Do the Yak

Geese Aplenty has validated my feelings about bicyclists in the city . Tomorrow is Demolition Derby Day in the Leafy Suburb. Not with cars, more's the pity, but with large pieces of equipment that eat buildings, which is the fate that's about to befall the existing ranch house on the site of our future Forever House. Yes, after months of dealing with town bureaucrats and attitudinous architects, the house project is finally getting underway. So I get to wake up at 5 a.m. on a Monday on which I'm on vacation to go shiver in a driveway while Ben and the kids dance around and watch the fun. If it were up to me I'd wait until the news highlights on TV, but apparently to men and small children, watching a house get torn down is a Big Deal. So I'll cheerfully go along with it and then excuse myself after a decent interval to go back home and go back to sleep. I have to store up strength for this week's fun -- my brother and his family fly in for a visit highlighted by

In yesterday's post about the delightful CowParade Boston, I neglected to do something vitally important: aggressively plug Sacred Cows , the superb debut novel by my friend Karen Olson , because it actually features a Cow Parade in New Haven, the setting for her debut mystery novel about hard-boiled police reporter Annie Seymour. Probably the reason I forgot to make the connection is because of my shameful secret: I haven't actually read the book yet, though Karen was kind enough to give me a copy a while back. Why, you ask? Well, early on, I guess I was subconsciously afraid that I wouldn't like it and then would have to think up something nice to say about it, and of course I didn't want to hurt any feelings. Not that I'm any great judge of literature with ultra-high standards; as anyone who knows me can attest, I have never shied away from books that some ivory-tower aesthetes might view as, well, trash. In fact I was the despair of my favorite high school teac

A while back, the whole family plus Ben's mom went for a walk in the Back Bay to observe members of a herd of colorful ruminants. I refer to CowParade Boston, a terrific public-art display that's appeared in several places around the country. Basically the organizers solicit artists' designs for painting white fiberglass cows, then they select the winning srtists and give them each a cow to decorate. Then the cows are installed here and there throughout the city, though naturally most of them are in places that get a lot of foot traffic. Finally after a period of time they remove the cows and auction thenm off for charity. I meant to write about this before, but I didn't because I didn't realize until now that there are lovely cow photos on the web so you can see what the heck I'm talking about. We have private documentation as well -- took a photo of each cow we encountered, with the kids and others draped around the under the creature, which is probably one

It gets pretty boring when you're waiting on the podium for those dumbass reporters to frame their nitwit questions.

Yesterday was the last day of a three-day weekend. It was overcast when the two urchins clambered into bed around 7 a.m. Eventually we all got up and Ben made pancakes and I settled down to read the paper while Ben immersed himself in revising architectural drawings for the Forever House. The kids were blissfully quiet, enraptured by Noggin. And I just couldn't get motivated. There wasn't anything pressing to do, anyway. And the kitchen was kind of cold. So... I tiptoed back upstairs, climbed back into the toasty bed and took a post-breakfast nap. The icing on the cake was hearing rain spatter against the window as I huddled under the comforter. The best part was that I don't think anyone even noticed. Children didn't come whining, husbands were not standing by the bed clearing their throats ostentatiously... I swear on days like that (rainy fall/winter Sundays) there really is no reason to get out of bed in the first place. And it's a good thing I have a job becaus

Boy I love the Internet! And the people who use their copious free time to make it even more fun. (Don't forget to click on "more.") adopt your own virtual pet!

...of the election results. No more from me on this topic (unless something juicy happens like a senator switching parties), except to point out this clever campaign-sign contest .

I thought we were past this phase... We were all driving home last night around 9:00 from dinner at a friend's house when Becky suddenly started crying in the back seat. The reason? "I have a bead up my nose!" she wailed. We were about five minutes from home and she wasn't having any trouble breathing, so I tried to convince her not to sniff (no dice). Once we got home I took her upstairs while Bern got the flashlight and I got the Tweezers of Futility. I had a look and I could see something sparkling WA-A-A-AY up there. No way were metal instruments going that far. We called the doctor, who told us to try a home remedy that usually works -- holding the unobstructed nostril closed and giving her a strong puff of air mouth-to-mouth. Also no dice. So off we went to our health plan's Urgent Care clinic, thankfully (I say that because the alternative would have been the hospital ER, and since she wasn't spouting arterial blood, we would have been seen after five h

1. I admit it -- I now read politicalwire.com a lot. We love Charles Rangel . Which reminds me of something I forgot to mention about Election Day. I'm signed up for news alerts from CNN.com, so I sometimes get e-mails with the subject line "CNN Breaking News" and the body text has a one-line summary of the story. Obviously this is intended for news stories so big that you want to know about them ASAP rather than wait until you get around to checking the web site on your own. So on election day, I saw "CNN Breaking News" in my Inbox and sprang to attention, since I assumed it was something major to do with the election like maybe Cheney having a heart attack at his polling station or Bush conceding. Imagine my burst of relief and warm feelings when I opened the e-mail and read: "Britney Spears files for divorce from her husband Kevin Federline, citing irreconcilable differences." Thank God CNN.com has its priorities straight. 2. Dan Savage had a grea

That's me, doing my daily NaBloPoMo post before midnight tonight so you don't forget, and the Dems, who have managed to gain control of the Senate as well as the House, as they just announced (this is Wednesday night) that Democrat James Webb beat incumbent Republican George "Macaca" Allen by a hair in Virginia. This beats even my rosiest expectations (winning back the House but not the Senate), and it's a sweet counterpoint to how I felt two years ago when it seemed Kerry had a good shot but Shitforbrains won by taking Ohio. Boy was that disappointing, especially since I was mired in the Deep South at the time. Now all I can say is... YESSSSSSS! I can't believe how caught up I got. Toward the end i was devouring politicalwire.com and electoral-vote.com , and last night I even printed out some score sheets for tracking the hot races like on Oscar night -- though CNN had a terrific personal tracking page as well. I certainly didn't get this worked up abou

I got new glasses for the first time since the turn of the century (I would guess the early 1990s). When selecting frames, you're always at the mercy of whatever style happens to be hip at the moment, but I think we're in a good period. They're neither outlandish nor nerdy; they're subtle yet quietly cool. Of course I may laugh my ass off at pictures of myself in these glasses 'round about 2025. Though I can't imagine they could be worse than others that people thought were nice-looking at the time, like this . Those of us who are unusually nearsighted also had to cope with thick distorting eyeglass lenses, but they seem to have largely solved that problem. Otherwise I might still look like this . By the way, did you recognize that last person? This photo will surely be trotted out for ridicule when she runs for president. It's not surprising that she's always had a rotten hairstyle, which she frequently tries to overwhelm away with scarves. Though this

Much better today. Houston, we have a brain. Last weekend Ben spent just about every waking moment working on the architectural plans for the new house while I imitated June Cleaver by doing laundry, grocery shopping and -- I cannot believe this -- baking cookies for the Election Day school bake sale. Apparently the wild yak has been fully domesticated. Anyway, we were inside the whole time so late Sunday afternoon we all went for a walk in the woods to have QUALITY FAMILY TIME, dammit, and we had a cool nature experience. As we approached our house at dusk, I heard “whoo hoo, whoo hoo” nearby. No, it was not Homer Simpson or some uncouth teen wolf-whistling at my hott bod. It was a great horned owl, I figured, though of course you couldn’t see it. But -- wrong! I looked up in the general direction of the hooting and there it was, a blob on the highest branch of a dead tree, moving now and then. Of course it took off as I was telling the others where it was, but I kept my eye on it, fi

O-kaaaaay... so the daily blogging thing didn't even get up to speed before I fell off the horse. But in the spirit of American stick-to-it-iveness, I will get right back on that horse. Oh dear, now I sound just like my mother. I have some ideas for semi-interesting posts. Unfortunately I can't pursue any of them today because I have a cold that is turning my brain into mush. It's extra annoying because I'm over the constant sneezing and honking phase, so I don't appear to be sick, but beneath this composed exterior is a yak teetering on the verge of delirium, so I'm going to rest now. And if you're wondering about the title of this post, it's the sound of snoring by one of several animals in Snoozers by Sanda Boynton, the best writer of little kids' books I've found.

I'm deliberately stealing the subject line of a post by Dooce because I'm so glad she alerted the world to this excellent article by a reporter in New Orleans who realized he was suffering from serious depression and needed medication, but only after his life had almost completely fallen apart. He was one of many people, including me earlier on, and my mother-in-law now, who didn't quite believe in depression as a serious illness that can and was skeptical of antidepressants, perhaps feeling that taking medicine was a copout and was simply bypassing "real issues" that could be sorted out only by talk therapy. I myself always figured that depression was a natural result of temporarily difficult circumstances in your life, that you should buck up and keep plodding and you'd eventually feel better, etc., etc. I too was an on-and-off sufferer starting at age 15; that episode I attributed to RHI (Raging Hormonal Imbalance, i.e., being smack in the middle of pube

Not to turn on the religion-rant button again, but The New York Times had an interesting review of a book that argues that a basic sense of right and wrong are hard-wired into humans, much as Noam Chomsky argues that the the capacity for language is also part of our innate neural machinery. To quote the Times article: This "moral grammar... is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie. But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations." The book then "suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior." Told ya so! you can be a good person (in fact, you're so

Here we go -- 30 straight days of posting, so I foresee some mighty inconsequential things being said, both here and elsewhere. As an editor of mine once said about an extremely light and fluffy feature that one of us had written, "Better put a rock on it or it'll float away." So last night was Halloween. As usual, we waited until the night before to purchase and carve pumpkins. Then as it turned out, we weren't even around last night, so the poor things have yet to be set on the stoop and lit up. The reason for our absence was that one of our future neighbors in Leafy Suburb had tracked me down and kindly invited the whole family over to her annual Halloween party and trick-or treat-en masse. So all the neighborhood parents and kids were there. The hostess provided pizza for all, lovely hors d'oeuvres and beer for the grownups, which immediately warmed me to her -- no foofy martinis, and not even fancy Pilsner glasses -- right out of the bottle, though only micro