When I went to buy my coffee (and chocolate croissant!) the guy who was taking care of me asked me how my day was going and we struck up a bit of a conversation. About 10 seconds into talking with my baristo it became very clear to me that I would need to ask him about his tattoo.

One of the hard things about getting older is trying to figure out the customs of the youth tribes. Tattoos are one of those cultural cues that I'm pretty sure I'm reading wrong. I think the basic idea is that you want to be able to remind yourself about some important thing or moment in your life, and you're so sure that this thing is central to your existence that you want to put it on your body permanently as a constant reminder. I guess I get that, although I have to say that most of the time I associate tattoos with furtive and ultimately regrettable life choices. Signs are tricky beasts and interpretation slides around over time. That girfriend's name used to mean forever and now it means alimony. Sure, it might be too simplistic to make a TA2 Lexicon coffee-table book where trampstamps are decoded as "poor self-image" or bicep barbed-wire reads as "I think I'm a tough guy", but it might be an interesting exercise. (Please send me a link to such a book if it exists). But there's no denying the beauty of the impulse -- no matter how poorly realized -- that makes someone slap a wager on the table and say: hey, this image will matter to me for the rest of my life. I can at the very least salute that kind of sucker bet.

Not knowing any of the protocol around inquiries into things written on other people's bodies I just came right out and asked my baristo what his tattoo said. He had a visible block of written text on his forearm -- there was no way I could avoid seeing it -- and being a word guy, I was super curious. He humoured me and said it was a quote about art by the poet blah blanitz. There was no way I was going to ask him to spell out the poet's name as I was already breaking nine hipster laws already, so I squirrelled in my head a couple words of the visible text (hey, the text was oreinted to be read by someone facing the tattooee so this thing was begging to be asked about..) and the name blah blanitz.

When I got home to my trusty interwebs I started searching for this quote. After a couple hours of reading lists of poets and reading poems online I came across the name Stanley Kunitz and a little bell went ding.

And after reading a pile of his poems and essays and quotes, I think this is what was written on my baristo dude's arm:

"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life."

That might be a bit long for an arm now that I think about it, but it's a helluva quote. Maybe it was this one instead..

"I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world."

Of course my lame-square comeback in the dead air that stained the space left by his reply was something like: Yeah, I have a couple things that might matter enough to write on myself. Clunk. Sure that may be true but I'll probably keep writing these things down where I think they may actually change me. That is, on my brain with invisible ink.

In What Furnace Was Thy Brain?

2010-04-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the Masters in Augusta Tiger Woods played his first competitive golf since last November when details of a few destructive parts of his personal life boiled over into public discourse. Given the sustained and intense global interest in the "Tiger Sex Scandal" that last sentence may sound a bit like understatment right now, but give it a few years. At this semi-auspicious inflection point in Tiger's career his major corporate sponsor Nike provided its perspective on his personal situation in the form of a 30-second television spot.

When I first saw the ad on ESPN.com yesterday morning I was blown away by how perfect it was. I watched the ad several times to get it properly burned into my brain. But I was a bit confused over the course of the day, while Tiger joined a few of his better peers at the top of the leader board, that the reviews of this Nike ad came back from sports journalists and cultural commentators almost uniformly negative. What? And then I had lunch with Chris and Kurt, and they hated it too. Philistines!

I have been a long-time Tiger-hater for the usual reasons -- he's always come across in the media (and in the one chance I got to see him in person, AT+T Pro Am at PB) as completely manufactured and one-dimensional. He was trained as child to be a golfing machine and his only meaningful conversation he's had with the world has been with golf clubs in his hands. It doesn't help that this un-likeable automaton is on track to eclipse the glory of my childhood hero, Jack Nicklaus. But I've been glued to the steady deconstruction of the polished Tiger image, along with the rest of the world. I've perused the girlfriend text messages and voicemails, seen the computer simulations of Elin's rage and his early morning Escalade accident, follwed the renegotiations of the pre-nup, and chuckled at the hamfisted sympathy corralling machinations of Gloria Alldred. But through Tiger's handling of this crazy media frenzy I've started to see something that I think is at least partially human. Granted, he still looks to me like a control-freak, but one I can identify with. There's a man in there who is vulnerable, insecure, and who at bottom almost desperately wants to do the right thing while trying to untangle his own identy from that of his military father -- to the point of trashing the image his father made for him.

But what delighted me about the ad itself was its economy. With two sentences from Earl Woods ("Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are, and did you learn anything...") and a single slow-zoom shot of a chastened but attentive Tiger, Nike was able to tattoo a swoosh on several layers of heavy stuff. What layers? I guess there are at least three things specifically that delight me about this Nike ad, and why it felt to me like something as perfect as an iPhone:

1) Nike has understood from the beginning that they are not selling shoes. They are selling emotional connection to things at the center of humans. Specifically, they've focussed quite literally on selling "victory", which they've approached from all different angles -- from the self help "Just Do It" to the swooping dominance of Air Jordan, from sideways social victories like Mars Blackman to the scathing social commentary of their short-lived Mining for Gold spot to their self-mocking mastery of science and celebrity in their current "Real Story On Air". I like the fact that they are capable of being ambitious in their attempts to connect their products with big problems and ideas -- not always, but often they are looking for the source of cool, for authenticity. Of course they're doing all this so they can attach that moment to their products, but I think that the commercialization argument against their objects d'advertisment is bankrupt. People will pay for something that speaks to them -- the Sistine chapel or a U2 song. I have no problem connecting Nike's image building with the problem of Art, whether I buy their shoes or not -- although I have no more trouble owning their version of cool than I do in owning a U2 album or a poster of God and Adam playing handsies.

2) Not only does this ad talk to some of Nike's artistic pretensions, but it fires a flare over their beachhead in the great battle for the narrative soul of the media-aware world -- the battle where bloggers and commercial interests, from Murdoch to Nike, provide interesting and maybe necessary alternatives to the suspiciously synchronous duo of the press and the governement. Here's a clue -- find a mainstream columnist who likes this ad. I looked for a while but gave up. I think the fact that Tiger and Nike can dictate their story and land it broadly without belonging to the media club really irks most media-heads. Some are all French Theory in the their critiques. Some are missing what's going on by such a wide margin that it's weird and cringeworthy. And while my trusty beacons of media navigation are close to matching my admiration, I still felt like Colbert and Jimmy's responses are a couple degrees too conveniently safe and aimed at a fast-twitch audience that couldn't be bothered with the bigger picture. And that makes me a little sad (but I'm looking forward to the upcoming youtube trend of creative voiceovers for the Tiger stoneface ad, like the Hitler re-mix meme a couple years ago.. here's an early fave).

3) The most important happiness here for me is that I think I finally understand Tiger's public voice. No, it's not a warm, personable, humble Freddy Couples voice, or a stoic Arnie Palmer voice. It's a visually mythic demigod voice, the adversting literature version of his golf game. Pretend this isn't actually a Nike commercial but Tiger's public state-of-the-Tiger-union address. It's more eloquent by far than either his awkwardly staged press release or the furtive timed interviews he did with ESPN and Golf Channel a few weeks ago. Clearly this is how he understands himself, and how he wants to be understood -- mistakes are obstacles to be overcome, they are something you learn from. There's no direct apology, none needed. This is a learning moment. The presentation is almost flawless, machine sleek down to the artifically aged projection flashes near the end, the victory symbols glowing over his heart and his head. He's on a golf course, by the sea. There is a breeze. It could be a dream or a poem. He is part god and part man, presented by a disembodied warrior father and sponsored by the goddess of victory.

So the net effect of all this happiness is that I'm now a Tiger fan. Not a respectful fan, like my turns with Michael and Kobe, where their prowess met my love of basketball and forced me, almost logically, into admiration. I am now pulling for Tiger completely. I have no idea if his wife will take him back, or if other sponsors will ever chase him down again. That doesn't matter to me. Tiger represents the triumph of reflection and the forgiveness of a calm, attentive, learning posture in the face of adversity -- self-inflicted or otherwise. Tiger has always been different than other golfers, but I totally see it now. The burden of his difference, that heroic distance finally makes sense to me now, and he has become a romantic figure, like his Blakeian namesake, burning bright while the stars throw down their spears. I no longer pray for him to miss the cut. In fact, for this Masters I am not merely pulling for him to win the whole thing, I want him to win by thirty strokes.

Ski Weekend At Cornerstone Lodge

2010-03-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

For the last couple years we've done a little ski trip with the Mays, the Osters, and the Naden-Johns families where we stay at the Cornerstone Lodge in Leavenworth. That's right, all 16 of us in one house. It's as close as I'll get to having ten kids.

Here's what breakfast looked like on Saturday morning before the main ski day. Chris and Nat made waffles and scrambled eggs and a variety of fakebeast. The kids got the first shift. Here you can see Peter without his shirt, like a junior Taylor Lautner. Apparently when there was some concern the evening before with a den of wasps in some of the upstairs room a shirtless Peter heroically manned the swatter and vanquished a few.

After breakfast we got a pretty early start, for this crew anyway. Kurt and Emma and Sophie had 10a lessons and Jeremy and Chris and I thought we should go early too, so we were out of the house around 9ish. By 10a we were ready to ski -- I got some skis with birthday money from Ma and Pa last year, and I ended up with some very cool Kung Fujas (check the very bottom of Pep's K2 page..).

First off Chris and I and Peter and Niko scooted up Hogsback for our first pass of the day. We had a bit of sunshine and a couple inches of new snow -- perfect conditions.

Second run we picked up Jeremy after he'd dropped Phoebe and Gabe and I got a picture of Jeremy and Chris and the boys coming off the Skyline lift.

Since Jeremy and I only had the morning to do some "edge" skiing, we said goodbye to the Osters and took of up Seventh Heaven after we went up Skyline again. The upper lift is barely visible on the ridge of the mountain to the left. Thus began our black diamond adventures.

Here's a bit of a view from up there -- Jeremiah is one of the dots down below.

As we traversed around the front side and headed up the Big Chief face we could see back across to where we'd been skiing -- right up near the clouds on the mountain in the picture.

Here's a picture of Jeremy during a rare rest-break.

Right before lunch we booked it back to the lodge to pick up kids and took the shortest route -- right over this monster double black diamond run called "Double Black Diamond" for clarity. We'd been shredding black diamonds on the backside for the last couple hours and we were getting a bit weary. So we got some serious exercise.

Lunch was mayhem! Kim and Stephanie had arrived and took Lu and Maze off to their lessons people were coming and going. Soggy fries and chicken fingers were consumed. M and Ms were snarfed. Mostly I just laid in a fetal position and moaned and whispered to my legs.

After recovering at lunch we took off again for more runs, this time as a huge pack. While waiting for Kurt and Emma to pick up their checked boards I posed in front of the beast run -- that steepish looking white patch at the top above my head was Double Black Diamond.

After a run or two with the pack I decided to check on the girls for a bit. Here's Lu busting it down the hyperbunny hill.

And the girls making their way back up to the top the moving rubber mat called "The Magic Carpet".

After lessons Kim came and took Lu for the first bus ride home and Sophie joined Maze for a few trips on the Magic Carpet run. Seeing Sophie zip down the hill was a big inspiration to Maze and after a little break she said she was ready for a trip down the big bunny hill under the "Daisy" lift. Sweet!

So Sophie and I took Maizy on her first big chairlift ride. Woo hoo! I held Maze in with my ski poles since there was no safety bar. Maze did great, especially on the first part of the run before we hit traffic. The people schwooshing past made her a bit verklempt. But we got a lovely visitation from Kurt and Emma about halfway down.

After we got back to the lodge and got the gear all sorted Sophie asked me if Maizy had a sunburn on her face. Nope, I said, but you guys have the biggest rosy cheeks I've seen in a while.

Walking back to the car turned out to be something of a challenge -- people just couldn't stay on their feet! I also got some pictures of Kurt splayed on the ground but I'm keeping those in a safe place so I can blackmail him someday.

Back home we all sat in the hot tub or took showers. I think my body was glowing for a while, but I didn't turn out to be sore -- just pooped.

Book Review: THE ASCENT OF MONEY by Niall Ferguson

2010-03-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

At one point I tried to write a review about every book I had just read, but I've sorta fallen off that wagon. I'm not saying I'm back, but I do feel like I need to say a few happy words about this money book I finished yesterday.

THE ASCENT OF MONEY is short history of some basic concepts, like currency, banking, bonds, stocks, and insurance. Ferguson uses stories of loansharsking and the Rothchilds commercial banking network and market bubble dynamics to flesh out those ideas.

In the last third of the book he talks mainly about the complexities of global finance -- the first great age of globalization, before the first world war. And how that war led to the complexities of monetary protectionism and the next order of trade. Since pretty much all my exposure to global finance came from a youth spent reading conspiracy books on the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Illuminati, etc., of course my ears pricked up when he talked about the IMF and the World Bank, and he even had a section on economic hit men -- all topics that he treated pretty logically.

He saves his most interesting commentary mostly for the end of the book though -- in the Chimerica chapter and then his Afterword (called The Descent of Money, ha!). The way he lays out the current landscape for global finance puts the struggle between China and America for global dominance as the backdrop for all sorts of obvious trade and politcial issues, but also as this giant hidden boogeyman for more subtle dymanics, including the most recent global credit crisis. And with the kicker that he thinks that from his historical perspective it is inevitable that America and China will go to war. Soon. Wow, I say. Reading that last section I had the image in my head of the Babe Ruth "called shot" home run. This Ferguson dude -- who hinted pretty hard in this 2008 published book that he predicted important parts of the credit crisis -- has called the shot, let's see what happens.

I'm not really qualified to say much about how accurate this book is -- I don't read much current stuff on finance outside of Buffet and Soros bios and stray articles in the Journal. But what I liked were four things:

1) I liked his simple approach of attaching stories to the beginnings of basic financial instruments, and then pretty logically tying them together. What's the relationship between insurance and bonds? How is the idea of insurance related to the welfare state? To options? By thinking in fundamental terms I got some connections I never saw by skimming the papers.

2) I love the Rothschilds, which apparently he fetishizes as well. Birthday book hint: He has a 2 volume set of the history of the Rothschilds.. Sweet!

3) I appreciated his detached and tight treatment of Breton Woods and some of the global sit-down activities that get the conspiricy crowd hopping. Without blaming Ferguson for my interpretation I would say that for the first time these intentional cabalistic activities had motivations that made sense to me -- the rich want to get richer and without free trade it's hard to make a killing..

4) I admire someone who's willing to take their academic theories and make a call -- war with China! Of course it may be a stunt to sell books, but I like stunts. And it certainly gives me a hook for reading current stuff.

At any rate, I thought this book was very engrossing read and it has pushed me in a couple research directions (maybe even -- gasp! -- back to TRAGEDY AND HOPE..) which is definitely my indicator of high engagement.

Three Kinds Of People

2010-03-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

I have no idea why this nonsense delights me so much. I was doing a little research on Norwegian bands this morning and I thought I'd have a nostalgic look back at one of my favourite acts from 2005, the band Hurra Torpedo and their absolutely inspired cover of the song Bonnie Tyler made famous, Total Eclipse of The Heart.

This song never fails to make me feel a very intense melancholy. Maybe it's the kitchy lyrics delivered deadpan by Vikings. Or maybe its the fact that in the degradation and destruction of their musical instruments these guys provide their performance with its own fragile, unique beauty. Or maybe its the blue Adidas track suits.

If you ever had any questions about Hurra Torpedo's dedication to their craft then you should need to see this short documentary that I discovered this morning -- from 2006 -- about their religious devotion to abandoned household appliances.

The mayor of "Howardville" is clearly working on a bigger scale.. And yes, the fact that I like these guys so much clearly puts me in that third category of people.

2009 Heavy Rotation

2010-02-22T00:09:00.000-08:00

All my posts have been late this year, but my New Year's resolution is to have my 2010 Heavy Rotation list out by the end of Decmeber this year.. Let's see how I do on that.

So what is a Heavy Rotation list? This is the list of songs in the last year that I've listened to *a lot*. They are songs that I inflict regularly on friends and family, songs that I will obsess about for some reason, and most of them have stories or lines in them that I can't forget. They're songs that mean something to me, songs that have hunted me down, or befriended me, or laid me out Nick Cave style with a punch to the heart.

Because I'm generally a pretty slow dude, my metabolic rate for owning -- in the spiritual sense -- new music is glacial and my music diet isn't completely new material. However, I make up for my slowness with a sort of teutonic investigative thoroughness and I end up interrogating this music, for listmaking purposes especially, with questions like "will I still admire you in 10 years?" and "why did I care about you this year?" Some stuff falls out of this process, but any omissions will get corrected next year if I made a serious mistake..

So here's my 2009 list of top tunes in roughly chronological order of when I was listening to them the most:

1. The Comeback / Shout Out Louds (Howl Howl Gaff Gaff 2005) -- Coming into 2009 I had a lot of momentum with the Shouts (see my Normandie post) so I started mining some of their older stuff. This was very much an inspirational song for marathon training, especially if I droppd a day.. And I loved the quirkiness of the video -- linked in title.

2. Asleep On A Sixpence / Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan (Sunday At Dirt Devil 2008) -- I've been consistently returning to the two albums by this pair in the last few years. Campbell's writing really gets to me, especially the religious imagery. And she tends to be too sweet by herself, but grounded by Lanegan the pair is solid. This song for me has been very much a goodbye song, and another song abour re-invention and following your own stars..

3. Jesus Of The Moon / Nick Cave (Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! 2008) -- Yes, another moving on song.. Last February that was a major theme from work craziness. This is probably a perfect song IMO, compact, allusive, sweet. I've listened to it over and over.. This is where the punch in the heart line comes from.

4. In A Little While / U2 (All That You Can't Leave Behind 2000) -- I'm not sure I've been that wild about U2 in the last decade, but for some reason when I was organizing my CDs last winter I gave Leave Behind another listen. This song completely hooked me, although the rest of the album stayed pretty meh. This song was one of the main reasons I recently bought a guitar, finally.

5. Beach Baby / Bon Iver (Blood Bank 2009) -- I really liked For Emma last year and when Blood Bank came out I loved this little song almost right away. The "tongue in my ear on the beach" lyric works in about 10 ways for me, not the least is that it reminds me of the "midge" lines in that crushing B+S song Another Sunny Day.. And you gotta like the schwing video, old dude sledding.

6. Falling Down / Scarlett Johansson (Anywhere I Lay My Head 2008) -- I let the critical bashing from 2008 die down before I approached this project quietly last year. I discovered that I can't listen to this whole album in one go, but then again, as much as I adore Tom Waits I can't really end-to-end *any* of his albums, even the stupendous Bone Machine. This song popped for me and got a bunch of play.. I do like the baroque production values (thanks Sitek!) and the blurry video. Someday I'll do my own album of Tom Waits covers.

7. One Hundred Million Years / M Ward (Hold Time 2009) -- I think I may have heard some stray She and Him plus some other collaboration work -- whatever it was, the name M Ward kept popping up in interesting places. Once I got Hold Time I was completely hooked and this song had to beat out Absolute Beginners and Hold Time for rotation cycles.. And I don't feel like I've started figuring out this album, which makes me happy.

8. Trapeze Swinger / Iron and Wine (Around The Well 2009) -- I first heard this song when Kim and I went to see the movie IN GOOD COMPANY about five years ago. We went partially because I was already a huge Sam Beam fan and I had read he had a new song in the movie. And of course I went straight out and bought the soundtrack to get this song, but that was the only place the song was published. Until the double B-sides album Around The Well came out last year. Oy vey, what an incredible collection. Like the Belle and Sebastian Push Barman etc. double B-side collection -- great great stuff. But this song is maybe my favourite song of all time, seriously. Ten minutes of intense religious and personal poetry, angels and grafitti and the walls around heaven and missed chances. This is what I listen to when I have to do my commute between 1a and 4a -- it only takes that long at that time of the morning, and I'm already clear and happy from being the only person alive in the world.

9. Bruises / Chairlift (Does You Inspire You 2009) -- OK, not in the same category as either M Ward or Sam Beam, but this song was good for summer and reminding me to not take being old so seriously. It almost got beat out of this slot by a pure guilty pleasure Cobra Starship's Hot Mess, but I suspect I won't really like Hot Mess in a year or two where I can see Bruises sticking around a little longer.

10. L'Illusioniste / Keren Ann (Le Disparition 2002) -- Sometimes I end up looking for something to fill a mood and I rediscover something from my music collection that ends up getting stuck in my car CD player for months. Karen Ann gets me to dreamy melancholy without any heavy aftertaste like nobody else.. And even though Au Coin Du Monde also makes me happy (and is more famous..) I like the idea of familiarity with angels in L'Illusioniste..

11. Waitin' For A Superman / Iron and Wine (Around The Well 2009) -- From my summer listening to Sam's new B-sides collection (see #8 above) there were a bunch of new songs I'd never heard before, and this was the king of that category. This is really a cover of the Flaming Lips song (Sam covers well -- think: Such Great Heights) but he owns it. And about when my summer was getting about as heavy as it could be, there was this.

12. Come Monday Night / God Help The Girl (God Help The Girl 2009) -- I've been tracking this Stuart Murdoch pet project for a while and got the CD pre-ordered, of course. I love the simplicity, femininity and cheekiness of the whole album, and while its hard to pick just one song from the narrative, Come Monday Night represents pretty well..

13. Furr / Blitzen Trapper (Furr 2008) -- I had lunch with my friend Chris who actually listens to way more exellent music than I do and in his list of recommendations he mentioned that in last year's best-of collections (i.e. 2008) there was a song by a newish Portland band that I might actually like. Turned out "like" was a bit of an understatement. I had been feeling a bit Furr-y for a while and by naming "the ancient distant flow" this song put lyrics all over me.

14. When The Night Comes / Dan Auerbach (Keep It Hid 2009) -- I think I bought this album becuase I heard Whispered Words on WOXY but then after the CD arrived I couldn't remember why I had purchased it. Some people are so stupid they shouldn't be allowed to have money. But then on my trip to Oregon to hike around Hood with Bradley I forced myself to listen to a pile of CDs that I had randomly bought but never heard. I haven't taken this one out of my car since then and this album has become my night driving CD with this song anchoring any pass I make through this collection. Yes, this was my backdoor intro to The Black Keys.

15. Blue Headlights / Shout Out Louds (Our Ill Wills 2007) -- I spent all year with the Shouts in my head. This song surfaced as a major favourite -- yeah, its a bit corny with the see-through scarring, but that doesn't stop me from loving this melancholy little story.

16. Another Saturday / Stuart Murdoch (Dark Was The Night 2009) -- I wasn't surprised that the Dark Was The Night was such a grab bag of whatever and practically un-listenable, especially end-to-end. But I wasn't disappointed with Stuart's contribution, and this became a Sabbath song for me.

17. It Ends With A Fall / Okkervil River (Down The River Of Golden Dreams 2003) -- I'm a major sucker for this kind of folk-emo stuff -- it's like next generation R.E.M. It puts me in the same mental space as when I listen to Matt Pond PA or Rilo Kiley, which almost made this list too..

18. Boat Behind / The Kings Of Convenience (Declaration Of Dependence 2009) -- This album snuck up on me. I didn't actually get it until I saw it recommended for me on Amazon. Click! I've loved these lispy vikings for ever. Although I have to say, I've only been smitten by the first two songs on this CD, especially this one where the video captures some of my own fond memories of Scandinavia (actually this moment reminds me of my feverdreams in Gothenberg, and not so much my travels in Norway, but those countries all blur for me.. give this to me).

19. Jacqueline / Alabama 3 (Jacqueline - single 2009) -- I think I check the Alabama 3 web site at least once a week. If I lived in London I think my poor wife would be dragging me out of some very seedy places because I'd be surfing Time Out and trying to snag live shows of these guys. One of my all-time favourite bands, and this is the single from their upcoming Revolver Soul album, but I haven't seen a release date yet besides some vague mumbling about "spring". Harumpf. Been making do just fine so far with Jacqueline though.

20. City Is Exploding / Zoey van Goey (The Cage Was Unlocked All Along 2009) -- Of all the music I've found this year that has made me very happy, I think ZvG has had the most play. I'm down to four or five tracks on their debut album that came out this fall -- where "down to four or five" means I'm having a hard time pulling one of those tracks out above the rest. But I guess if I had to chose, City Is Exploding wins out over The Best Treasure Stays Buried, Foxtrot Vandals (originally produced by Stuart, of course!), and Sweethearts in Disguise. But the rest are stupendous too. Sigh.

Lucy's Birthday

2010-02-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

Note: Events in this post took place between December 17 through 22.

Goerlitz family birthdays are not so much about a particular day but a series of events that create a multi-day birthday experience. Rather than post on every single event, especially since I'm in holiday archival mode, I'll just post once on the whole extravaganza.

Things got kicked off a day early with the arrival of "The Bed" as part of a furniture upgrade to Lulu's room that Grandma and Grandpa helped to fund. The bed was so large and so much anticipated that Daddy relented on his ironfisted rules on early celebration by building the bed on the birthday eve.

Here's Lu all snuggled in, a huge grin on her face. Finally at six years old she's entering big-girl world. Finally.

The next day, after school and all her Superstar work, we had a small family celebration with presents and everything. Of course Maze as our family master of ceremonies wanted to help out. Beatrice too.

Here Lu is opening one of her many books -- My Father's Dragon, which quickly became one of our favourites (we read a chapter every night and discuss!).

After presents we asked Lu where she wanted to go for her birthday supper. Rubys, of course.

One of the great disadvantages to having a holiday birthday is that your speciallness gets drowned out in all the other hoopla. But one of the advantages is that there are plenty more opportunities to piggyback your celebration on the adjacent holiday -- in this case Lu wanted a "birthday ride" on the Christmas train. Birthday girl gets what she wants.

Here she is having the time of her life. We were trapped inside of some kind of trailer with bars and plastic wrapped around so that we could barely see out. But the gauzy view and smeared lights made our over-familiar Redmond Town Center seem exotic and magical somehow.

When we got home Lu dressed up in some of her new present outfits. Here the policewoman came storming in my office and gave me a citation for "slinking to the office." I was sentenced to tickling.

The next day we had our regular BI gathering at the Mays house and a Lucy celebration was on the agenda with Gabe and Phoebe and Peter and Niko and Sophie and Emma. While the rest of us had birthday pie, Lulu got candles in her cupcakes and a song.

But the main party didn't happen until a few days later at..

Pump It Up!!!

Here you can see a bunch of the kids from among the usual suspects in our neighborhood and school: Maddy and Megan, Maze and Lu, Abbey and Colin, and David.

Much leaping and cavorting took place. Here is Abbey making a heroic dive for the high flag on the jumping Matterhorn. I tried on that one but my weight to strength ratio wasn't working too well for me.

Here Lulu is pursuing one of her talents -- air hockey -- with Megan.

After all the running around it was time to settle down for some serious business. Yet another gluten-free dairy-free and soy-free birthday cupcake. With six candles.

And finally a throne for opening presents. Although in this case Lucy is the minor ruler of her own birthday with Maizy as the regent. A lovely, benevolent regent.

Welcome to six Lulu!!

Superstars: Lulu and Mrs. Segal

2010-02-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

Note: Events in this post took place on December 18.

Lucy started kindergarten this year and the consensus was that the best fit for her learning and social profile was an extra-help program at the Laura Ingalls Wilder school down the road. I run past this school every time I go longer than 10k on my runs so I know that it's pretty much precisely 3.6 miles from our house.

But Lulu had such a great first half of the year that we felt like she was ready for the more mainstream program at Rosa Parks, which is closer (0.2 miles!) and which is where big sister Maze attends 3rd grade.

That said, we all *loved* Lucy's Wlider kindergarten teacher Mrs. Segal so saying goodbye was very very hard.

Lu's last day happened to be her own birthday -- December 18 -- and the culmination of her "Superstar" week. To close out Superstar festivities she gave a presentation on herself (pictured above).

After the slide show Lu got to have her family up front (that's Kim's knee in the right bottom) and have them explain what they do. Then she directed the Q + A session.

As all the other kids were leaving Daddy got to hug the superstar and the strenuously ignored and underappreciated sister-of-the-superstar.

Here's our goodbye to the truly exceptional Mrs. Segal. Everyone was crying except Lulu.

Coffey Christmas: Part 3

2010-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

Note: The next dozen posts or so represent the purging of the holiday picture backlog, so it may be a week or two until this blog is back to semi-realtime.. The "Coffey Christmas" series is from the weekend of DEC 11-13. That would be back in 2009. I think.

Sunday morning Maze and I were up early again.

There had been several inches of snow from the day before and it snowed a bit more that night. The Quail had moved in and taken over the base of the bird feeder. The sparrowy-finchy birds seemed to have figured out how the feeder worked at this point, so everyone was happy.

Here's a view of the roads on Sunday morning -- we are following Alan and Sher and Seth on our way to Clarette's for breakfast. We packed and planned to leave earlyish to make sure we did the pass in daylight. I love the snow. And the comfortable nearness of the sky.

This breakfast still-life is too interesting to not include here, even though you'll see much much more of it in the CNN breaking story analysis once Sher and Kim are officially suspects in my murder.

It looks like Aunty Sher is having some kind of melancholy revelation where she's running down a list of mental bullet points that lead to a regrettable but unchangeable conclusion. Kim is caught mid-bite and is winding up to tell me that I shouldn't even contemplate taking this picture. And Lu is taking a little bite from a stolen, invisible carrot.

Breakfast was very lovely, and how Sher got us a seat immediately even though there was a lobby full of people I'll probably never know. I asked her and she wouldn't tell me.

Alan and Sethie B holding it down Walla Walla style.

When the girls came back from getting freshened up (what a great euphemism, eh? Just think for a minute about the alternatives and you get a real appreciation for that hard working little turn of phrase) we all did our hugs and kisses and the Goerlitzen hit the road.

And what a lovely road it was, as empty as the atmosphere. Not far out of Walla Wall we saw the snow diminsh until by Prosser there was hardly any.

And the pass was mostly slushy, and by North Bend (pictured) where we stopped to pick up Beatrice it was all rainy. I was a bit sad because we have these superstud tires on our Volvo SUV so we can drive up frozen telephone poles -- I like to drive a bit in impossible or somewhat possible road conditions at least once a year.

This was the longest Christmas season we've ever had -- Christmas ended in late January with the arrival of Gradma and Grandpa! -- but our Coffey Christmas was a very happy start.

Coffey Christmas: Part 2

2010-01-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning Maze and I were the first up. Since this was kind of a "Christmas Morning" we were hoping it would snow. The clouds were close to the ground and really trying hard..

Eventually it started dusting a bit. Here's a picture of the birdfeeder as the snow started. I think this was a newish birdfeeder because the birds -- which you can barely see there on the ground -- hadn't figured out where they were supposed to be eating. Apparently whoever loaded the feeder had spilled enough on the ground to slow down the learning process.

Maze became a scholar of the presents. She figured out which ones were for whom, and memorized their locations. She tried to guess at some of the more oddly shaped boxes. Usually I would catch her staring at presents for herself attempting to picture what was inside. She does all of this without making a peep, like some kind of curious ghost.

One of Seth's areas of great expertise is Line Rider -- a three-dimensional (where depth is replaced by time) art format with a basic physics engine and a fixed point of view character named Bosh. Seth's pretty good at it and participates in the Line Rider culture -- posting tracks set to music on youtube. Here he's giving Lulu a guided tour of one of his creations.

After a delicious and somewhat largish brunch, a collection of people not including me went out into the snow (you can see some in the window outside..) for a walk. I took a nap! I woke to find the girls hunkered down over art projects.

The consensus was the we should wait until sundown to open the presents, in the fine SDA tradition for Christmases that fall on a Saturday. And for our border-crossing into the secular we did a little Christmas caroling, including a somewhat original arrangement of Hark The Herald Angels Sing to the tune of Deck the Halls. Ha! Seth broke out the trumpet and accompanied us..

Not everyone was a huge trumpet fan. But after the joyful noise subsided we were able to lure Lulu back with presents.

As the resident present-scholar Maze got to be Santa. Here she is opening the cermonial "first present".

And then it was mayhem!!! Here I am opening a tiny present with a big bang inside..

The girls got tons of cool things, including some musical coordination-bashing games that we played later in the evening. Before long the last present had been torn-into and everyone had settled into the books and toys that carried them off into the warm and shiny-commercial heart of Christmas.

Where Was I?

2010-01-28T09:27:00.000-08:00

After a lengthy Christmas-induced bloggus interuptus, I think I'm back. We'll see. Above is the schedule that proves I have time budgeted to actually do this, so there. I have a couple holiday posts queued up to start tomorrow, as well as some completely invented random things (JJ? Awesome?) and a 2009 Heavy Rotation music list. Hold your breath.

Coffey Christmas: Part 1

2009-12-19T11:39:00.000-08:00

This year the Goerlitz Jr. family is spending Christmas day with Tibi and Lee in California, but before we head down we planned to do a little pre-celebrating with Alan and Sher and Seth Benjamin.

I still had a little work to do on Friday afternoon, so Kim offered to drive. At first it seemed like a good idea..

Here she is giving some poor driver the kiss-kiss sign. I only just looked up and didn't see what happened but she sometimes does this when she runs some other car into an embankment or off into a ditch. Then she says, "Out of the way daaahhling. I finish you.."

Lu had a dreamy afternoon ride, thinking about school and bat-cake and how to avoid being seen by the moon.

Maze spent much of her ride trying to find a comfortable position. Here she's listing a bit to starboard. Snoopy seems to be napping just fine with that goofy grin on his face.

I love the drive across Washington State. Here are some of the hills outside of Ellensburg later in the afternoon.

And more hills from the "three passes" between Ellensburg and Yakima.

It was dark by the time we finally arrived and Sher had supper ready. Haystacks with real Frito scoopy chips and everything. And Hawiian punch. Comfort food.

After supper we all settled around the fire.

While most of us relaxed, Sher did some ornament hanging. Apparently putting ornaments on a Christmas tree is a very narrative process becuase we were treated to stories about the ornaments as they went up. Ma and Aunty M figured heavily in these histories. There was even a pickle ornament, which is some made-up tradition about German families hiding this little green glass pickle in the tree so that the clever child that finds it will be especially praised and rewarded. Apparently this helps separate the bright children from the dull children, casting a competitive pall over the festivities -- it's important for German families to keep a lid on the warmth and good cheer. At any rate, the whole thing is supposedly apochryphal, which doesn't make it any less potent and deligthful. I read about it here. I like the fact that The German Christmas Pickle story is German Myth 11. Hey dumkopf, keep those myths in a nice list for orderly recitation, ja?

Maze took some quiet time with Snoopy. This is the same Snoopy she rescued from my memorabilia box in the garage a few months ago. At that point he had lost his ears so she got some fabric and begged me to make him new ears. Which I did, since I'm a better seamstress than Stephanie. This was my old Snoopy as a kid and sometimes before bed I will tell Maze stories about some of my old adventures with Snoopy. We've agreed that if either Maze or I ever has to go the hospital, Snoopy will come with. Snoppy's still missing a nose, but we'll find one for him someday.

Here's Seth taking some time off from torturing his dear friend Bosh..

And Lulu found a happy place to snuggle before it was time for bath and bed.

iPhone Adventures: Free Books App

2009-12-14T23:17:00.000-08:00

I have this super-secret theory that you can tell someone's deepest failing from simply knowing what it is that they do for a living. As the theory goes, a person will tend to dedicate time and energy to compensating for a weakness, and that time and energy will often translate into a professional career. I don't think that it's always as simple as the logical chain of 1) wimpy guy is afraid of getting beat up, 2) he goes and works out a lot and gets huge, then 3) ends up becoming a professional wrestler. But I suspect in a lot of cases it's closer than most people want to admit.

In my case it's pretty obvious -- I tend to gravitate toward writing and technology career choices because I'm pretty terrible at organizing and articulating myself, especially in real-time. And technology generally gives me the heebie-jeebies -- in fact I think it's pretty much evil.

Exhibit A -- freebooksapp.com, and of course the iPhone app in the AppStore for $1.99. I think I may actually buy this app just to get the tattoo-of-eternal-damnation on my soul over and done with, but I'm still struggling. I'm so torn about it that I'm kind of quivering. Why?

Have you seen these books they have on this application? Plato, and Shakespeare, and Pliny the Younger and Abraham Lincoln. All great stuff, yeah? Sure you can't get anything that has anything close to a copyright, but 98% of the best stuff is older than a hundred years anyway so I have no problem there.

The problem is that books aren't *content*. That is, a book isn't just a bag of ideas that can be diced and spit out real-time into whatever format is most convenient. A book is the object that contains those ideas. And that object has it's own very important value:

1) Physically a book has weight and sensory momentum. Some books smell like college, or Morocco, or coffee, and they bring me back to where I was or what I was doing when I engaged them. My bookshelves at home are organized like dog barf, but I have no trouble finding most of my books quickly by sight or sometimes by touch. I don't even read most of my books -- I think I now have more books than I'll ever read in two lifetimes, especially at my glacial pace. But that doesn't stop me from loving each of my books and having a friendship, or at the very least a cordial acquaintance with every single one. Or from wanting more.

2) The layout of a book provides a fixed frame of visual reference on which to hang the encounter with an author and their ideas. Much of what I remember from books I can see as places on a page, the break of lines and the flow of type. An iPhone app can't do that for me. Even with "original page numbers" included, the sense of place in a book is majorly compromised. Assuming I could remember the settings for a book I read and was able to look things up by location, I still would have a hard time pointing someone else to the same location. Maybe with text search the need to direct people around a textual space with physical cues becomes useless, but it seems less memorious somehow.

3) Which brings me to versions. I suppose at some point there will be eReaders and iPhone apps that will be able to provide me with massive amounts of metadata on the particular version of the book I'm reading. They may be able to show me all the editions and translations, or even let me pick a particular copy of a book (William Shakespeare's hand-annotated copy of Heroditus, for example). Someday. This app doesn't do that. This app makes word-sausages that as near as I can tell are completely opaque to edition, translation, publisher -- things you need to know before you start to develop a relationship with the book itself.

Hmmm.. There are obviously some huge plusses, though. Carrying around 23,000+ books. Holy cow! Searchabliity into and across books? Cool! And some of these books are a bit hard to find -- I did a very cursory look at the catalog and there are some weird books in there. In fact, the craziness of the selection is quite attractive to me and I may use this unholy app to help me navigate the world of real books.

Ach, I feel myself slipping..

Seattle Half 2009

2009-12-13T08:37:00.000-08:00

Last year I ran my first longish race -- the Seattle Half-Marathon. My intent for the last couple years has been to run the full marathon, but since my training seems to consistently get interrupted with sickness and chronic sloth (see last year's story here) I vowed to come back and do the full marathon this year. The Portland Marathon that I ran in October was supposed to be a warm up for running the somewhat harder Seattle Marathon this year.

Harumpf. Somewhere in Hawaii I made the decision that I'd had quite enough triumph for one year and I'd rather eat lots of fun food and lay around than force myself to run another marathon right away. I had already been struggling with my schedule by late October. My only time to do long runs is between 5a and 8a in the morning, before work, and running that long in the dark and rain and wind every few days was beyond my feeble capacity for discipline this year, sadly.

But I did feel like if I ran the Seattle half again it would angrify me -- like it did last year -- and set me up for another decent training and racing season in 2010. And the 13-mile distance for some reason has always seemed like something I could do no matter what condition I'm in.

Of all the people who vowed last year that they'd run some part of the Seattle marathon with me in 2009, Chris was the only one I knew who had queitly been doing the training to actually make a go of it. We ended up hooking up on Saturday before the race pick up our packets at the Westin. I wasn't think that we'd actually run together, especially when I saw that he was planning on running 10 minute miles. In my low-training state I projected something more like 11 minute miles, since my marathon two months earlier had been almost 11:30s and last year's half I ran 11:30s. I was even a little nervous about doing 11s..

The night before the race we spent on a family sleep-over at the NJs where Sophie and Maizy and Lucy provided a spectacular and comprehensive dramatic production to cap off our evening. To get over to the city in time for my 7:30a, however, I needed to get an early ferry which meant earlyish bed which cut the evening a little short.

Kurt kindly offered to give me a ride in the morning and the night before he helped me rig up several alarms to make sure I'd be up in time. Here he is saying goodbye and good luck to me at 5a.

The crossing was uneventful but Chris showed up a bit earlier than I expected on the other side so he caught me wolfing down my plastic breakfast in McDonalds with the assortment of street-people that nurse their pre-dawn three hour cups of coffee. Chris found parking near the start area and we changed and hydrated and even managed a potty excursion complete with a 20 minute porta-potty line wait.

When the starting gun went off we were lined up in the vicinity of the 2:30 pace flag. We had a bit of a delay at the start because we didn't realize that we were standing behind spectator baracades. So we did a little pushing and scrambling and managed to cross the starting line about 5 minutes after the official clock started.

The first few miles were great. I love the crush of running with several thousand people, especially through the middle of a city. Somewhere between mile two and three the course passes Qwest Field and goes up the on-ramp to I-90 -- the birthplace of I-90. It took about this long to break free from the packs of people, but our pace wasn't too bad -- about 10:45ish.

We took it pretty easy for the first 6 or 7 miles. I had built-up the THE HILL between mile 8 and 10 as this monster and I think I even scared Chris a little. I just remember feeling bonkish last year at the end of it and realizing that I hadn't managed my food and water properly, so I wanted to make sure I had enough energy this time.

The night before Ma and Pa stayed at our house on the way back from seeing Alan and Sher down in Cannon Beach. They planned to come over and spectate a bit on Sunday before heading back to the island. Sure enough, somewhere around mile 8 I saw Ma by the side of the road. I think I saw her before she saw me. Pa missed me because he was parking the car! At any rate, I think that's Chris's arm you see to my right -- we were still cruising along at 10:45ish pace.

When we got to THE HILL, however, I started slowing down and Chris was ready to burn on ahead. So we said our goodbyes. I think the steepest part of the hill is on Madison and he cooked up that thing, and I think he pretty much disappeared as we entered the park in mile 9 somewhere.

I had a little epiphany after Chris was long gone. I wasn't tired or really pushing myself, in fact I was running very conservatively. And then it kind of hit me and I said to myself: Dude, what are you saving it for? This is a race! So I just kicked it.

Somewhere before the top of the hill I managed to find Chris again. I think I surprised him a bit -- I think he'd given me up for dead. But I was ready to burn and we made good time the rest of the way. His foot was giving him trouble but he gritted it out and I think it made him go a little slower down hills. I would run ahead down hills knowing that he would be able to catch up with the Chunky Love Train on the uphill part.

And there we are crossing the finish line together. It turns out that we ran a couple of sub-9 min miles at the end there because we ended up averaging around 10 min miles altogether. Which is what Chris was hoping to do in the first place. I was pretty happy and a bit surprised, but Chris wasn't impressed and he said that he still thinks I'm the biggest sandbagger ever. Yeah, right.

Here we are in the "Finish Area" or the "Victory Area", depending on how you felt about the run. Those blankets are surprisingly nice.

My girls had managed a pretty early ferry too but they were there for the grand finish. Lulu is wearing my finisher's medal.

Nat and the boys came out to see Chris finish too. Nat's the only real runner in our group but I think she got injured and can't race anymore.

So after standing around for a few minutes we decided to head inside to find the mythical "finisher's shirts". Apparently this year everyone gets a participant shirt, but finishers shirts are extra.

While standing around the finishers shirt table, Kim and Pa started trash talking each other. The woofing quickly escalated into vows. This is proof that they are both going to run the Seattle half-marathon next year.

After the finisher's shirt faldera our next priority was food. Here we are headed back to the cars. At this point I'm looking forward to putting on dry clothes and having a big breakfast with Ma and Pa at Cafe Flora. And I'm already trying to figure out if I will ever run a full marathon at the end of November.

Das iPhone, Part Deux

2009-12-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, hell froze over. I bought an iPhone. Again. And look at that nice Reg Mombassa wallpaper.

If I would have been actively blogging this spring you would have been treated to the saga of me getting my first iPhone. The bones of the story are:

a) I sat on the fence for about 9 months even after heavy lobbying from Gianluca and a collection of iPhone people who loved to cooldemo their fave eye-candy apps that they only use to show off their phone.

b) I think the last straw was a supper with Webster (in April?) where he dazzled me with tales of programming riches if I would port an old-school 2-D scrolling shooter -- I think it was the Choplifter-esque Armor Alley -- to the iPhone.. Of course I would have done Lode Runner first, but I thought I should get a first-hand look at the platform.

c) So I bought a 16gb 3G black iPhone at my local AT+T store.

d) I was ga-ga happy for about 2 weeks before I started finding scenarios where I hated the phone. It just felt controlling and over-designed, and I felt like it was mocking me. My canonical failure was the "driving my stick-shift in the rain looking for a meeting location and typing the I'm-late mail at the same time with a non-tactile keyboard". Plus the Office apps aren't on iPhone so the mail/calendar/tasks productivity experience is different -- and I hate having two apps for the same thing..

e) So I engineered a trade with Sher -- she gave me a Thule roof rack for my phone straight up.

f) My old Windows phone was a bit buggy -- an old Motorola Q -- so I decided to buy the cool Nokia 71x. That was great for a while, but the Office apps thing sucked even worse than iPhone and there weren't any good rush-hour games.

g) The productivity stuff drove me back to my old Moto Q for many months..

Until Hawaii. Two things happened in Hawaii that pushed me over the edge toward buying another iPhone: 1) I had just purchased an iPhone for Kim before the trip and her experience was soooo awesome that it was contagious -- she was using it as a GPS, the browser experience was great, the games were cool, email was fun, blah blah blah. Plus, Jeremiah and Teffie had iPhones too, and the music and fun and dancing between the three of them was unbearable. And then 2) I went diving and forgot that my Moto Q was in my jams pocket. Ooops. Brick! Talk about a sign from God.

So, a couple weeks ago I went out and got myself a new iPhone. I decided to take a completely different approach, modeled on Kim's usage patterns -- the approach was: conform to the phone don't try and make it conform to you. Life lesson #243.

That's a hard one for me and we'll see how this pans out in the long run. I did actually purchase a couple apps at the app store (Tetris! Bejeweled 2!) and I've accepted the less than perfect mail situation in the short term so I'm well past the 2-week itch. At any rate, I'll keep you posted and ping me if you have any app recommendations.

Bringing In The Trees

2009-12-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the day the Goerlitz family goes and forages for a Christmas tree. Over the years we've patronized several of these "tree lots" that spring up around town, but last year we went with the Osters out to the U-Cut farm they discovered a couple years back. It was such a happy little event that we all did it again this year.

I have a new iPhone (there will definitely be an upcoming post on that!) and late afternoon sun on the drive to Fall City made me very happy so I took a bunch of pictures with my phone. Our destination is roughly those far hills you can see in the distance.

This tree farm has developed into quite the operation. They have a pretty decent sized parking lot and cluster of buildings. The main office, in what probably used to be a farm house of some kind, is a gift store full of Christmas nonsesne. The cookies are good though.

There's something cool about 20 saws in one place. Not exactly menacing, but not exactly friendly either. Maybe it just looks like communal work.

Here we are starting our quest for the perfect tree. Lu's holding the saw for a minute while I get some pictures. Behind Maze and Luly you can see Kim and Nat and Chris and Niko. Peter is up with me in the advance team.

For some reason we gravitate to the Noble Fir section most years. I think it's because there's less choppage on the branches to make them conform to the proper conical shape. And maybe the color too, which is a little dustier.

We hiked pretty deep into the lot and Maze saw our tree first. After a bit more searching we circled back and Daddy started the sawing while Mommy held the tree.

Twenty seconds later we were free.

Its was only an 8 foot tree so I opted to do the solo carry out to the little service road. Carrying trees is an important part of a well rounded Canadian education. That and snow-ball fighting. And skating, which I flunked.

Here's the little ATV with a trailer that the dude uses to carry the trees back to get wrapped -- it's like a tree valet service. Hugely civilized.

Now for the best part, the hot drinks! There's a little drink hut beside the gift shop where they have some free cider and hot chocolate and some cider and hot chocolate that you can pay for. It's like an IQ test. Of course we failed. But when you pay for the hot chocolate you get whip cream..

Hot drinks by the fire after those gruelilng 30 seconds of real, honest manual labour. Ahhh..

Here is Chris's proof that he's not just a white collar worker with soft pink hands. I don't know what he was doing to get this messy -- my best guess is that he gave the tree a backrub before he chopped it down.

The Oster boys having their drinks. I think someone in their family actually passed the IQ test.

After throwing the trees on top the SUVs it was time to descend back into the madness of the city and the suburbs. Until next year.

Obession Update: The Shouts at QFC

2009-11-30T00:41:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how closely you all are tracking my many obsessions, but one that I wrote about a little last year was a Swedish band the Shout Out Louds. I even did a second post about one of their songs I really liked.

So I've been checking for their next tour dates or news about their next album "Work", which is due out next year, and guess what I discovered?

Where do you think this picture was taken? If you said "downtown Woodinville, WA" I think you would be correct. Holy cow!

To record their upcoming album they spent some time with producer Phil Ek at his studio in Woodinville, which is just a few miles from we live. You can read more about it on their site.

I've been looking for a glimpse of these people all over the world and they've probably been shopping for mangoes at the QFC right next to me. See, it pays to be nice to everyone you meet -- you never know. That lady buying cream cheese on aisle four could be a homeless lady or the Queen of Tonga (yes, I saw Abe Markowietz in the USC game this weekend..) or Bebban from the Shouts. Wow.

Here's a small video of their recording session down the road..

Thanksgiving

2009-11-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Life is very hard when you come back from a holiday only to be dumped into another holiday against your will. Our return from Hawaii coincided with the start of Thanksgiving, and since we had just come back from travelling and had to be around for the weekend's running events (more on that later) we couldn't really travel to be in Cannon Beach or Pebble Beach with our families.

Who else was in the same situation? The Mays, of course! Somehow on Wednesday we figured this out, after sleeping off the red-eye and planned to "do lunch" on Thursday.

By the time the Goerlitz contingent made to Chateaux Mays it was about noon. There was a lovely fire going and the kids picked up where they left off in Hawaii a few days before. Here you can see Pheobe and Maze doing the Charleston Cha Cha while Lu devlishly strums a pink guitar and Gabe broods with a broadsword in the corner..

In the kitchen things were pretty casual. This was all about finding a relaxed way to make a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. I like to think of it as making love out of nothing at all.

Here I am at work on some stuffing between swigs of Stephanie's spiced cider. I think everyone contributed something. I made sure to make the things that mattered the most to me -- plenty of mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and fake turkey.

Here Maze and Kim are making cranberry sauce. This is Maizy's "I'm not amused" look. I wonder where she got that one?

After an hour or two of potzing around, here's the finished product. Everyone seems to be smiling, although Gabe -- who moves faster than the speed of light -- is under the table looking for goblins. This picture was taken by my guardian angel and he only got the top of my head.

Here is what a Shelby would eat. Notice a conspicuous lack of yams. And the cranberry sauce was a bit too adventurous for me.

This is what a Kim would eat -- not so much on the fake meat and a bit more colour. I think everyone did OK.

Here are the three amigos laying into the feast. If you're wondering what that is on Lucy's cheek, yes, that's a tattoo. They wash off but I can't help think we're setting our girls up for a career in the navy or the merchant marines.

After dinner -- yes, "lunch" turned into the full deal after all -- the doggies Emma and Bee got to have a bit of the leftover real-Turkey that Kim bought. Emma literally ate her bowl full in 3 quick bites.

The kids worked on these gingerbread houses that Stephanie and Kim helped them build. I think we needed Nat there though. If you read in the paper that a family of elves died a hideous death after being crushed under the collapse of their gingerbread house, you'll know what happened. Here Maze is putting some final touches on her creation.

And in the eveing the grown-ups got a chance to watch a little of The Office, season five. I watched season four in Hawaii and I like the characters enough that I thought it was great, although Kim and the Osters who are ahead of me here think that's one of the weaker seasons. So far season five is shaping up to be even better than four, I agree. The Mays have only seen a few episodes of this show and so this was a teaser for them -- after BSG I think this might be next in the queue..

Hawaii: Coming Home

2009-11-25T06:33:00.000-08:00

The last day in paradise picked up where the previous nine days left off -- eating and playing and laying around most of the morning.

These two weren't more rambunctious than usual -- here they are locked in mortal pillow combat -- but we managed to score our first visit from Mr. Grumpy, our downstairs neighbor. He was trying to be nice, but you could tell he was not that excited to be hearing the pitter pat of little feet overhead in the mornings. Of course we apologized but we told him: guess what dude, we've got great news for you. We're out of here today..

This was Gabe getting an ear treatment for his swimmer's ear. I think Emma got these from Stephanie too. Blech, what a pain. It must have worked because I didn't hear any shrieking on the airplane.

By late morning we headed down for one last tour of "kiddie beach".

On the way we stopped by the coconut vendor. Apparently there was demand for coconuts coming from somewhere in our group -- Stephanie? Emma? -- and even though Jeremy and I had walked past the somewhat cryptic and arresting "ICE COLD NUTS" green and blue sign several times in the last week and smiled knowingly at each other, we never connected that sign with coconuts until the very last day. So the whole crew crowded around while we bought a couple coconuts.

First, of course, the coconuts have to be husked. This guy was a pro. Three stabs was about all it took.

Emma looks like she's trying to decide if she likes coconut water or not. It tastes sorta coconutty, but kinda weak too. And nothing like coconut milk..

J-dog took a couple swigs too.

When it comes to coconut smashing, who ya gonna call? Exactly. I tore up one of the coconuts and dug out some meat for the kids. I think I ate most of it myself -- turned out to not be super-popular.

The last beach run was quite idyllic. Jeremy and Stephanie and Emma took off for Lawai beach for one last snorkel so Kim and I stayed back and watched the younglings. Kim's out there in the water somewhere. I hung back and tried to avoid the sun. I managed to go the entire trip without using sun screen.

Phoebe and Lulu hung back with me too. Eventually Maze joined them and built a whole house floorplan out of raised sand pile lines. I just laid out under the tree in the shade and read my book. I'm still stuck obsessively on the Dutch story of New Amsterdam in "The Island in the Center of the World." Awesome book. Thanks Sally for getting me started there.

I did try and nap a bit, but even in a perfect place like paradise you have to watch out for danger. I was laying there looking up at the blue sky and suddenly it occured to me that those coconuts -- you can barely see them in this picture at the base of the palm branches -- don't travel to the grass by walking down a tree trunk and asking permission to sit on the ground, if you know what I mean. That line of thinking sadly compromised any perfect tranquility and attempted nappage from that point onward. Et in Arcadia ego, baby.

The first snorkeling shift returned and it was Kim's and my turn to get a last dive at Lawai. By the way, this Poipu kiddie beach was pretty safe as beaches go. Notice the Sea-doo sitting there. And notice the lifeguard tower in the background.

Kim and I had a very lovely final pass at Lawai beach. We saw a couple eels, and a few trumpet fish, and tons of bright angel fish and parrot fish. I saw this giant "lurker fish" that I can't get anyone else to see, so I'll try not to mention that I saw it again.

After the beach we headed to Koloa for pizza.

The little artist hard at work with a pen filler and a torn out page from my book.

And after pizza we made one more trip to the local surfing clothes shop. This is where I purchase all my t-shirts except one.

Inside the kids goofed around while Jeremiah and myself looked for yet more RVCA shirts. He ended up with a pretty cool "Penn State" contraband shirt. We'll see how much it's worth in a couple years.

To complete our farewell tour we stopped at the Poipu Mall for gelato.

Behold! Milk chocolate and coconut gelato in a waffle cone!

The grownups had a few more furtive bites of ice cream before the return to realitiy and dieting and exercise. Ah, the mystery of iniquity.

We went back to the house to pack and I was hoping the kids would have one more good romp for Mr. Grumpy's sake but they were already pretty tuckered out.

Here's a little guy that Jeremy caught before we left. On the right that huge grey/black thing is a sandal. These little lizards were barely even an inch long.

On the way out the door we saw this lady having a quick prayer.

No, it's not a complete day unless you've been to Walmart. At least in the Gospel according to Stephanie. I can't even remember what we got, but I'm sure it was absolutely necessary. Grin.

On the rental car shuttle bus to the terminal my dahling and I share a sad face. We were already missing Kauai..

In case you were wondering, yes, Glitz Mama *does* travel in style. And each of those three bags on the bottom weigh well over 50 lbs, and that red bag underneath the glamorous luggage probably is approaching 100 lbs. For some reason -- probably having more to do with islander-mentality ticket clerks than with my jedi distraction skills -- we didn't get charged any overage. Whew.

Here Emma is paying her $15 for the privilege of checking a bag.

We got to the airport at 8:30ish to have our cars back before the appointed time, but that meant we had about 3 hrs to kill. We foraged for food and found some retro benches near the shops and spread out to watch movies and read.

At last we're boarding our plane. That lady right in front of Phoebe and Emma was my seat-mate for the flight. This lovely lady had actually booked a middle seat hoping that no one would take the aisle or window. Too bad for her I had the aisle seat, but when no one claimed the window she camped on both seats, rather than moving over to the window and leaving an empty seat between us. Hmmm..

None of us really slept on the flight, which took off at 11:30p. I watched five or six episodes of The Office and read my book most of the way.

At one point, while the girls were napping in the row next to me (seats A, B, and C -- I had D), Maze just got up out of her seat and started walking down the aisle toward the front of the plane. Kim whispered loudly to me: "hey, she's sleepwalking" so I took off after her. Maze stopped in front of some gentleman 15 rows down and just stood there, sleeping. I herded her back to her seat and she kept sleeping. She had no memory of the incident in the morning. Ha!

The flight made good time -- less than 5 hrs -- and we landed around 7ish. Our little party of nine shuffled off the plane and onto the tram and on and off the escalators to get to baggage claim. Miraculously our bags were already there.

We said sleep-zombie farewells and threatened to see each other again some day, and then shuffled off to our cars.

I think the guy who drove us was Emil's uncle or something. This time we had a big white SUV. We dozed on the drive home.

By the time we made the climb up the NHR it was getting light but there was mist in the trees and a little rain. I love this time of day.

We came home to a clean house and a cherry pie in the fridge from our house-sitters -- Sher and Alan and Sethie B stayed over for a few days while we were out.

Kim and Maze and Lu fell asleep within 10 minutes of coming in the door. Klonk. It took me another 10 minutes after that, and we all slept until noon.

Hawaii: Day Nine

2009-11-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

We packed a lot into our second Sunday on the island. This was to be our last full day so we wanted to make the best of it.

There's no better way to start the day than with a hearty bowl of camera rice stew. So remember the hike to Shipwreck Cove on Saturday? Well, if you look closely and Kim and Stephanie you'll notice in some of the pictures they look a little splashed-upon? Turns out they were supervising the children in the tide pools and got whacked by a sneaky wave. Stephanie's camera saved her from getting too wet. Of course the camera ceased working after making the supreme sacrifice. So while we were doing Mexican food on Saturday night, Stephanie -- in the 20 minutes while we *knew* we weren't getting any food -- visited a camera store and they gave the suggestion of putting her camera in rice to pull out the moisture. That's how you get camera rice stew.

Lu opted for a bowl of Crispix and some OJ instead. And a smile. Maizy is toiling in the mines of large number subtraction at the other end of the table. How much more Dad? Can I have a lollipop if I finish this hard problem?

Not everyone was in homework hell. The rest of us took it pretty slow to start. Emma and Gabe actually discovered they had a bit of *swimmers ear* which I guess is a euphemism for the bugs that cause trouble in your ears when you stick your head in a less-than-pristine hot tub. Stephanie called all the medical people she knew and could get on a Sunday morning early, relatives and otherwise, collected all opinions and decided that the afflicted needed ear drops. So she ran a mission to Longs drugs -- not Walmart for a change! -- and Emma and Gabe got stuff poured into their ears at strategic points in the day.

At noon Jeremiah and myself headed out to do a little scuba diving. I don't think he'd ever done it before and it has been almost 25 years since I passed my NAUI certification so we signed up for a little dive with a guide.

Once we had filled out all the paperwork and signed the consent to die papers, we headed to the beach and set up camp.

Our divemaster was a dude named Bryan (see his bio on the AA team page). He was half our age and had zoris with Oregon State woven into the toe straps. I had been listening to Supwitchugirl all morning -- especially the new "I Love My Ducks" on youtube -- so I was a bit nervous trusting my life to a Beaver but he was cool.

We got a lecture on skills and what we could expect to see on the reef. Turtles, moray eels, parrot fishes, etc.

Here is Jeremy decked out and ready to go, booties and all.

The bay had a horseshoe-shaped reef. We did our skills tests at the base of the "U" and then did a descent along the left side. Visibility was a bit crappy at first but things cleared up after we got down to about 30 feet and there were a ton of things to look at. Bryan showed us a couple Devil Scorpion Fish and we found the resident Hawaiian Dragon Eel. I saw dozens of the white mouthed Morays, and we got to see the Sentry Fish guarding their purple eggs. On our way back we also got to see a large sea tortoise sleeping on his rocky-reefy bed. The hour under water was up before we knew it. If you want to see the underwater pictures from the place we were diving you can check out the photo section on the Aquatic Adventures website.

We got Bryan to take our picture aftwards. A couple happy divers.

Meanwhile, the girls had the kids out at the baby beach. The day was pretty perfect. No wind, not too superhot.

With all the ear problems going around the kids did more beach-related activities like architecture.

Maze told me that this is the castle for Princess Maizy and her pet doggy Beatrice. Sounds a tad autobiographical..

It doesn't look like Emma's ears are bothering her *too* much. Or maybe she's crying on the inside.

Here the inseparables are having obligatory smoothies from the deli across the street.

After diving and beaching the party reassembled at the little Poipu mall for burgers. Jeremy and I were holding down a table when we looked out and saw some girls doing the boogie-woogie on the stage where the hula girls had been. Hey you guys, we're hungry! Get over here!

This is the burger place where we ate at least five time on this trip.

I think we had the same waiter every time. Privately we called him "blue-eyes" but Stephanie almost called him that in person! Here he is with Gabe.

After burgers the kids played and the ladies shopped. I took Lu to the bathroom and while I was waiting for her to come out of the ladies room I noticed this little spider. It was about the size of my fist. Looks like a pretty harmless St. Andrew's Cross Spider.

Eventually you knew the guys would get involved in the shopping action. Yes, I am a fashion princess.

Maze here is just finishing up being a dog again. I think she really misses our baby Bee

No sooner than Kim and Stephanie got matching dresses but a little bird comes along and poops on the front of Kim's dress. For a Virgo this is a horrific outcome.

Here we are in matching outfits. This is a bit scary, actually.

Kim just couldn't get enough of the Shelby tennis love-train so at 5:30p we headed out to the courts to resume our rivalry. The lady running the pro shop said we only had 30 min to play so she wouldn't charge us for raquets or court time. Sweet!

Here is a picture of Kim serving. We decided to play a set. The Shelby-logic retro betting was in place, although in this case I'm not sure Kim understands the complexities and it may be more trouble for me to explain how I am actually the winner than it would be to just give her money. Sheesh.

At any rate, we had a few spirited games but I came away with another 6-0 set. Yes, there a few dicey moments there where the outcome hung in the balance -- a couple deuces. But justice prevailed.

Here is "His Smugness" after the workout. Notice how much he had to sweat to get to victory condition?

I did admit to my beloved that I think she is more skilled than I at tennis and the testosterone in my body gives me an unfair advantage, especially since we are both utterly rusty

Back at the ranch the children were running amok but Teffie was shouting with happiness from the upstairs balcony. Notice what she's holding? Her camera! Looks like the rice trick worked.

To celebrate I converted the rest of the rice into rice pudding for everyone!

The movie of the evening was the last of the Bourne trilogy, BOURNE ULTIMATUM (7.7). It was good to get closure on the series, if you call the ending of this third installement "closure." The next movie has a pretty high burden for me because this series is starting to feel like J. J. Abrams write-as-you go style -- LOST especially. There are some loose ends that shouldn't still be hanging out there -- Nicky especially. And I think the Treadstone / Blackbrier switcheroo has been poorly handled. Where was Blackbrier in the second movie? Plus, the ratio of story development to action is too weak -- it's at 1:5 which is Bondesque. This story deserves more wheels, something like 2:3 or 1:1. Overall, as much as I like Jason as a character, it's starting to feel like the amnesia thing is wearing thin -- there's only so much mileage in that schtick, sort of like the Rimbaldi thing in ALIAS. But I'm still along for the ride, at least one more ride.

Hawaii: Day Eight

2009-11-22T21:03:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning came early. The Mays family was up before sun-up and hustled with Emma out the door to make it to the beach before sunrise.

These people. Forced pre-dawn marches are not in the Goerlitz family vocabulary.

Brunching at the Hyatt, however, is our native language. And by the time the Mays returned we were able to assemble everyone for an earlyish run at the buffet. Early means before 10a.

Gabe runs pretty much everywhere. Here you see him and his OLPC outpacing his nearest competitor and most ardent admirer Lulu.

Phoebe and her OLPC eventually caught up and posed with Lu for a picture. We were waiting for the other adults -- who don't run so much -- to load into the cars for the lesiurely drive.

Maizy and Kim waited patiently while our table at the Hyatt was being prepared.

The breakfast was quite delicious. Red papaya this time. More bread pudding, omelettes, pastries, juevos rancheros, pineapple, the works..

And afterward, posed pictures in the lobby.

First the Mays family.

Then the Goerlitz family.

Then the kids.

Then everyone! We had the concierge take these.

Outside the Hyatt, while we were waiting for the kids to get bored of the feeding Koi, Emma showed off her grass trumpeting skills. Very impressive. Pretty much everyone else got involved and bystanders were walking up to see what all the mating-call excitement was about.

After breakfast we retired to the condo to rest and read.

Lucy and her daddy needed naps, so the rest of the party went for a small hike out to Shipwreck Cove.

This cove is a short hike from the hotel. Here is the view from where the trail empties into the beach.

The tide pools at this beach are one of the main attractions.

Maze the artist can't resist an empty canvas.

The ladies took a few pairs photos. Emma and Stephanie..

Stephanie and Kim.

And Emma and Kim.

Jeremy and Gabe got in the action too. Gabe is constant motion so this picture captures his spirit nicely.

Maze stands over the cliffs on the other side of the beach. This would be a great place to look out for pirates.

After the hike the party returned to the condo to rejoin the nappers and rest, change, read and get ready for supper.

On the drive into Koiku Grove for supper we passed through a little rain shower and some rainbows. This picture doesn't do the rainbow justice. It was right *there*. We could smell heavy-wet glimmering from the pot of gold.

Right about here I had my first wild-pig sighting. A beauty. Dark browny-grey with tusks, digging by the side of the road.

Here is the Mays car decamping at La Bamba, our dining destination in the background. You'll notice that Lu has taken to driving with Gabe.

We had a delightful Mexican dinner. Mostly standard family-style Mexican food, but the menu actually said something like: "Remember this is not a fast food restaurant, the dinners will take 20 minutes to prepare!" We were like, chill dudes..

Emma needed the full 20 minutes to perform what she alleges is her regular pre-Mexican dinner ritual. She puts every available condiment (salt, pepper, salsa, guacamole, etc.) in every possible combination on her corn chips. Nice. I didn't get a chance to police this activity or lecture on factorial math because I spent a solid chunk of the 20 minutes at KMart down the road purchasing paper and pens for the kids -- this restaurant didn't have them and there weren't enough iPhones to go around..

After supper someone spied a Cold Stone Creamery down the mall. Aloha! How could we pass by with out a little something-something, as Madame Mays might say. Here I am sporting some of my new fashions -- RVCA shirt and Ezekiel jams. Still with that damned, elusive Data Direct hat though.

BTW, that last allusive line reminds me that I will have to review last night's movie THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (9.0) separately -- it was too awesome to let pass with a comment or two.

These two ordered a *pile* of ice cream. Mein Gott in Himmel! I was envious. They are trying to look coy so you won't notice the sheer volume of ice cream that they've salted away.

Back at the condo the kids fell into bed after a busy day. The grownups (minus Emma, who floats between both categories) took a run at the second Jason Bourne movine, THE BOURNE SUPREMECY (7.9). I'm not sure it's quite as good as the first, but it's focused and well-paced. I would like more closure out of these films though. Less like ALIAS episodes and more like Bond stories. But you have to like Jason Bourne and Matt Damon totally owns the role. Sweet.

Hawaii: Day Seven

2009-11-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that a whole week has gone by, but sure enough -- last Friday we were jumping in a plane on our way to a little tropical holiday.

Of course, some of us have had homework to do even on holiday. Maze had an extra dose on Friday and will probably have to crank on Sunday to get it all done. Poor baby.

In the middle of our homework vigil we got a call from the lovelies who were running down by the beach. "Hey, there are seals down here!"

We stuffed the kids in the car and headed down to the beach and sure enough, a couple big fat seals were flopped on the beach napping. The lifeguards -- or the seal fairies? -- put up a crime scene barricade around them to keep the humans away.

At the same time right in front of the seals there were a couple turtles frolicking in the surf. I'm using the term "frolicking" loosely since these turtles were more like a pair of old boots getting washed around by the waves.

Here's another picture of these seals close up. They looked a *lot* like some of the humans on the beach, quite frankly. The little flippers swatting casually at flies, the rolling around, the large distended bellies, the belching..

Of course what most people on the beach don't have is this protected status and a roped off area to wallow around in.

After the seal excitement we headed back to the condo. On the way Phoebe and Maze played dog and master. Maze loves to be the dog and Phoebe falls into the master role pretty naturally. Yes, this is consensual.

We saw some cute chicks running by the side of the road. Hey, we know those chicks. Jeremy turned the car around for another look and we blasted Chariots of Fire music on the second pass. When they started sprinting to show off. I could hear the sound of tendons snapping over the blaring Vangelis.

After the completion of homework we headed back to our standard beach. Here is Jeremiah keeping an eye out for the kids. For me the main goal of going to the beach was staying out of the sun. That sounds pretty grumpy but its hard when you have my delicate skin and impossible beauty standards.

In the afternoon Kim and I had some unfinished business to attend to: our tennis bet. We haven't played tennis together since we've been married. Kim and we figured this vacation was the perfect time to do some level setting. I may have been woofing a bit, and she certainly wasn't backing down, so I figured our game should be pretty epic.

Here we are renting raquets and signing in for court time. Kim thought it was a good omen that the sign on the door to the left said "Kim", presumably the name of the lady working behind the counter.

These were my new tennis shoes. I'm very fond of them. I haven't named them yet but I'll take suggestions.

So we played a set. Our bet was for an undisclosed sum -- if Kim could win one game in a set then she'd win. I had no victory condition, so it was a bit of a sucker bet. We played the first set, 6-0 for Darth Shelby, although we both played terribly.

Then starting the second set Kim got angrified. Boy howdy. Her serves went in, her returns were solid. And I was cocky and I choked. Blech. Lost four points in a row and the bet too. Rats!

This is her victory celebration. She learned that from the Agassi family

I stayed and played with Stephanie, who was also being a little free with her opinions about her tennis abilities. In this picture you can see my Becker-like serve.

In this picture Stephanie is telling Jeremy that she *could* have beaten me if we had actually played a game. And I think I heard some muttered vege-curses.

The sporting business behind us, we cleaned up and headed into Koloa for a little supper.

Here is the crew having a little pizza

And here is Maze doing a little fortune-telling. I picked Five, Four, Seven, and Red I think and found out that I should try something new and I would be rewarded.

So after supper we stopped by the little surf shop next to the pizzeria and I bought 8 shirts and 3 pairs of shorts. I did feel very rewarded. I discovered a new cool brand -- RVCA. Last time in Hawaii I became very attached to Ezekiel and Christian Audigier. The Audigier stuff has gotten a little weird for me, but the love for Ezekiel has stayed pretty strong.

I gave a little fashion show when we got home. Lights! Runway! Pose! Sashay baybay! One of my tamest shirts and some handsome Ezekiel shorts.. Four, Five, Seven, Red!