Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

The oldest living major league baseball player

...just turned 100 this month.

There was an article about him in the Post last week; he's from this area. Billy Werber.

It's a neat article, even if you aren't a huge baseball fan. I liked the way Dave Sheninin managed to mention all of the anecdotes for which he didn't really have room.

When I read the bit about how Werber "wound up going to school in the District, eventually graduating from McKinley Tech," something dawned on me. My grandfather graduated from McKinley Tech, too. My grandfather would have been 100. My grandfather was a huge baseball fan, and managed the McKinley Tech team.

My dad was away on business last week, so I couldn't call him, but on the way into the park last night, when we passed the Navy Yard building where my grandfather worked, it reminded me to ask if he'd known anybody who'd made it to the majors.

"Oh yeah," my father said. "Dad knew a guy named Billy Werber; they were friends back in high school."

I won't even hike in shorts

Hikers encounter pack of 'bares' at Md. park

A group of men between the ages of 40 and 60 reportedly disrobed and started walking along the trail, said Sgt. Ken Turner, a spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources.

Crazy. Don't those guys realize how bad the ticks are this year?

Wildlife

I didn't bother to photograph the ticks.

Cool

Literally. It's a close-up of the bubbles in the water where we dropped some chunks of carbon dioxide, more commonly thought of as dry ice (even by chemists).

Sublimation!

Just...wow

I was flipping through Sports Illustrated yesterday, killing some time before an appointment, and happened across this article about a soccer team in Georgia called the Fugees.

Once I was done, and I had to keep stopping because my eyes were filling with tears, I wanted to go photocopy the pages and hand out them to everybody I know.

It's July!

Well, maybe not on your Gregorian calendar, but on the Niconian calendar, July started around 11:30 this morning, when I got my long-awaited word that I should go ahead and begin the annual project from Hell. (Details on what I need to do differently this year will come sometime in the next, oh, three weeks or so.)

Lack of detail notwithstanding, the project is due on August 1, again using that Gregorian thing. Since I'm supposed to leave for vacation on July 26, that makes July 25 = August 1, Niconially speaking.

Perhaps I'll do like the French revolutionaries and make up new month names.

Hockey
Spring training
Rain
Hell
Brief respite
Pennant races
Football
Food frenzy

Yeah...that should do it. I'll work out numbers of weeks in a month later, and number of days in a week. All I know for sure now is that Hell has both too many and not enough days, and Respite is very, very short.

Water

I've been lucky with the storms so far this year; I only lost power for a few hours, not days. And on Sunday night, when a 48-inch water main in the middle of the woods ruptured, I didn't lose water, just some water pressure and permission to do laundry.

We've had a few inconveniences, and maybe I'd be more upset if I had lost a freezer full of food and couldn't take a shower. But I think my coworkers are a little sick of my constant refrain: yeah, but look at Iowa.

I hate to admit it, but if it wasn't for reading Jen's blog, I might be thinking more about how I need to boil my water than the 31 feet of it in the Iowa River.

(In case you don't have it handy: www.redcross.org)

My 4 o'clock

Several weeks ago, I got an invitation to a meeting today. Well, invitation isn't quite right...more like summons. The funny thing about the meeting is that the list of invitees was a bunch of chief officers in the company, some vice presidents, lawyers, and me.

Surely there was some mistake, some important person with a name spelled similar to mine.

But no. I manage a small program, a tiny little boring program of minor significance, except every few hundred years when it attracts the interest of big important people, and its my misfortune to be the manager during this once-in-a- few hundred year occurrence.

So, you know me...do you think I stressed out about this, just a tad?

Do you think I obsessed about it for every moment since getting the meeting notice?

Do you think I anticipated every question the big people might ask? Do you think I drove everyone around me nuts, trying to get them to quiz me on things I may have overlooked?

Do you think I felt queasy all day, because the meeting wasn't until 4 pm?

Do you think I got an e-mail at 2:15, postponing the meeting until...get this...August 26?!?!

As Charlie Brown used to say: I can't stand it.

And I have to wear my railroad train pajamas

I had a crappy day today. It was nothing big, just stupid small thing after stupid small thing. When I tried to relate the list to my sister this afternoon, though, I realized I sounded like the kid in a book I've loved since kindergarten: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

But I do love a tasty burger

We're getting a Fatburger.

Actually, I don't know if I need to get excited about this or not. I've heard some west coast natives swear its the Best Burger Ever, but others tell me its not even the best burger in California. (In-n-Out, they tell me, is even better.)

My provincialism requires me to assume that no California burger can really beat Five Guys, although honestly, I'm not such a Five Guys fanatic that I'll fight to defend them.

When I was a kid, my nice birthday dinner out was usually Hamburger Hamlet. That was back when their menu really concentrated on hamburgers, though.

When I was in school, I used to visit friend at Virginia Tech, but my first stop in Blacksburg was always a place called Mike's, which had burgers the size of my head.

But the best hamburger I ever had? I can't recommend the atmosphere, but it was the cafeteria at Naval Hospital Pensacola. Those Navy cooks can make some sliders.

Here comes the rain again

So I won't be long, in case the power goes out. (This storm looks nothing like last week, though. I wish I'd taken screen shots of the huge red blob on the weather radar...but as I was watching it cross central Maryland, we ended up under a tornado warning and I had to shut off my computer and go to the lower level of the parking garage.)

I am playing tomato roulette. I have no idea what the origin of my tomatoes are, but I'm not throwing them away in case they carry Salmonella. (Carry? Have? Are contaminated with?) And I'm eating fresh salsa by the bowl!

I'm going to be in the dark soon, regardless of the power. I just went to replace a burned-out light bulb, and I'm out of light bulbs. So I went to take a light bulb out of a lamp I don't use that often, but apparently I'd already lifted that one. Pretty soon I'll be carrying my one remaining good bulb from room to room.

I could buy light bulbs, of course, but it never seems vital enough to make a trip specifically for light bulbs, but then I forget that I need them in the course of regular shopping trips.

I could carry one of the PocketMods that Ted likes, and put light bulbs on my shopping list, but I would need to remember to take it out of my pocket and check it.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

The farmers' market opened today. Of course, it's still early in the season, but I was happy with what we got. Rainbow chard, for example:

(accompanied tonight by macaroni and cheese).

And strawberries:

When I was a kid, much more of Montgomery County was still farmland. During the summer, we could go up Route 28 from Gaithersburg north and buy produce from out of the backs of pickup trucks, every day of the week. Not that I appreciated it then...but now, I make it a point to patronize every local farm I can, lest they sell out and become another townhouse development full of commuters competing with me for space on the road every day.

Nothing in the water but H2O

When we were at the ball game a couple weeks ago, Ted remarked that I hadn't been blogging lately.

I have the usual reasons: I can't really blog about the work stuff that is preoccupying me, and most of what I had been writing (posted or not) was sort of, well, whiny. Then, if I came up with something that amused me, like the Fonzie statue, I'd start writing about how '70's sitcoms molded my mind, but then I'd get sidetracked by a news article about a disaster and I'd feel guilty about being so frivolous when there's tragedy to be depressed about...etc.

The other day I heard Badlands on the radio. I'm no huge Springsteen fan, but he has some lyrical passages that I do love, and one is

For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive

...so, I've been trying to lighten myself up a little. Maybe somebody else might appreciate the Fonz statue, but if not, it still made me smile. And that attitude sort of took me back to another short-lived experiment, the one where I was going to try to enumerate good things every day, instead of dwelling on every little thing that pissed me off (even though, let's be honest, the angry stuff is usually funnier. If I'm not careful, I may end up Ned Flanders.)

Anyway, that's why I'm so freakin' chipper all of a sudden, in case you were wondering.

(And for today, I'm really appreciating Pepco. We had some crazy, Great Plains weather yesterday...tornadoes. In Maryland. We don't get tornadoes.* But when I got home last night...following an hour and forty five minutes of absolute anarchy on the roads...our power was out. I was starting to ponder losing the refrigerator full of food when, at 8:15, there was light. Today I was hearing estimates of Saturday evening for some people to get their electricity back, which would seriously suck, since it's going to be in the 90's the rest of the week. So, I'm not sure why I'm a lucky one**, but I'm very grateful.)

* Actually we do, a couple a year, but since they don't have the impact of a midwestern tornado, I forget about them til the next year, when I say "We don't get tornadoes!"

**I do have a guess. Most of the power lines in my immediate neighborhood are buried, so outages from trees taking down lines are over at the substation, where hundreds of people are affected, so that's the kind of repair they do before going street by street.

Another day, another computer story

I had to clean up a chemical spill today. It sounds more exciting than it was...apparently none of the chemists were available (I'm the spill cleaner of last resort), and a guy in the mail room spilled some solvent on his desk. When he called me, he said "It's literally three drops; can't I clean it up myself?"

I'm the procedure-following type, so I said no. As it happens, the three drops of solvent were on the guy's computer keyboard, and when I wiped it up, the plastic came with it. Probably he doesn't need the shift key to say "Shift," but after thinking about it for a minute, I unplugged the keyboard and bagged the whole thing as contaminated waste.

I spent the rest of the day waiting for IT to call and bitch me out. But on the upside, one of my coworkers pointed out that taking the guy's keyboard pretty much guarantees that they'll never call me to clean up a spill again.

Today's list

The good computer karma stopped at the office. Friday evening, a tech from IT dropped by to randomly update something, and today I had no connection to the network. He told me when he started that whatever he was doing would make things faster for me, and in a way, I suppose he did, since I wasn't hampered by requests for data that I couldn't access anyway.

There is still plenty of time for blight and bugs to move in, but tonight I am rejoicing in the first blossoms on my tomato plant.

And I have a new favorite food...well, a new favorite that isn't made from avocado. Or cheese. Or spinach and artichokes. Ok, amongst my favorite foods I now include chocolate cherry macadamia granola from Michele's Granola.

(You don't have to be a hippie to believe in granola, ya know.)

And yet...

Although there is no reason to have a computer in my home, we now have...oh, I'm not even going to count. But I just added another one.

And though I hate big box stores, I bought it at a big box store. And it was painless. (Although they did try to sell me some odd setup service. For a laptop? People will pay to have someone come over and plug it in? My coffee maker requires more setup than this sucker.)

I thought I got a pretty nice deal on the computer I thought I was buying, and when I unpacked it, I realized it has a 9-cell battery, not the standard 6-cell I expected. (The technical specs in the advertisement merely said "Lithium ion.)

It is a Vista machine. I have heard horrible things about Vista, although I've had trouble getting specifics about how it's horrible. I suppose I may come to hate it eventually (and I can see why you'd hate it if you had a slow computer, because all those animations must be sucking up some serious resources), but after all of eight hours, it's not bothering me. Plus, I haven't yet found something so different from XP that I wasn't able to do what I needed to do on the first try.

I also bought a 160-gigabyte external hard drive that's about the size of my hand. Perhaps it's because I work in a non-technical field, but when I think back to the tape drives we used when I was a kid (you thought I was going to say punch cards, didn't you? I'm not quite that old...but I do remember recycling punch cards as craft projects in girl scouts), a 160-gigabyte hard drive I can hold in my hand is like magic.

It wasn't so magical when the clerk took my cute little hard drive out of its plastic shoplift-proof case and let it fall with a thud eight inches down to the counter. I cringed. It was the last one in stock, so I took it anyway. It's nice to know that apparently you can throw it around without ill effect (maybe it is magic, after all), although I do intend to treat it a bit more gently.

And lastly, after years of advertising that suggested the contrary, credit card companies are telling me that I can't be fulfilled by the acquisition of material possessions...yet I am awfully happy right now.