I just got an email from REI telling me my dividend is in the mail. The amount? A measly $25.13. (For those of you who don’t know, you can join REI as a lifetime member for a nominal fee and you earn a dividend on all your purchases that you get refunded in the spring (historically about 9% of what you spent) and there’s typically a 20% discount if you use that dividend on more REI gear. It’s a fantastic, no-brainer deal.)

I remember the heady days when my dividend ran into the hundreds of dollars. If you’re a scrooge you’d be quick to remind me that such a dividend would require spending thousands of dollars. Well yes, but that was part of the fun.

I started backpacking about a year or two too early. Lightweight gear existed but wasn’t yet affordable. A pocket stove cost $150, for example. So I geared up from the ground floor and so did Amy: backpacks, sleeping bags, stove, cook sets, and the other basics. Then the floor dropped out for prices on all the high-tech stuff and slowly, over the course of several years, I began the replacement. The clunky, heavy stove I bought for $45 was replaced by a pocket stove that was one-quarter the weight and now cost $35.

Living in Washington State also necessitated certain purchases, like high-quality rain and snow gear. I was also going backpacking two weekends each month year-round and there’s no doubt superior gear made for easier packing, lighter travel, and more enjoyment overall.

Those days are sadly over. First off, the majority of my gear is top-notch and doesn’t need replacing. Secondly, the only stuff I’d like to upgrade costs too much now that I’m going less often: to get a significant gain in the weight and packability of my sleeping bag would mean a $400 purchase, and I don’t go often enough to justify that. Third, we’re living off half of one income while Amy and are both in school.

The most of the REI dividend this year came from my cross-country skis. Last year, I think it came from Athena’s backpack. Now, I’m looking at $25.13 and 20% off just about any gear and nothing springs to mind when I think of what I might need.

Sad days indeed.

Current Mood: Remembering the Glory Days |

I finished The Sun Also Rises and began Neuromancer this afternoon, which explains a potential head-scratching post title.

I didn’t realize that the majority of The Sun Also Rises takes place in Pamplona, Spain; had I known this, I would have read it sooner. I’ve discovered that I find Hemingway a highly enjoyable read. I read In Our Times as an undergrad and a great many other of his short stories on my own, but never any of the novels before For Whom The Bell Tolls a few months back. Except the Cliff’s Notes for A Farewell to Arms in high school and, unsurprisingly, they left no lasting impression.

In college, I always felt like Hemingway had to be handled with plastic gloves because of his unflattering portrayal of women and the unspoken closeness (i.e. closeted homosexuality!) shared by macho men who hunted, skiied, and fished together while never talking about their feelings. Now I see that just because you don’t buy in to Hem’s worldview doesn’t mean his words aren’t clever, his characters flat, or his stories uninteresting.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Sun Also Rises for a number of reasons, and not least because Hemingway, like me, is fascinated by most things Spanish. And because it takes place between the wars, which I’ve mentioned before is an area of literature that greatly interests me. Put those two things together (like in For Whom the Bell Tolls) and I’m an easy sell. There’s precious little story here, as a group of people go from getting drunk in Paris to getting drunk in Pamplona and watching bullfights. There’s a lot happening under the surface, of course, but not a lot of action to speak of. That sounds like something I’d hate, but Hem makes it work, and work well. I look forward to reading it again, the next time on paper.

Neuromancer is one of the million books that always comes up in conversations just after the words “I can’t believe you haven’t read.” I’m only twenty minutes in (audio again) and I already understand why everyone loves it and it’s a sci-fi classic. It’s edgy, it’s cool, and it’s spawned a billion clones that somehow aren’t quite as edgy and cool. Maybe I’m not a complete sci-fi convert yet because I’m always expecting the “classics” to let me down. I dunno, maybe blame Ender’s Game (which underwhelmed me) or maybe it’s an internal nerd alarm with a hair-trigger. Either way, I find my knee-jerk surprise that “Hey, this is actually really good” to be very annoying, especially since I am a practitioner of the speculative.

Current Mood: Huh? |

Quality entertainment, this.

Please stop snowing. Please.

I would be totally remiss if I failed to mention Spurs’ comprehensive 4-1 thumping of Bolton today. I can’t stand Bolton, I think they play crappy long-ball footie, and they’ve got the most annoying manager outside Man Ure, Chelski, and the Arse. 3-0 up inside the first twenty-some minutes? Playing with only 10 men for the last hour? Only conceding on a somewhat dodgy penalty? I’ll take it!

Overstatement of the weekend #1: Spurs’ win following their mid-week victory over Everton “put them right back in the hunt for a UEFA Cup spot.”

Overstatement of the weekend #2: Charlton’s 4-0 win over West Ham means “the relegation race is wide open.”

No, to both of these. Both teams need to keep winning and hope that the teams dropping likes stones recently (i.e. Pompey and Wigan) continue to do so. Charlton have been consistently bad this year and Spurs have spluttered, being fantastic one week to being dreadful the next. Basically, these teams have to hope that their character completely changes in the last 10 games, which is unlikely. Not impossible, but it’s a bit of hyperbole to say this weekend’s results have changed everything.

Chelski 2, Arse 1 in the Carling Cup final. The better of two evils? For me, yes.

For the record, winter has officially worn out its welcome. Shoveling slush is far less fun (and far heavier) than pushing around that fluffy white stuff. The plow came by and deposited what could only be described as snow boulders about hip-high in the mouth of the driveway. These had to be methodically broken into smaller chunks and then lifted (umph) out of the way instead of just pushed around, like one might do to snow.

Taxes are next on my agenda. Yuck.

On Friday our snow was almost gone. It snowed yesterday about 8″ and overnight we got at least another 6″ of wet, heavy snow mixed with rain. You need to be junior weightlifting champion to throw the stuff hip-high, and it’s still snowing to beat the band right now.

Here’s a spring vs. winter shot of our front walk:

And a glance the backyard. Thank God we don’t have to shovel it. That snow’s about three feet back there.

Current Mood: More Snow? |
Currently Listening To - Soundtrack - “Song Catcher”

I learned the other day that Will Rogers was one of those people who only needed 4 or 5 five hours of sleep a night to be fully functional. I wish.

I require an average of 8 hours and my body keeps this schedule whether I want it to or not. If I run a two-hour sleep deficit on Monday, I’ll feel it until I can make up the time. This used to mean sleeping in on the weekend because, due to regular work schedule, I woke up at the same time every day. I could often resolve the deficit by going to bed early but not always. I tend to perk up around 9:00 pm, even if I’ve sleeping on my feet at 8:30.

This week has been rough. I’m managing to average 8 hours of sleep, but in wild swings of 4 hours one night and 12 the next. My body doesn’t know what the hell is going on and I feel vaguely jet-lagged all the time, wide awake at 6:00 am and then dead tired by 1:00 pm. Today I woke up at 5:00 and couldn’t fall back asleep. Yuck-o.

Part of the sleep problem is due to a racing mind. I’ve mentioned before that I swing between wanting to do nothing but read and wanting to do nothing but write. The pendulum has swung fully to “write” recently and that means explosions of new ideas, ways to resolve problems with old stories, and the desire to do it all now.

I finished “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter” yesterday and posted it for my grad writing workshop as well as my Clarion group’s message board. It’s a bit of a strange story so I’ll be very interested to see how the two different groups attack it. Then I began work once again on “The X-Ray Style,” a story my Clarion compatriots will likely remember from week four. (The one with the slacker/genius inventor) The story sagged in the middle and now I think I’ve got a solution. We’ll see.

The other Clarion-era story I think I’ve got a handle on is the one about the prescient Swedish immigrant who moves to Minnesota in the 1880s. I wrote myself into a hole the last time I worked on this one—literally. The main character and his horse can’t get a stump out of the ground and I realized this was very much my subconscious saying “stop writing, you’ve lost the thread of the story.” Now I see I need to rewind, erase (egad, no!) and restart with an entirely new slant. I had one of those “oh, so that’s what this story is about” moments.

Unfortunately, these moments seem to strike between 11:00 pm and 7:00 am. See above.

Unrelated: Is Rachael Ray the most overexposed pseudo-celebrity of the moment or what? Good lord.

Current Mood: Zzzzz |
Future Mood: Pick-up Friday! |
Currently Listening To - Woody Guthrie - “Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs”

I went from too much Dick to none overnight. Yesterday in class we finished discussing Philip k Dick’s VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. We had read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before the trilogy as well. I also finished up Moby Dick on audio during the drive to Milwaukee Tuesday. So Dicks, whether it was Philip K or Moby, had been taken up quite a bit of my time for the last month.

First, the Philip K. We read these books for my Sci-Fi/Utopia class. Androids is an obvious choice because it’s an SF classic and gave us the opportunity to compare the book to a more-than-decent SF movie, Blade Runner. The VALIS trilogy, however, is a much more interesting choice. Half of VALIS (the book) is realism, the second half is “aggressively” SF, The Divine Invasion is SF from the get-go, and Transmigration doesn’t have any trappings of science fiction at all and could easily have been marketed as a novel of realism. The reason we read these three (which aren’t necessarily Dick’s finest work) is because the professor wanted us to grapple with definitions of science fiction as well as read highly metageneric (i.e. fiction that is about writing genre) works. An interesting exercise.

Now for Herman Melville. Moby Dick started off really hot and then cooled to lukewarm. I wouldn’t call Ishmael’s frequent and lengthy digressions from the plot unnecessary, because Melville was more clever than that. All of his asides about the nature of whales, the mechanics of whaling, and the role of the seaman end up coming into play, yet this must be the easiest book in the world to abridge. The book can easily function (albeit at a shallower depth) without them. What struck me most was how quickly the book ended. The chase for Moby Dick doesn’t start until very, very late and then when it’s over, it’s over. Moby takes the Pequod out and then there’s, what?, maybe a page that describes how the narrator was rescued. I know short stories that have more a dénouement than that! It’s a really long book, so talk about getting out fast.

I also felt like I maybe zoned out during 10-15% of it, which is the problem (and sometimes benefit) of audio. I certainly don’t have time to read such a long book right now, but it’s a good solution to pass time on the drive and while doing errands or playing frisbee with the dog. Still, while I may not have the complete Moby Dick experience, I know how the book feels, the sub-plots, and the story arc. So this is good.

I started Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and I’m maybe a quarter through. It’s good. Not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls, but good.

Current Mood: Tired |

Can you believe it? Our darling little puppy turns three years old today. 85 lbs. of pure love. She’s a big girl.

We give Athena a special treat for her birthday. Last year it was some steak on top of her food. This year, turkey with a little gravy.

 
The birthday also includes frisbee until she’s had enough, and thankfully it’s a balmy 35 degrees this morning.

In case you’re reading this, happy birthday sweetheart! We love you!

I finished both Phil Dick’s The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer over the weekend and wrote a brief, somewhat rambling 3-page paper on them as a launching point for Wednesday’s discussion. I tried to compare alternate universes to Tolkien’s fairy realm. And I don’t think I did it very well.

For my sci-fi class, I think I’m going to write my term paper about the metafictional short stories of Jeffrey Ford. I mentioned this grouping of stories way back when I finished The Empire of Ice Cream, referring to them as the Jeff Fordia. Now I think I’m writing a conference-length paper that I might end up presenting somewhere, sometime. Should be fun.

Toes. I’ve broken many of them playing soccer, usually by having them stomped on with cleats. Today it was another matter. I got kicked—or perhaps the better word is drilled—on the underside of my foot which bent back pretty much all of my toesies. It hurts. I don’t think I broke anything but they sure are throbbing. The pain needs to diminish by Friday. Otherwise I won’t be able to…play more footie!

And mark your calendars: I had my first kerfuffle today. The vast majority of guys who regularly play in the lunch group are really very nice, but there are one or two jerks, and a couple guys who I’ve suspected could be jerks—so only a handful out of probably 40 guys who play regularly. Friday saw a tiny flare up over a minor event, and today a guy got rather bent out shape when he thought I fouled him. The funny thing is that he pretty much barreled into me and I gave him a shove while trying to win the ball. His forearm caught me—not gently—across the face right after, and only he knows if it was intentional or not. Then he stopped and started lipping off, saying “Do whatever you have to do, man,” all pissed off like he’s Ronaldo (only fatter) and I’m some hack.

First off, it was hardly a foul. I’ve been whacked harder than that most weeks and, while I don’t laugh about it, I wasn’t whining either. Second, the dude’s got at least 50 lbs on me so you’d think he could handle a shove. It’s not like I swept out his legs or checked him into the boards. He didn’t even fall down. Third, whether he meant it or not, he gave me a shot across the face, a fact which, for those of you know my saintly ability to check my anger, I politely pointed out to him. (There may or may not have been profanity involved.)

From the neutral’s unbiased standpoint here’s what happened: the fat guy (with admittedly crazy good dribbling ability) let his tired legs get the best of him, and lost his temper after I had STUFFED him on his last two attempts down the field. However, I will say after the flash point, I offered my hand and said no offense and he shook it. So that would be me offering up the $#%ing olive branch, which I sure hope St. Peter got in his good book.

These bumps in the road don’t make me like pick-up any less; they just make me like people less. Now if dogs could play pick-up, then you’d have something. But I know my dog. She’d never pass the rock.

Current Mood: Sore |

Spurs nailed Fulham 4-0 today in the FA Cup to make it through to the quarterfinals. Huzzah! For some reason the game was only on Fox Soccer Canada with a one-day delay in the US. Nice to see Tottenham back to winning ways.

Spurs have traditionally been a cup team and are staying true to form this campaign. It’s odd, but I think they have a better chance of winning the UEFA Cup, which features other also-rans from Europe, than winning the FA Cup where the likes of Chelski and Man Ure are still alive. Something psychological there, but it’s hard to put your finger on it.

The Champions League starts back up this week and I’m quite looking forward to it. ESPN has caught on to the fact that they’re better off showing world-class footie during the day instead of running rodeo or ladies’ pool reruns. The match-ups here are great. Take a look at the field in the tournament’s last 16:

Celtic vs. AC Milan
Lille vs. Man Utd
PSV Eindhoven vs. Arsenal (Tues. @ 1:30PM Central, ESPN2)
Real Madrid vs. Bayern Munich (Tues. @ 4:00PM Central, ESPN Classic)
FC Porto vs. Chelsea (Wed. @ 1:30PM Central, ESPN2)
Barcelona vs. Liverpool (Wed. @ 4:00PM Central, ESPN Classic)
Inter Milan vs. Valencia
Roma vs. Lyon

And they’ve got a UEFA Champs League highlights show on Friday at 2:00 Central on ESPN2. It’s remarkable how far the sport has come in regards to television in the last decade. There’s been slow but steady progress. In high school, the US national team’s friendlies would literally be on at 3:00 am. Now we get four Champions League games during the week. Brilliant.

Of course, US television rights to the Champions League are cheap because of the relative lack of interest. As interest rises, the games will no longer appear on basic cable but rather pay-per-view—and I’d love to see how the whole “watch the game on the Internet” idea is working out. I don’t know who is paying $10 per match for streaming video of live Champions League games on the computer, but it ain’t me.

Astute sport fans will have noticed how American sporting events have slowly been migrating from broadcast television to pay television (cable/satellite) and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the next step is migrating to predominantly pay-per-view viewing. What I find funny is that people think this is somehow new. It’s been happening in Europe for years. A person is more likely to spend some cash to see all of his/her home team, which is a direct revenue stream for the team/league instead of generating revenue via advertising on “free” television. This a la carte system may be appealing on the surface, but it’s really about tapping directly into your wallet.

For example, how much did I spend on watching the Packers this year? Nothing, because I watched most of their games on network or satellite TV, which I’ve already paid for. In the future, it’s quite likely that I’ll be able to watch all the Packers games I want for the low, low price of [insert figure here] by purchasing a “Packers package” above and beyond what I pay for satellite. The alternative to “all” games? None, of course. Except for when the Packers are available on the Game of the Week or whatever they keep on network television. And the best part? There will still be advertisements. Remember, those things that were supposed to be funding the “free” event? Yeah, now you as the fan get the benefit of paying for what used to be free and still be bombarded by advertisements.

Check back in 2017 and let me know if I’m right. Doesn’t the future sound exciting?

Current Mood: I Should Be Writing |
Currently Listening To - Grateful Dead - “Workingman’s Dead”