Closing

As I write this, the closing of the sale of my father's house is taking place. Our attorney is representing us, so we needn't be there. We've had tremendous support from our attorney, the real estate agent, Mike and his crew, neighbors, and friends.

So, the house where I grew up (to the extent that I grew up) is now owned by another family. A number of years ago, I was talking with some people at work and learned that I was the only one of the group who'd spent all 12 years of elementary and high school in the same school system. There were very few changes in the neighborhood. Don's family moved there when we were in the third or fourth grade; that's the only family with kids that moved in or out.

Sandra and I went through the house on Saturday, making one last check of the place. Both of us felt some sadness stir up. We remembered where and how my father lived during his last years and days. We admired the work that was done in the renovations. We left a note to the new owners, hoping that they love their new home.

I wonder how long it'll be before we'll want or need to ride down that road again.

A touch of family

This morning, I received a call from my aunt, my mother's older sister. My aunt is 90. Her voice is strong and her mind clear. This was, probably, the only time that she called me directly. Previously, she called when my mother was living with us and then only if she hadn't heard from my mother in a while.

My aunt was eager to talk about her life at this time. She's in a Finnish-American nursing home in Florida, run by Karelians (people from what had been the southeast corner of Finland; Karelia was seized by the Soviet Union as a part of the settlement of the Winter War). She asked if I've been in contact with my cousins who live in Florida and asked that I ask them to give her a call.

Dilbert on hobbies

In just about every first encounter with doctors, therapists, and even real people, they'll ask me about my hobbies.

I do have real friends, for whom I am deeply grateful.

This week's miscellaneous links

• BELOIT COLLEGE'S MINDSET LIST® FOR THE CLASS OF 2011 ( Sunday, Feb 03 at 02:22 AM )

• Teach your brain to stretch time - being-human - 04 February 2006 - New Scientist ( Friday, Feb 01 at 09:17 PM )

  "Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment."

• How Do I Choose A Sauna? ~ Tech News Watch ( Friday, Feb 01 at 08:56 PM )

  After establishing a budget decide where in the house the sauna is to go. The size of the sauna is in direct relation to the size of your budget. Sizes range from 3×5 (ft.) to a typical bedroom size. It is entirely possible to purchase a do-it-yourself k

• Catholics Asked Not To Celebrate St. Patrick's Day On March 17 - Entertainment News Story - WEWS Cleveland ( Friday, Feb 01 at 06:19 AM )

  Let's see: Holy Week vs. Green Beer.

• Ice Sauna - The Snow Room Anti-Sauna ( Thursday, Jan 31 at 10:46 PM )

  The room will be offered to those hotel guests who have had enough of the blazing sun and unbearable heat, and are looking for a way to cool down - at minus ten degrees the Snow Room will be just the place.

• Lazy Productivity: 10 Simple Ways to Do Only Three Things Today | LifeRemix Blog ( Wednesday, Jan 30 at 08:28 PM )

This week's Roaster Boy's playlist

• Curtis Mayfield - Move on up ( Monday, Feb 04 at 08:02 PM )

  There are so many things right about this tune - the beat, the lyrics, the singing. -- Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com Drink from the well and yield your place to another. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Happy 60th Birthday, Vince Furnier, aka Alice Cooper ( Monday, Feb 04 at 06:48 PM )

  Also, Happy Almost 18th Birthday, MFH. This song, written and delivered quite a while ago, still tells the story of eighteen years old better than any other song I know: I'm Eighteen

• YouTube - Step Right Up (Tom Waits) ( Monday, Feb 04 at 10:27 AM )

  With a voice like rocks in a metal bucket, Tom Waits 'splains our As Seen on TV world : Step Right Up . The large print giveth while the small print taketh away.

• Rolling Stones - You can't always what you want ( Saturday, Feb 02 at 03:31 PM )

  -- Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com Drink from the well and yield your place to another. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

• YouTube - Talking Heads - Life During Wartime ( Thursday, Jan 31 at 03:28 PM )

  YouTube - Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

• YouTube - Dave Brubeck - Take Five ( Thursday, Jan 31 at 11:35 AM )

  You'd be hard pressed to find a more nerdly-looking bunch, but this tune, nearly 50 years old and with its iconic 5/4 time, still defines cool: YouTube - Dave Brubeck - Take Five

• Fleetwood Mac - Oh, Well (Live at the Boston Tea Party) ( Wednesday, Jan 30 at 08:36 PM )

  The Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac shows off its stuff in this somewhat-hard-to-find recording from 1969.

• January 30, 1969: The Beatles make their last public appearance with a free rooftop concert. "Get Back." ( Wednesday, Jan 30 at 12:33 PM )

  FARK.com: Fark YouTube Player (3363759) January 30, 1969: The Beatles make their last public appearance with a free rooftop concert. "Get Back."

• Fred Neil- The Dolphins ( Wednesday, Jan 30 at 11:29 AM )

  Another old folkie gem - YouTube - The Dolphins . We mostly know Fred Neil from Everybody's Talkin' , popularized by Harry Nilsson as a part of the soundtrack for Midnight Cowboy.

• The music in our heads ( Tuesday, Jan 29 at 09:04 PM )

  From time to time, we all have songs stuck in our heads. The folks in this story (NPR: Hearing Things: When Sounds Come Unbidden) , however, get music delivered through their own, bored auditory systems.

The sky is the color that Bellicheck's sweatshirt should have been

We went to a dandy Super Bowl party at Mike and Lynn's last night. They've put a fantastic entertainment room above the garage. We ate well, enjoyed the crowd, and stayed for the first half. The high-def big screen was just what the game called for.

Of course, what was really called for was the Patriots team that played the first 18 games of the season. There was plenty of suck to go around last night - the coach, for not going for the field goal, Brady, for throwing bad passes, the offensive line, defensive backs, just about everyone.

The theme in the NFL for the last 20 or so years is that, on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team. The quality of all of the teams is so high that it only takes a slight shift of skill, luck, or energy to raise up the low or knock down the mighty. The value of a team is what they bring to each and every game. Last night, the Patriots played as though they were confused and tired. In the past, their desire has overcome their confusion and tiredness. Last night, it didn't.

It wasn't a great game. Neither team showed great stuff. The Giants just played well enough to win.

So, now, we wait. The Red Sox equipment van leaves Boston for spring training next week.

And what the heck was the deal with that red sweatshirt?

In a house where the average age is 72.5

"Don't make fun of my hearing."
"What? You think my hair looks funny?"

Mid-winter inventory (nocwyhfl*)

*nocwyhfl = No One Cares What You Had for Lunch, a blog entry that is full of minor details that are probably of little interest to anyone outside the immediate family (and, even then, only if their lives slow down for a bit).

As noted before, we should have half of our winter's wood supply remaining at the end of January. We do. Nearly all of it is wood that we brought from my father's house. I didn't measure our supply in the fall, but I'd guess that it was about five cords. We burn more wood now that I'm around all day long. In the spring, I'll place another order for the coming year.

The sun is bright today, so it's a good day for laundry. The extra minutes we get each day add to the drying time available on the clothesline. We still have to finish drying the clothes on a rack inside the house in the early evening, but the good smell still lingers.

Our winter project is to get our office clutter trimmed down. I've cleared out a couple of small baskets, tossing some stuff and sending other to deeper storage. I've saved perhaps 10 pages out of a half-dozen shirt-pocket notebooks. ("Burn our notebooks. What good are notebooks?") We've cleared about half the shelves, a tasty bit of progress.

It looks as though we'll close on the deal with my father's house next week. The closing was originally scheduled for today. The buyers requested an extension, but said that they might be able to make the original date. Given that we're just about out of the original date, we'll go for next week. We have our final chores as complete as they can be, so now we're just waiting. For all the work that's gone into the house and sale, we've been extremely blessed with a lot of help from many corners.

Department of why people hate computers

We have a new desktop system at home, a system that I plan to keep fairly clean and use only for household chores - photos, DVD-burning, home finances, stuff like that.

I'd been spoiled by working in a corporate networking environment where you could pretty much just plug a computer into a network port and you'd be connected to everything that you'd need. It's taken me about a week to get our old laptop to see shared folders and a printer on the new system (running Vista). It turned out that I needed to start two services - Workstation and Computer Browsing - on the laptop. Nowhere in the official docs did that appear. I stumbled on it in an IT forum and, even there, it was just an off-hand remark made by the poster on the way to another point.

And, here's what happened the first time that I opened Internet Explorer:

This week's RoasterBoy playlist

• Paul Butterfield - East-West ( Tuesday, Jan 29 at 11:45 AM )

  The title track of one of the most interesting albums that I've owned. (I bought the vinyl album about 40 years ago, replaced it with a CD in the 80s, and have listened to it on my iPod since 2004.) The album is a mix of blues standards with a pop/jazz tune (Cannonball Adderly's Work Song)…

• Emmylou Harris - The Maker ( Monday, Jan 28 at 05:40 PM )

  A fine cover of a Daniel Lanois tune. -- Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com Drink from the well and yield your place to another. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Georgie Fame and his Blue Flames: Yeh Yeh (1965) / Co-authored by Pat Patrick ( Sunday, Jan 27 at 10:30 AM )

  Deval Patrick's father, Pat Patrick, wasn't much of a father, but ran with a good crowd as a jazz musician: Patrick shaped by father's absence - The Boston Globe .

• YouTube - Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush - Don't Give Up ( Saturday, Jan 26 at 10:19 AM )

  YouTube - Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush - Don't Give Up Or, if you'd like to have it shaken up a bit, here's Don't Give Up with Willie Nelson and Sinead O'Connor.

• YouTube - Jefferson Starship -- Wooden Ships ( Saturday, Jan 26 at 08:23 AM )

  How the hippies survived: Jefferson Starship -- Wooden Ships

• YouTube - Phil Ochs - Power and Glory ( Friday, Jan 25 at 03:04 PM )

  Strength and wisdom side-by-side with a deep and relentless pain: Phil Ochs on Midnight Special , with an intro by Curtis Mayfield.

• YouTube - John Coltrane - My Favorite Things - 1961 ( Thursday, Jan 24 at 06:43 PM )

  YouTube - John Coltrane - My Favorite Things - 1961 As memorable as Coltrane's performance is, the rhythm section, particularly McCoy Tyner, is the Atlas to Coltrane's new world.

• Jennifer Warnes: First We Take Manhattan ( Thursday, Jan 24 at 10:30 AM )

  Most folks know Jennifer Warnes from her duet with Bill Medley (Righteous Brothers) on I've Had The Time of My Life , a nice tune that's been seared into our prefrontal cortexes by those Sandals ads. You might also know her from her duet with Joe Cocker on Up Where We Belong . Excellent…

Multitasking makes us stupid and, oops, I've got to take this call...

"... certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy." From The Atlantic: The Autumn of the Multitaskers

via /.

Party on

We had a great gathering yesterday at our house for Mike's birthday, 16 of us at the dinner table. A few items were overcooked and someone took the ice cream cake out of the freezer too soon. (Ice cream soup, anyone?) Still, everything tasted good and, most importantly, we had time to talk and just enjoy each other's company. A lot of it had to do with being relaxed. Instead of worrying that there were kids running up and down the stairs and from room to room, we said, "Isn't this great?" The older kids found Spiderman on TV while the younger ones watched a bit of Nemo upstairs in our room while other just found ways to play. Marley stayed quietly in his room and was rewarded with lots dishes to lick clean after the company was gone.

Happy Birthday a couple of days later, Mike.

Department of Oxymorons: "How Murphy's Law Works"

If Murphy's Law works, does that mean it didn't? Howstuffworks "How Murphy's Law Works"

There is something going on here, ...

but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Olsen: YouTube - DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994

What your neighbors say about their religion(s).

237 - Regionalism and Religiosity « strange maps

A Compendium of 150 Monty Python Sketches

Lily knows the words to the Lumberjack Song because I sang it to her as a lullaby when she was a baby. In case you've forgotten the words, here's the sketch along with a compendium of 150 Monty Python sketches.

Baby-sitting, part next.

The word is out that they think that, somehow, I know what I'm doing as a babysitter.

BTW, there's a special place in Hell for the people who design the packaging for children's toys. Imagine having a new collection of Disney figurines in a thick plastic package with each of the figurines also wired into to place so that you have to untie these tiny wires while a three-year-old is waiting to play with Remy and the other Ratatouille characters. We finally freed the characters and had a delightful time, in spite of my malevolence vibrations directed at the packaging engineer.

Scientists vs. Gray Beards

Even though Scientists say time is slowing down, they aren't saying so from the perspective of people living their lives. For me, the days are getting smaller. No matter how precious each day's activities might be (and precious indeed they can be), the bags get smaller and slide past more quickly.

About the Patriots and winning ugly

Some days, we aren't great. Some days, in fact, we aren't even good.

The New England Patriots sneak into the Super Bowl. - By Charles P. Pierce - Slate Magazine: "His greatest gift always has been his ability to go completely egoless while playing a position designed for egomaniacs."

NPR: In Today's World, the Well-Rested Lose Respect

NPR: In Today's World, the Well-Rested Lose Respect

Listening to people claim how little they sleep reminds me of the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch by Monty Python (and others).