family

Unhappy Old Year

So. Once again we rebooted the calendar, and it worked. Whew. Couldn’t have happened soon enough. This year had its moments, but it wasn’t among the best I can recall, though it stands shoulders above 2002.

The year began with the worst flu I’ve had in 35 years. Lesson: Get your flu shots! Carol did. I didn’t. Q.E.D. There was other illness in the family that I won’t talk about, though nothing life-threatening. For that we have to move out into our friendscape. We lost Prudy Stewart, a stalwart from the local Bichon Frise Club, along with Harold Shippey, a gentleman in our camping group. Two of my grade school teachers died within a couple of months of one another: Mrs. Mary Clare Toffenetti, who taught art and French at IC school, and Mrs. Mary Veronica Condon, who taught third grade and also French. Dan Matthews, one of the kids in my grade school class, who had been a close friend for several years, died on Christmas Day. Just last night, one of our parishioners, who generally sat two pews behind us at church, had a serious heart attack. He’s in a coma and is not expected to survive.

All this since November 1, sheesh.

Oh, and my house almost blew up. Settling soil has been our bane here for years now. We had to empty the lower level and get the slab mudjacked, and are still fooling with paint chips and carpet samples now that the carpet’s been torn up anyway. All of my SF and most of my electronics magazines are packed and out of reach. It’s a mess.

For good things to report I’ll begin with the completion of Drumlin Circus, a 53,000 word short novel that came together in one furious six-week period, during which I wrote as much as 5,000 words in a single day. Jim Strickland and I put a tete-beche double novel on the market, incorporating Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings, both tales from the Drumlins World.

Jim and I attended the Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop in July, conducted by Walter Jon Williams and taught by Walter and my SF mentor Nancy Kress. I described the workshop in two entries after we got back, and would have continued if my damned gas line hadn’t threatened to ignite virtually under my feet. (I hope to write a little more about the workshop in coming days.) I will say right now that if you have a little experience in SF or fantasy, Taos Toolbox is spectacular. Granted, it’s expensive, and almost unbelievably intense. Jim describes it as a 500-level graduate course in the art of the novel compressed into two weeks, and that sounds about right. Walter is currently accepting applications for the 2012 workshop, and I give it my wholehearted recommendation. I met a lot of wonderful people, workshopped 15,000 words of my current novel-in-progress, Ten Gentle Opportunities, and returned with new dedication to the craft of fiction. I’d hoped to finish TGO by the end of the year, but (as described above) the year did not cooperate. The new target is April 1. Snotty AIs, zombies dancing the Macarena, a copier factory gone rogue, magic as software, physics as alternate magic, and malware from another universe…hey, what else d’ya want?

On October 2, Carol and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We spent ten days on Oahu, generating enough gumption to start having the lower level rehabbed when we got back. It took everything we could generate, and more.

I joined the Writers Write! group here locally, and have made many friends there. The group’s motto is Just write the damn book! It’s advice I need to take.

Those are the broad strokes. Scattered among the days were little flashes of light and minor grunts of annoyance. My brakes have needed work three times. I met Cynthia Felice. My new superregenerative FM receiver has dead spots. I finished a nice steampunk computer table. That sort of thing; up and down on an almost daily basis.

I have high hopes for 2012. Carol and I have deliberately held back opening our Christmas presents until January 6th to get an upbeat start on the year, and 2012’s first 18 hours have gone pretty well. I won’t try to draw any conclusions from the data points presented. Hey, sea level dropped 6mm in 2010 alone. Blips happen, so let’s not read too much into any of them. It’s not the end of the Holocene…yet. Then there’s the Mayan calendar. Y2KXII, anybody? Let’s party!)

Happy new year, everyone. Strive to appreciate your friends this year. (You won’t have them forever!) Write more. Worry less. Go outside and check your gas pipes. Eat fat and drink sweet wine, and make sure you share what you have with others. I’ll be here when you need me.

Uncle Jeff Tricks

Jun 15th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Tricks? Oh…one of them is that I just disappeared for a week, but I’m now back, having spent five days tending small girls while their parents took a much-needed jaunt to Las Vegas for the wedding of a close friend. Carol and I kept Katie and Julie fed and entertained and (mostly) happy, which is no small feat. We have never had children. We don’t have any real kid experience, especially with girls. We spent plenty of time with our nephews at the same age 20-odd years ago, but boys are…different.

We did our best. A lot of it comes down to devising Uncle Jeff Tricks that interest them for more than a few minutes. I had some success there. Trick #1: The three of us sat on a blanket on the grass in the backyard for some time, eating pretzels. Julie evidently feared that I would starve, for each time I crunched down a pretzel she kept handing me another. Never willing to let a learning opportunity pass by, I began biting portions off the pretzels and making them into letters.

“What’s this say?” I asked Julie, holding up a suitably mutilated pretzel. (Katie is now four and a half, and has her letters down cold.)

“R!” shouted Julie, obviously delighted. I put the pretzel down. She handed me another. I nibbled off a different set of bits, and held it up.

“O!” she shouted, giggling. And so it went. Soon I had spelled their last name out in multilated pretzels. (See above.) That “E” was a bitch. I ended up eating ten or twelve before I got one that E-ified without crumbling into loose punctuation.

Trick #2: I tried to use the large population of balls in the backyard to model the Solar System. The colors were wrong, but I got the sizes in the ballpark–right down to a slightly greenish tennis-ball Moon for the Earth. Alas, before the lecture began Julie decided she wanted to play planet-soccer, and whap! Uranus got kicked down the gravity well into the bushes. To celebrate, our junior niece ran into the house and came out a minute later with a (clean, whew!) pullup on her head. This was not an Uncle Jeff trick. Really.

Trick #3 worked out a little better, especially for Katie. I poked around the edges of the yard until I found a reasonably intact maple seed from last year’s crop, and tossed it into the air. The girls had doubtless seen them spiraling down from the trees the previous fall, but hadn’t yet hit upon relaunching them. I explained that to work the seeds must be intact and complete (the squirrels eat the seeds and leave empty wings that don’t fly well) and challenged them to dig around the yard to find a special seed that flew better than all the others.

Julie was stumped, so I handed her the one I had picked up and launched several times. Katie, however, ran and got a Jewel grocery bag and spent the better part of half an hour walking around the yard, singing a song to herself while picking up any flyable maple seeds she could find and stuffing them in the bag. I’m not sure many seeds got launched, but trust me, there won’t be any new maple seedlings in the yard this year.

Katie did pick a favorite, and she’s holding it in the photo above.

Trick #4 fell flat: I tried to teach them to make grass whistles. This was a stretch, and they don’t (yet) have the manual dexterity to hold a blade of wide grass between their thumbs in such a way as to make the monumentally irritating sound that grass makes when blown on just so. Katie, frustrated, decided to simply imitate the whistles I was making with a blade of grass, and Julie soon joined in. They are excellent mimics. The two of them sat screeching along with Uncle Jeff’s blade of grass until the blade disintegrated and the two of them got bored. I imagine the neighbors were grateful that grass is as flimsy as it is.

Herding girls is hard work, and it took a day or so for the two of us to fully recuperate. I expect to be back at full vigor tomorrow, and need to be flailing at Ten Gentle Opportunities in a very big way. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tripwander: The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Dec 28th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Christmas in Chicago is always aerobic, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and gather impressions, now that we’re packed and ready to hop a plane. In seven short days I chauffered, shopped, entertained small girls, repaired a planter that needed deck screws and Plastic Wood, fixed computer problems, wrapped innumerable presents, unwrapped (different) innumerable presents, and ate far, far too much sugar.

First bit of advice? Don’t mess with small white dogs. The Pack has been with Jimi this trip, but Carol’s sister Kathy has a ten-pound Maltese, and Wrigley received two dog toys for Christmas. One was a stuffed squeaky dinosaur that was all but guaranteed by its maker to be unshreddable by dogs. The other was a Christmas Kong snowman toy made of the same stuff that luggage straps are made of, and certainly looked like nothing short of a machete would take it down.

Ha! I use the word “was” deliberately and with emphasis. It took Wrigley less than 24 hours to chew the squeaker out of the unshreddable dino, leaving a hole that suggested an alien bursting its way out from the vicinity of the poor thing’s kidneys. The Kong snowman lasted a little longer, but 36 hours post-Christmas, its squeaky plastic core lay exposed, and Carol had to remove its innards to keep Wrigley from swallowing them.

We did a lot of visiting and probably more eating than we should have. On the way to see our nephew Matt’s flashy new apartment, I drove past my high school (Lane Tech) for the first time in over twenty years. The building itself hasn’t changed since I graduated in 1970, but the neighborhood is now almost unrecognizable. The “tech supply” stores where we bought drafting paper and bow compasses are gone, perhaps because Lane is less technical than it used to be, or perhaps because French curves are now draggable splines in a CAD document. The legendary Riverview amusement park (behind Lane Tech and still in operation until my sophomore year) is now a drab retail center.

Sic transit, and all that.

Transit? Uggh. The weather was hideous (clearly due to anthropogenic global whining, or perhaps unsustainable xenon dioxide emissions) and I had a rental car peculiarly unsuited to snow and ice: a lumbering Nissan Altima with rear wheel drive, grabby brakes, and a keyless key fob with an un-guarded panic button that will go off if left in your pocket with anything stiffer than a glob of rice pudding.

My nieces gave me a Pillow Pet shaped like a penguin, which I suspect will be useful for leaning on while I mark up manuscripts, or simply as a laptop cushion for a lap that doesn’t have much inherent cushioning. I can see it parked on the back of my big reading chair, staring down at QBit, but therein lies some danger: QBit, like Mr. Byte before him, doesn’t like artifacts with eyes, and we’re going to have to be careful that he doesn’t drag the plush creature off to his lair to shred at leisure. (At least the penguin doesn’t have a squeaker.) Like I said, don’t mess with small white dogs.

It was abundantly good to see family again, and partake of vigilia on Christmas Eve with my sister, Bill, and her girls, complete with piles of pierogi and Manischewitz sweet wine, just like we did it in the Sixties. Christmas Day at Kathy’s brought us cookies, key lime pie, ham, Hawaiian salad, potato bake, bean salad (which I heard was very good) apple and pecan pie, and much more.

It’s a little late, but better late than never, and no less sincere for that: Merry Christmas to you and yours from Carol and me and the Pack. There’s much to be said and done in the coming year, if we can get past this bruiser of a winter and remember what really matters: freedom, family, and friendship. I’ll give it my best shot if you’ll give it yours!

Tripwander: The Board Into Summer

Nov 11th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

We got back here to Colorado from Chicago just in time for the first snows. And while it snows like hell outside my window, I sit here in an interior fog, recuperating from a typical post-Chicago-trip headcold. I’m starting to climb out of it, but if you haven’t heard from me lately that’s mostly why.

The trip itself was short as such trips go, and was mostly concerned with getting Carol’s mom moved back home from the nursing facility where she’d been for some time. We also spent four days babysitting our nieces Katie and Julie while their parents took a much-needed break from parenting to attend the Ohio Valley Filk Fest in Columbus.

Tending small children is aerobic, to say the least. We ran around the back yard with them and the dogs, took them to several parks and playgrounds, and (finally) got a kite into the air in the big field behind their house. The kite was a nondescript 20″ ripstop Nylon diamond item from Wal-Mart, and it flew beautifully without any tail at all, thanks to a relatively light and steady wind. Katie (who is not quite four) flew it carefully and well, though whether she listened to my uncle-ish lectures on staying away from the power lines is unclear.

Carol and the girls blew soap bubbles and chased them, assisted by Dash. QBit watched dourly from the sidelines after he touched a biggish bubble with his nose and popped it all over his face. We retrieved any number of things (including Julie’s Hello Kitty boots) from The Window Well Where Balls Go To Die. Kick a ball around the yard long enough and it will end up there, though how the boots got in remains a mystery:

“Julie, did you drop your boots in the window well?”

“NO!”

Well. I guess that’s that.

Of all the Pack, Dash clearly had the most fun. We deliberately had the neighbor girl come by regularly to play with Dash and his littermates when we first had them (and their mother) so that they would know what kids are and enjoy their company. And wherever there were kids, that was where Dash wanted to be. We watched him watching through the slats in the back fence while a group of local gradeschoolers played touch football in the field. His tail was wagging so hard I thought his butt would fall off. A few minutes later, I heard Dash’s distinctive yaps from a distance, and realized that he was out in the field with the kids, having somehow finessed the fence. When I went out the gate to fetch him I saw how he did it: There was a loose slat that wasn’t fastened to the bottom horizontal board, and he had just shoved it aside and pushed through the gap.

Fixing the fence was easy enough. The nails were still in the board, and I whacked them back into place with a handy half of a brick. We then watched Dash go back and forth along the fence for the rest of the afternoon, stopping at each slat and nudging it sidewise with his nose, clearly searching for The Board Into Summer.

We watched a lot of what passes for kid TV these days, including Phineas and Ferb (brilliant) Dora the Explorer (craftsmanlike) Wonder Pets (eh) and Fish Hooks (ghastly.) The cartoons provided a clue to an otherwise puzzling occurrance: We ordered in supper one evening from Mr. Beef and Pizza, including a styro container of chicken noodle soup. Julie grabbed the soup container and handed it to Gretchen, exclaiming loudly: “Arbor Day! Arbor Day!”

Arbor Day? I was puzzled until Katie followed up with “Por favor!” Ahh. Abrade! Open it! This was one of a number of Spanish words used in Dora the Explorer, which may be the girls’ current favorite cartoon. (Gretchen made Dora and Boots costumes for the girls for Halloween, though Julie refused to wear her Boots tail.)

On the last day we babysat, I came down a little oddly on my left leg running around on Gretchen’s uneven hillside, and, once I stopped writhing in pain, had to go to urgent care for an X-ray. Nothing was broken, but my knee swelled up something wonderful, and I was on a crutch for two days and visibly limping for the rest of the trip. Anaprox helped.

So we’re back, and I can now confront the huge wobbling pile of things I need to catch up on, making sure that all of the detonators go off. If one misses, well, the rest of the block will be toast.

Daywander

Jul 11th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I put Carol on a plane Thursday morning for Chicago, after her mom was taken to the hospital late Tuesday night. Delores is doing a lot better now, but for a few days it was unclear just what was going on. We were both planning on flying out there on the 16th, so this wasn’t an immense change in our summer plans–it just means I’m here by myself for a bit, trying not to eat like a bachelor nor dress like a college student.

I didn’t get the whole story yesterday when I cited the YouTube video of Carol’s sister talking about her experiences at her local Ford dealership. It’s actually a clever piece of marketing, though I’m also sure it’s not viral: The dealership will award a gift certificate to the customer garnering the most clicks on their YouTube video by July 15. So do us a favor and go look at the video. Thanks! (I will admit I’m curious to see how many clicks a citation on Contra can generate, and this is a rare opportunity to find out, with real numbers.)

When Carol’s gone, I generally drown my sorrows by writing, but I ran into an interesting problem yesterday. I finished Chapter 7 of Old Catholics last week. I won’t know how good it is until I get a month’s emotional distance from it, but in the meantime there’s Chapter 8. The problem came in when I sat down to write, me in my shorts with an iced tea on the coaster, the sun beating down on the oaks outside my window, only to realize that Chapter 8 is the Christmas chapter. It’s about the quirky Polish Christmas vigil supper at St. JJ’s, and draws heavily on my own experiences with Polish Christmas vigil suppers, both quirky and ordinary. It was 86 degrees out yesterday afternoon, and no matter what I did, I just could not get my interior state to feel like Christmas. It may be the mark of a true hack to be able to write convincingly about Christmas during the second week of July, but I may need to go back to hack school. I just can’t do it.

No matter. I’ve been working on Old Catholics since 2005; what’s another five or six months’ delay? In the meantime, there’s “Drumlin Circus” to work on. It’s still at the notes-and-outline stage, but that doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made. Imagine a line of circus wagons pulled by woolly mammoths, and a show with an acrobat who performs in a cage with two live smilodons. (I may even work in a giant beaver.) And every artifact the circus owns; wagons, props, steam calliope, everything, is made out of drumlins. The Bitspace Institute kidnaps the circus master’s wife, who supposedly has a private drumlin that compels wild animals to obey her. After two years without her, the circus master finds out where the Institute is keeping her, and let’s say that he has a grudge. When the circus comes to a nearby town, it mounts a show that no one in town–especially the Institute–will ever forget. Pleistocene megafauna, scary clowns, calliope music, secret drumlins, the legendary Function Controller–we’re gonna have a real good time!

It may be as much as 35,000 words long. Jim Strickland is doing a Drumlins novella as well, and we may try to put the two stories together as the first Copperwood Double. I’m not an ace at tete-beche, but I intend to learn. Stay tuned.

There’s a Nap for That

May 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I finally got an appointment with a local sleep specialist last week. I’ve never been a strong sleeper, and I’ve been having intermittent problems sleeping, some of them severe, since the collapse of Coriolis 2001-2002. There’s some (small) possibility that I have apnea, even though I sleep on my side and not on my back. I’m going to go in for a sleep study later this summer (when my allergies are better) and this was the initial consult.

The specialist went through all the usual sleep disturbance stuff with me, mostly things I’d read about many times in many places. One of the first things on his list he said briefly and emphatically: “No naps!”

Carol and I about cracked up.

For two reasons, actually. First of all, telling Jeff Duntemann not to take daytime naps is like telling Jeff Duntemann not to code in C++. No problem, Doc! I’m just not built that way. I can sleep during the day only when I’m sick, drugged, or both. (No comment on C++.)

The other reason goes back to our last couple of trips to Chicago. Our niece Julie, like her (slightly) older sister Katie Beth a strong-willed little girl, decided at some point earlier this year that She Will Not Take Naps. I teased her about it several times this past winter:

“Julie! How about taking a nap!”

“No!” She clutched her favorite blanket and made Angry Face at me.

“Just a little nap?”

“No nap!”

This went on for most of an evening in Gretchen’s family room, until I decided that I was in danger of jeopardizing my relationship with the person who would someday decide the fate of my legendary tube collection, and knocked it off.

But by our next trip, winter had faded to a glorious spring, and Carol and I did a lot of chasing around in Gretchen’s back yard with Katie, Julie, and the dogs. Carol has the Kid Gene and I do not; I have no intuitive grasp of what very small girls consider fun. I spin them around and roll down the hill with them, but I’m never entirely sure what they might enjoy. And the trying is nothing if not aerobic. So at one point, a little out of breath, I just lay down on the hillside, laid my hands over my chest, and stared serenely at the very blue sky. Julie, now 2, came up to me and looked at me quizzically.

“Julie, Uncle Jeff is taking a nap.”

Without a word or even much hesitation, Julie lay down on the grass beside me and laid her hands over her chest.

Lead by example, I always say.

The Dollar That Didn’t Like Hawaii

Apr 8th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Life is full of little weirdnesses, and here’s yet another: Shortly before we left for Hawaii last month, my lucky dollar turned up missing. That’s the very one at left, though it’s shinier and more worn now than it was when I first mentioned it (and took the photo) in 2006. I’ve had the dollar in my pocket pretty much continuously since Aunt Kathleen died in mid-1999. She received it from my Uncle Louie at some point, and it came to me upon her death. Keeping the dollar in my pocket isn’t about luck, but about remembering both my godmother and a peculiar man who faithfully looked after his baby sister (my mother) after my dad died, and who believed in me when almost no one else did.

It’s hard to misplace something that big, but one day I just reached into my pocket for some small change and noticed that it wasn’t there. I then did a furious ten-minute tour of all the most likely spots: The sofa, the sectional, my reading chair, the 4Runner, behind the pants press. Nothing. Two days later we boarded the plane, and by then I pretty much assumed it had fallen out while I was sitting in a chair at Carol’s doctor’s office or somewhere else irretrievable, and was gone forever. I was bummed. (Hawaii helped ease the pain.)

Back at the end of March, only a few days after we got home from Hawaii, Carol and I had the carpet cleaners in for the first time since 2007. We spent an hour putting scooter disks under the legs of the smaller furniture pieces to get them out of the carpeted areas. Something caught my eye as I shoved Carol’s nightstand toward the bedroom door. There on the carpet, pretty much dead-centered in the space where the nightstand had been, was the dollar.

WTF? I tried to imagine a scenario in which the dollar would pass from my pants pocket to underneath Carol’s nightstand, without convincing success. Ever so rarely often I dump my pockets on the bed while I change pants, and somehow, the dollar must have migrated from the bed to the floor when I wasn’t looking, and rolled unerringly into shadow. You’d think I would notice. But I didn’t.

I put it back in my pocket. Carol and I both laughed, because we knew the rest of the story: Aunt Kathleen was not an adventurous person, not the least little bit. She’d had exactly three street addresses in her whole 78-year life, all within a few blocks of Chicago’s Devon Avenue. She’d been to California with her family when she was a 13-year-old girl. (Boris Karloff is signing her autograph book in this photo.) She took another trip with her parents in 1953, when she was 33, this time to…Hawaii. The trip must have been difficult, or for some other reason freaked her out, because as best we know, she never left the greater Chicago area again, ever.

As she said many times, she just didn’t like traveling. Or maybe Hawaii had made a bad impression. Hard to tell. But for all the talk you hear about the velocity of money, Aunt Kathleen’s dollar preferred to sit out our Hawaii trip and went to great lengths to do so. And once Hawaii was no longer a threat, it showed up again, promptly.

Crazy world, ain’t it?

A Tree For the Ages

Jan 14th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Not everything gets done on time, but at our house, at least, most things come in at or under budget. Carol and I budgeted an afternoon to take down and pack all of our Christmas decorations, and that’s about what it took. We’re certainly not on time (I had planned to be done a week ago) but a buzzing swarm of minor irritations got in the way, and it wasn’t until suppertime yesterday that the tree came down–and that only after everything else in the line of decorations was gathered in from the eight corners of the house and repacked in six cozy Rubbermaid totes.

And boy, what a tree that was! We put it up on December 10, which means it was on duty for almost five weeks. It had dropped some needles on the floor, but nothing I’d call a torrent, and when we got to picking ornaments off the tree’s high precincts, we discovered something else: The tree had been growing. On the very highest branches, there were new pale-green needles emerging from the branch tips. Those had certainly not been there when we brought it home back in December. This is not a trick we’ve observed in any other tree we’ve had in 33 years of marriage, nor with our respective families prior to that. We’re not sure how we managed it, but we’re going to buy our tree at the same lot next year and hope we get lucky again.

We broke only one glass ornament this year, and it wasn’t one of the old ones. It was perhaps ten years old, the sort of worked-glass item you see artists making in real time with a blowtorch at home and garden shows, out of thin glass rod. When Carol touched it to take it down from the tree, it literally flew apart in her hands. (There were internal stresses involved, as we vacuumed up fragments six feet away.)

A lot of our ornaments were inherited from Carol’s family, especially after we sold her mom’s house in 2006. Many are old, some extremely old, judging by the fragile cardboard boxes that had held them on store shelves decades ago and still serve in 2010, taped and patched though they may be. What I found remarkable was a price tag on the box shown above, from the venerable (and now extinct) Weiboldt’s department store in Chicago. The tag reads two for fifteen cents.

Wow.

Maybe it was a clearance sale price for the day after Christmas. I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything enduring for less than ten cents. (Hamfest junkmongering doesn’t count, though the junk certainly does endure.) Even the Hi-Flier kites I flew in 1962 cost me a dime. This may take us back to the early 1950s, and possibly to the late 1940s. Carol’s parents were married in 1947. We wonder if this box could be among the ornaments they bought for their first Christmas together.

I snipped off the branch tip shown in the photo at the top of this entry, and put it in a glass of water, just to see what happens. The tree is now out in the garage and will go to Rocky Top in the next day or so. The decorations and the Lionel trains are back in the Harry Potter closet downstairs. I gave Carol a hug while we moved the furniture back into its accustomed places. Christmas is over, but there’s still a little sparkle in the air, and I’m dealing well with the ordinary gloom of winter.

Mission accomplished.

Odd Lots

Dec 31st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

So here, on the eve of the end of a year I’d just as soon forget, the last Odd Lots of 2009. Carol’s in Chicago and I’m staying home tonight with a lapful of dogs and a good book, which on this occasion will be Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer, his history of the Holocene Warm Period. Carol will be back on Saturday. Getting tired of meat. May have some mashed potatoes tonight.
The Christmas tree is no longer taking water, and I perceive that’s it’s begun to dry out. We brought it home on December 10, so it has been standing guard in our living room for three weeks. This may be a new record for us. We’ve had trees stand (a little) longer, but their final two weeks were a rain of needles.
The day after Carol and I showed Carol’s mom our Christmas tree via Skype video call, this Zits strip was published. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know–I read Zits but generally in the newspaper, and not every day.)
2009 is ending with 260 sunspotless days. 2008 had 266, and December was the most active month of the year, so we’re guessing that the Long Solar Minimum is mostly over. Can 15M skip be far behind?
Ray Kurzweil has announced a new ebook software reader package called Blio. Not a lot of detail and no software to download yet, but it’s going to be a free product, with versions for both mobile devices and the desktop. Introduction will be at CES next week.
The ebook technology to watch in 2010 is Qualcomm’s Mirasol, which promises color without sacrificing battery life or readability. Looks good, but what we need much worse are larger displays and higher resolution.
Once again, Bruce Schneier nails it: The bulk of our antiterrorist strategies rely on magical thinking. This is not the way to win; alas, magical thinking appears to be a pervasive part of modern culture, and I’m not talking about Harry Potter.
Recent discussions of digital media piracy reminded me of the 2005 article in Wired describing the media piracy “scene” ecosystem (topsites, couriers, races, etc.) and how it works. Big Media may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean that no one is out to get them.
Pete Albrecht photographed two UFOs flying in formation (big animated GIF) while taking a long-exposure shot of M42, the Orion Nebula, through his big Meade telescope. Nothing spooky or alien about it, but before you click on the explanation (in his December 28 entry) think for a second and see if you can figure it out on your own.
From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: murse, more often called a “man bag,” which is basically a purse carried by a guy.
Ditto above: prepper , a person who prepares for the end of the world by stockpiling peanut butter etc. They called themselves survivalists until survivalism became equated in the public mind with psychos packing machine guns; watch for the word to vanish when 2012 ends but the Earth is still here. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)

A Videophone Christmas

Dec 26th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

A day late, perhaps, but no less sincerely, let me wish everyone who reads this a good and blessed Christmas, from here on the snowy side of Cheyenne Mountain. We had a day so cold, clear, and crisp that I was walking around the house carefully, lest it shatter. This was our year to stay in Colorado for the holiday season. (Next year, as is our custom, we’ll be in Chicago.) Two thirds of the country had a white Christmas, which is great unless you happen to be traveling while the whitening is going on. Ducked that bullet, whew.

We’ve had our tree for a week or so now, and it may rank as the best Christmas tree we’ve ever scored. Tall by our historical standards at about 7′, it’s also a balsam, a breed of tree I don’t think we’ve ever had in 33 years of marriage. I’ve been a little leery of them since I was five or six and broke out in a rash on my hands when my mother allowed me to place some ornaments on the tree. Somewhere we have a photo of me hanging ornaments with my winter mittens on, and although history is silent on the point, I have to wonder if some of my poor mother’s ornaments didn’t survive the adventure.

No rash this time–I guess one can grow out of such things–and the tree is not so full as to make finding places for ornaments a challenge, nor so sparse as to look like Charley Brown’s poor twig from the Peanuts TV special. It’s taking water and is not yet losing needles. Dash pulled a stuffed Saguaro cactus ornament off the tree and tried to remove its stuffing, but we caught him before he got too far. Jack has been spotted licking the colored light bulbs when they’re off, but apart from that there’s been no tree mischief.

There was some stress on Tuesday night when Carol’s mom fell at her home outside Chicago and was taken to the hospital. She didn’t break anything, fortunately, but had to spend Christmas in a hospital bed. To cheer her up I put an SX270 system on the coffee table by the Christmas tree and set up a Skype video call with my nephew Brian. The hospital has Wi-Fi in the rooms, and Brian set his new laptop up on Delores’s bed tray. So by virtue of my Phillips ToUCam and Brian’s built-in Webcam, she could see us, the dogs, and the Christmas tree. Delores was delighted, and it’s a technique to keep in mind if you find yourself in such a situation. Skype is very good with detecting and autoconfiguring Webcams, and there was no fussing involved. I plugged in the ToUCam, made the call, and video happened. It’s not exactly a flying car, but it’s definitely one of those odd Sixties dreams fulfilled, mostly when nobody was looking.

We also called my sister and Bill on Bill’s laptop, and sang the ABCs song with Katie. Katie looked puzzled, but Julie just beamed. In another couple of years this sort of thing will be second nature to them.

This was a very good year for Lionel trains: I finally bought a modern steam locomotive to run around the tree, and boggled a little to find myself searching underneath the brand-new 4-6-0 MTH Camelback loco (above) for its volume control. It has a built-in electronic sound effects system that plays real steam locomotive sounds, a bell, water-pump thumps, and other racket at deafening volume. Jack backed around the tree as I slowly ran it along the tracks, yapping furiously at it until he got bored. Pete Albrecht unexpectedly sent me a rare artifact indeed: An original Lionel 275W ZW dual-control transformer (right) that was probably made in the midlate 1950s. It works great, and can control two independent track sections and two independent sets of accessories.

Christmas for us really isn’t about gifts (and I confess to being a little tired of Santa Claus supersaturation this year) but once again, my spouse knows me well, and bought me an electric blue summer robe to replace my old terrycloth robe that’s been falling to pieces for the last ten years. She also presented me with my recent books wantlist: The Long Summer and Fish On Friday, both histories by Brian Fagan, and two popular treatments of decision psychology: Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Fagan is the author of The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer is his followup about the warm period that followed the end of the last ice age.

I bought Carol her fondest wish: A universal TV system remote that allows you to program whatever sequence of steps is required to turn everything on and then pop the drawer for a DVD, all with a single button press. (She’s justifiably weary of having a fruit-bowl full of diverse, incompatible, button-riddled remotes on the coffee table.) It’s a Logitech Harmony One, and I guess now I have to figure out how to program it. Hey, I know assembly; how hard can it be?

Our friends Jim and Marcia came by for Christmas dinner at 2. We had a spiral ham, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes, spinach salad, home-made apple-pecan bread from Jimi Henton, steamed asparagus, and Carol’s signature spiced squash soup with cranraisins floating in it. I opened a Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, and we had hot spiced cider as well as some Colorado honey mead that Jim brought. We stayed at the table for almost six hours, solving the world’s problems and designing the odd universe, and overall considered it an excellent Christmas Day indeed.

Nor is it over. Carol and I celebrate Christmas for at least a week, so for us it’s really only beginning. If this is your season (whatever you may call it) to celebrate all that is good in the world, hold that thought–there’s no reason at all to stay there for one day only and call it done!