We leave at first light

The car is packed, save for the Thermos bottles of coffee and our toothbrushes. We'll leave at 4:30. When Woody was a boy, the trip to PEI would take three days. Now, anything over 12 hours for the 650 mile trek is regarded as dawdling.

We have one recorded book, David McCullough's 1776, and my iPod for some music. The sandwiches are packed (pb&j). We have apple and raisins for snacks and water. We plan to stop no more than three times - the first rest area on the Maine Turnpike, at the Border to fill up on American petrol, and in Sussex NB.

Did you know that USB key chain drives can withstand a washer cycle?

RoasterBoy in the wilderness

This is the first RoasterBoy post from the camp. The telephone installer completed his work a few minutes ago and left behind a copper wire that connects us to the great net.

Progress sometimes comes unexpectedly on the shoulders of a somewhat unrelated event. For example, the 19th-century road graders ledt to smooth roads and allowed for reliable mail service that led to mail-order services such as Sears and Roebucks. This camp received its electrical service as a reseulf to the New Deal's Rural Electrification project. Those poles made it affordable for us to install a telephone. Our thanks to FDR, then, for this connection.

It's warm and sticky and there's barely a breeze. I might have time for a quick swim before leave to I check in my father and then go back home. He seems to be doing ok. I'll change the bandages on his arm. He's to go to doctor's office to have them changed on Thursday.

Postings will be infrequent, if at all, for the next few days. We're going to PEI to visit with Woody and Marian and Marley. We hope to see our friends, Pete and Mildred, on the way home. I may be online for a bit while I do some work on MRM's computer.

And that's why we call them patients

It was a step he'd made many thousands of times, from the boathouse to the ground. This time, though, with the ground softened by so much rain, he didn't slip so much as he lost his balance. He fell backwards, between the boathouse and the little stone wall at the back of the flowerbed. Naturally, I was most concerned when my father hit his head, but that turned out to be a lesser bruise. He said his arm was uncomfortable. He'd hit that against the stones, too.

We went up to the camp and cut away the sleeve of his sweatshirt to reveal an arm that looked like it had met up with a dull and determined potato peeler. He agreed that a doctor should see it. He wanted, however, to have coffee first. And we did. So, 20 minutes later, we drove to one of the community hospitals in the area.

(The insurance companies have us pretty well trained. We don't ask ourselves, "What's the nearest hospital?" We ask, "What's the nearest hospital that's a member of my insurance plan?")

The medical staff was pleasant, professional, never giving the impression that they were terribly understaffed. The waiting room was full to overflowing during the time that we were there. There was only one doctor in the ER. The triage nurse examined my father as soon as we arrived and put some bandages on the wounds. It would two hours before we would get inside the ER. Then, treatment was thorough, but slow, another three hours. He received a tetanus shot which lasts for another 5-10 years. It wouldn't surprise me if he got another one then.

So, he's home now with no further treatment other that change the dressings daily and respect the law of gravity. I'll check in with him by phone today and in person tomorrow.

I'm glad that we went, but if we knew that it was going to take five hours, we probably wouldn't have gone.

"Hello, World" redux

One of the women with whom I work is retiring next week. She and her husband have built a retirement home in New Hampshire. She's the second person to leave the group, both voluntarily, in the time that I've been there. The other person transferred to another group with an office closer to her home. I picked up one of the retiree's assignments, that of managing the software upgrades for the servers that we use for our testing. She's very energetic and out-going. So, retiring she is and retiring she isn't.

Through a professional society, I am able to obtain a discount on long-term disability insurance. The cost is surprisingly modest for the quality of coverage.

If you're using the Firefox browser, there's a nifty new extension that lets you send a text message to any cell phone directly from the browser. Give it a try if you're using Firefox and you have my cell phone number. BTW, Firefox 1.0.5 is available. This is a bug-fix release. Version 1.1 is nearing beta.

I'm in the process of moving my QueenLake domains (.com, .net, and .org) to a new hosting company. There are many safeguards that are designed to prevent domain hijacking. They also make it difficult for a legitimate owner to make a change. If the next step goes well, I should be on my new server by early next week. I don't expect that there will be any changes visible to the readers of these notes.

Not long ago, a former co-worker had hear bypass surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. One of his biggest complaints was that the hospital didn't have Internet access for the patients. Which is interesting, because Children's Hospital, across town, is among the 100 most wired hospitals in the country. For more reasons that one, sometimes it doesn't pay to grow up.

As I've mentioned before, because I am not a programmer by trade, I am easily confused when I move between programming languages . 'Hello, World' is usually the first, small program that a person would write when learning a new language. This page shows how various languages would handle this simple task.

Huck's stories - the well

From time to time, I'll record some of Huck's stories. My father is one of the best story-tellers around. His stories are good and he tells them well.

The camp sits on top of a small hill that's mostly ledge. In order to dig a well, my father and his friends had to use dynamite, much more easily obtained in the 1940s. There were several guys hanging around helping with the construction of the camp after WW II, members of the 52-20 club. The government was paying returning veterans $20 for 52 weeks. They dug as far as they could by hand and then drilled holes in the side of the well wall. They packed the holes with dynamite and attached blasting caps and wires. They put old cotton mattresses on top of the hole and laid heavy chains on top of the mattresses to hold the broken rock in after the explosion. Using a car battery, they set off the charge. Seconds later, the trees were filled with cotton stuffing.

My father went into the well with a sledgehammer to continue breaking up the rubble. After hammering for a while, he discovered (insert sound of blood draining from face) that one of the sticks of dynamite hadn't exploded. It was still in the well wall, blasting cap intact.

Thereafter, when they had to blast, they would only put one stick of dynamite in at a time so that they knew if it had exploded or not.

Stop reading this and get back to work

Some of the systems at work don't have solitaire installed at all or, if they do, it's installed in an obscure place. How do I know this, you ask? A study on salary.com reports that people goof off at work, that they goof off more than management and HR think that they goof off. I'm pretty respectful about separating work and personal business, taking and making personal phone calls on my cell phone, for example. I do read and write some personal email during the day and follow some news web sites. No, my time-wasting doesn't come from solitaire or www.nationalenquirer.com. My time-wasting results from spending a half day to write a script that automates a 10-minute, one-time task.

I watched the first few innings of the All-Star game last night. Manny didn't have a good night, but Johnny and David showed why baseball is fun in Boston.

Only Fox would have a new series called "The War at Home" start on September 11th.

My sleep has been particularly bad for the past couple of weeks, waking at 2 or 3, and sometimes earlier. I'm keeping a journal to record what changes in medication, diet, exercise, or stress affect my sleep or mood. So far I've been doing better than I should. I have a couple of project tasks due by the end of the day today, so I'll see how I do under a bit of pressure.

We gave this chain-saw sculpture, made by friend John K., to my father for his birthday several years ago. We keep the cat at the camp. The mice, as we've seen, are not intimidated at all.

Working for wages for a year

Today marks a year in my current contract job. It's been the right job for me at this time. The work can be very interesting and the people are nice. For those who care about such things, yesterday I prepared a set of use cases in UML for a project meeting. That was something I'd learned in my previous job, but hadn't applied much. Here it's something new and exotic. I am, however, quite detached from most the politics and strategy of the business. I've done that and done that pretty well in previous jobs, but that's not what's needed now. Although my job title is technical writer, my work is mostly that of an engineer or technical analyst.

In the past year, I've come to think differently about work. At IBM, I thought quite a bit about career paths. At companies before that, companies that were growing, I was excited at the prospect of building something. Now, largely because my contract limits me to 40 hours per week, I just want to make sure that I'm giving good value for what I'm receiving. Long-range thinking is setting a project deadline for some time in a month or more.

Language grows, evolves, sheds dead skin. What was once radical is now sweet. But never underestimate the power of the business world to hijack language and make it do a nasty dance. This site, weaselwords, has one of my favorites: capacity release, meaning, get rid of people.

This would be a great name for a rock band, Deathwish Piano Movers, if they weren't already a company that, um, moves pianos. They've been in business for a long time and I've long liked their name.

Holden's population is a bit more than 15,000, a town large enough to have its share of drama. From a recent police log:

• Caller received copy of Telegram and Gazette in his drive without his permission; advised to call news paper to stop complimentary copies; caller says he will seek criminal complaint against paper.
• Female came into station with snake she found; assisted and discarded snake for her.
  
• Port-a-potty stolen from Eagle Lake.

Coffee for Buddha

Sandra occasionally has her nails done at a salon nearby. The salon is run by a Vietnamese woman with other Vietnamese women in her employ. They always greet Sandra warmly and are especially reverent to Sandra's mother. Each morning the owner brings a cup of coffee and places it before the status of Buddha that sits on a small shrine in the shop. Buddha likes coffee with milk.

And when we don't go to Buddha, we go to Google. You can use Google as a quick currency converter. For example, recently, we learned that a Canadian prescription cost about $C74. That translates to about $USD56 or so. More here on how to use it.

The first time you try it, you and your partner are apt to be clumsy, uncoordinated, and unexpectedly wet. Doubles kayaking isn't for everyone. We rented a twin kayak over the weekend and learned that, for a variety of reasons, that's not what we want.

My father may have a buyer for his sail boat. He was sad. As he was looking it over to prepare for the potential buyer, he inspected each of the pulleys, stays, and spreaders. He knew he could have spent all day tinkering with it, but finally just had to walk away. Even if Sandra and I agreed to take the boat and readied it for the water, it wouldn't change the fact that his sailing days are drawing to a close.

We attended the annual lake association meeting on Saturday morning. Sandra is assistant treasurer and I'm on the board of directors. Her job requires much more work than mine. Most of the discussion revolved around inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal, boating practices on the lake. (The ne'er-do-wells, of course, don't attend the meetings or don't speak in their defense.) The beavers keep plugging the dam. The police chief said a couple of times that, "the complexion of the town is changing."

There are lots of reasons that bring people to vegetarianism - religion, politics, health, preference, the after-effects of a trip to a meat or poultry processing facility, or any or all. Well, for those who don't eat meat because of the way that the meat industry treats its animals, here's something to thing about - lab-grown meat.

We have friends who don't particularly enjoy dairy products. They have their morning cereal with orange juice. I may try it, but will do so with a skeptic's palate.

Other than Karl who took over Mike's landscaping business, I can sometimes go for years without bumping into another Karl with a K. Here's the science: the relative popularity of baby names over the last 120 years.

Last week I mentioned that Google had invested in a company that was planning to deliver high-speed Internet access over power lines. News reports this morning indicate that IBM is moving into this area as well. In the meantime, we now have a POTS (plain old telephone service) line to the outside wall of the camp. We might be connected this week. Or not.

What rough beast, indeed.

The Underground withstood the German onslaught, the tunnels deep and sheltered from the bombs. It mattered not that the escalators were made of wood and were a hazard for fire. The Underground helped Londoners win a war by wearing out their adversary. A new adversary, this time, turned the depth and strength of the Underground against the people, leaving no place for the destructive explosion to go but through the railroad cars.

I wasn't able to recite all of the lines from The Second Coming by Yeats, from which the title comes. So, I did a Google search for Slouching toward Bethlehem Yeats. The Google ads on the right side of the page showed several links for treatment of bad posture.

To quote Dave Barry, regarding 7/7, it's best that I leave the reporting to the real journalists. It's probably best for this blog to go back to doing what it does best. Whatever that is.
--
ZDNet is reporting that Google, among other companies, is investing in a company that delivers broadband of Internet access over power lines. I like this concept a lot because, unlike cable and like wireless, it offers the prospect of ubiquitous, networked computing.

Recently, we learned that a one-month supply of a commonly prescribed medicine that costs $C70 in Canada and, with an American HMO, $US15. Uninsured price in both places is about $US160.

In the meantime, a Canadian government panel is recommending that the Canadian government consider restrictions on the distributions of ibuprofen. Basically, they'd like to make sure that doctors and patients discuss the risks related to heart attacks before embarking on a Vitamin I regimen.

They say that it's Psalms 33:12. I say it's Exodus 3:5.

Wired and wireless

I hadn't been in the Starbuck's in Worcester for several months. They've added electrical outlets. People who were using the wireless Internet access often had to share a single outlet to recharge their laptops.

On this date in 1896, the U.S. annexed Hawaii. Kona coffee, the only coffee grown in this country, is among the best in the world. It has the sweet acidity of the east African coffees (Kenyan, Moka). Adam and Jennie brought some Kona for us. It's often the case that the Kona available on the mainland isn't pure Kona, but Kona-style Kona-blend. The real stuff is expensive and rare. Thanks to A & J.

I am certainlyl not familiar with the many state and federal judges who would be qualified for the Supreme Court. One person came to mind as an interesting prospect - Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. He is quite conservative; there's no doubt about that. But, he's a guy you can talk to. He and Ted Kennedy are buddies. Hatch is sharp and he understands the role of technology in society.

President Nixon nominated Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell was a man of, ahem, modest intellect and abilities. Senator Roman Hruska, R-Nebraska, rose to Carswell's defense, declaring that, even if Carswell was mediocre, there were plenty of mediocre people in this country who needed representation.

In addition to these notes, I'm going to resume a journal to record my sleep patterns and what medications, vitamins, exercise, diet, and other goings-on. My sleep has been very irregular. My mood has generally been better during the last couple of weeks.

[The Blogger spellchecker offers 'strabismus' as an alternative to Starbuck's.]

If you hear bongos behind you, it's too late.

During the night, when there is no moon, the sound of bongo drums echo across Queen Lake. Years ago, the southeast side of the lake was a summer camp for girls from New York. There was a very mean sailing instructor named Herbert. Herbert would steal the kids' lunches, make them sail even when there were thunderstorms on the lake, and censor their letters when they wrote home to complain. Herbert was so mean that he smoked, even in his bunk, because everyone was afraid to tell him that he couldn't.

One weekend, the kids had collected fireworks for a Fourth of July celebration. Herbert found out about it and confiscated all the goods. "There will be no parties around here," he barked. He put all of the fireworks in his footlocker. The rest of the camp on the lake were shooting off their fireworks, but it was quiet at the camp as darkness settled in.

Herbert had one last cigarette, as he usually did, while lying on his bunk. This night, though, he fell asleep and the bed caught fire and then the foot locker. The fireworks exploded. Herbert was on fire. Screaming, he ran to the lake, his skin falling away. As soon as he hit the water, he met up with a great snapping turtle. He pushed the turtle out of its shell and made the shell his new skin.

Thereafter, he lived in the lake and, from time to time, would seek his revenge by capturing a camper and dragging the poor soul back into the dark waters. He would signal that he had caught his prey by reaching back and pounding on his shell, as though he was tapping on bongos.
Some years later, the camp closed and the property divided up for house lots. Still Herbert, now known among the lake residents as Bongo Boy, is restless. Over the weekend, we heard the sound of bongos at a camp across the cove.

Mike is taking Tess and Krista to the camp this evening, along with some friends. I wonder who will get the top bunk.

With apologies to Ira Glass, the Tappett Brothers, and campers everywhere

---

President Jacques Chirac was reported to have commented: "We can't trust people who have such bad food. After Finland, it's the country with the worst food". And the Finns, gnawing on a piece of reindeer jerky, are wondering why they're being dragged into an international row.

Our lake association meeting is scheduled for Saturday morning at 9AM. Sandra noticed in yesterday's paper that a funeral is scheduled in the church for 10AM. I suspect that we're in for a quick meeting. The biggest issue of past years, a pit bull at one of the camps on the lake, is no longer a problem. The dog is gone. The dog's owners continue to rent the camp. A couple of weeks ago, when we were on the canoe ride with Lily, we saw one of the residents having beer for breakfast while preparing for a day of fishing.

The new Coke Zero tastes like they collected the spray from a skunk that drank a bunch of Moxie.

A local NPR station, WBUR, often uses a Rolling Stones tunes, 2120 South Michigan Avenue, as its exit theme on its Morning Edition show. The address is the home of the old Chess studio in Chicago. We visited the place, which is privately owned now, on a trip to Chicago in the 1980s. The tune was also used as an outtro on WBCN by morning guy Mississippi Harold Wilson, aka Mississippi Fats. He's no longer in radio, instead running a restaurant in Roxbury, the primarily African-American part of Boston.

Palms of victory

The centerpiece of a truly delightful weekend was our trip to Tanglewood in the Berkshires to see a live performance of Prairie Home Companion. We saw nearly all of it. (More on that in a moment.)

The Shed at Tanglewood, open on three sides, can seat more than 5,000. An equal number can sit on the lawn and listen to the show on a fine sound system. We had tickets for seats in the shed.

Moving 10,000 people in an out of a town is a considerable task. The Lenox police, assisted by the Berkshire County sheriff's Department, did a spectacularly bad job managing the traffic flow to the Tanglewood site. Granted, the route to Tanglewood takes you along some narrow roads and through the village of Lenox, but the volume of traffic is well known. They've been hosting such events, several times a week, for 65 years. The ride from the camp to the Lee exit on the Pike took just about two and a half hours, including a stop at Whole Foods in Hadley to pick up our dinner. It took us a bit more than an hour to complete the remaining seven miles, from Lee to Tanglewood. We had our tasty dinner of Thai slaw, French bread, potato salad, and coconut chicken in the car. I thought that three-and-a-half hours would be plenty of time to get us there. I was mistaken. We arrived about 10 minutes late, but, fortunately, had aisle seats.

Garrison had recently relearned a brief hymn from an aunt. He taught the hymn to us and which we reprised throughout the show:

Palms of victory
Crowns of glory
Palms of victory
We shall wear [emended @ 10:20AM]

He taught it in four parts. Peter Schickle led the bases and I found myself singing along. It fit nicely in my three-quarter octave range. I also sang the National Anthem, but spared everyone my attempts at the high notes.

The song, Palms of Victory, is a old tune. Bob Dylan used something similar in an outtake on the Times They Are A-Changin' album, Paths of Victory.

Why do right-handed people finger stringed instruments with their left hands?

There's a running joke in the MacGregor family. When Woody would go to a Red Sox game, he'd invariably leave at the 7th inning stretch and listen to the rest of the game on the radio on the way home. Often, they'd miss some dramatic comebacks. People were leaving right after the News from Lake Wobegon to get a jump on traffic. We hung around the grounds and heard a full half hour of encore music. One of my favorite performers, a regular on the show, is Prudence Johnson. She has such a clear, sweet voice. She doesn't record much, but brings a wealth of musical experience and expression to the show. She was featured during the encores. I bought a couple of Gillian Welch CDs in the gift shop.

We've attended three PHC shows and this was, IMO, the best. The music was first rate, the writing crisp. And, he read our card. I brought greetings for Huck from three of us and handed the card to Garrison at the stage.

So Prairie Home Companion has become the Lawrence Welk show for the Boomers. There were some people under 40 there, on their own, but not many. We sat next to a teenager, attending the show with her parents. She exuded the excruciating boredom that only teenagers can produce. Her parents tried to buy her things, but she would have preferred an evening at the orthodontist office. Our parents watch reruns of Lawrence Welk every chance they get. It wouldn't surprise me that standard issue for nursing homes in 2015 will be a can of Ensure, a pair of no-slip slippers, and a Garrison Keillor musical implant.

Getting out of town wasn't much better. The folks at the Department of Homeland Security should study the behavior of exiting crowds if we can ever hope to have orderly evacuations in the case of disasters of any magnitude. We had to walk along the side of the road to get to our parking area in the field. A woman honked at Sandra so that she could hurry along and wait in the line ahead.

We saw fireworks in various towns on the ride home, including private fireworks on the Connecticut River.

But we got back to the camp safely. The sky was clear, the lake was calm, and you could see the constellations reflected on the smooth water. A couple of years ago, Sandra and I took a course on astronomy, learning enough to pick out some basic features of the northern sky. We're pretty small, but we're where we belong.

The weekend weather was as perfect as you could get, warm when it was supposed to be, cool where it was supposed to be. We did experience a bit of news withdrawal. The world we'd left behind had a Supreme Court justice resignation, continued war in Iraq, the Live 8 concerts, G-8 meetings, continued famines and strife in Africa, and the missing-white-girl-of-the-week story. Naturally, then, channel 5, the best of the lot in Boston TV, had a story about a horse that was frightened by fireworks and ran away. But it came back.

That night, Sunday, we heard the eerie sounds of Bongo Boy out on the lake. More about him in another note.

Sandra will drive Phyllis to the airport shuttle station in Framingham and we will all make our way to our respective places this morning.

Good luck on your new job, Jennie.

O little town of Hackensack, How still we hear thee snore;

The picture on the right is an overhead view of our cove. The pushpin denotes the roof of the camp. By comparison, the site that looks like a runway is our neighbor's year-round home. The neighbors don't understand why my father didn't like what they did to the property.

Below is the perspective that a hawk would have on our house and yard as it's approaching from the south.

All images are courtesy of Google Earth. With the Google Earth software, I can tilt, zoom, and circle around. The images are based on an amazing array of GIS, satellite, and aerial data covering the U.S.

We had a large meeting at work yesterday regarding a reorganization. The major impact was felt by some managers who have new bosses as of today. The individual contributors are largely unaffected for now. I did talk with one manager who is in the process of forming a software tools group. He's still resolving issues regarding his budgets. He knows that I'm interested in such a job and that I'd likely be good at it.

This morning's automated search for a technical documentation position provides a lead on a Principle Internal Auditor. "And how are your principles doing this morning, Dilbert?"

Moving my work computer so that it faces the opening in my cube at work has had the desired effect. Not only are people not sneaking up on me, but people are stopping by to talk. If I really need to concentrate on something, I can take my laptop and work in a conference room or in the cafeteria. Most of the time, though, it's more important that I talk with people.

Every hour or so I get up and walk around the building. It's about a 1/5th of a mile. I walk clockwise. My friend Brownie used to like to have discussions proceed around a table clockwise. He said that, because that's the direction that high pressure systems circulate in the Northern Hemisphere, it brings fair weather to the meeting.

Sandra's at the camp with her cousin Phyllis. I'll go there this evening. It should be a quiet day at work and we may even be sent home early. Traffic was heavy yesterday afternoon, with people getting an early start on the early start.

Speaking of which, in a GMAC study of driver knowledge, or lack thereof, we're #2!

On Saturday evening we'll see the Prairie Home Companionshow at Tanglewood. Gillian Welch, one of my favorite singers, is performing, along with the usual cast. An added treat is the appearance of Professor Peter Schickele. We can only hope that he will pull another rancid gym sock from laundry bag that is the repertoire of one P.D.Q. Bach. (The title of today's entry is from P.D.Q.'s Christmas carol O Little Town of Hackensack.) We have seats in the shed.

Sunday night we'll watch the fireworks on the lake. The weather promises to be good. We will probably watch from Elden's lawn where there's a better view of the whole lake.

Happy Canada Day.

Fung shui rides again

It's coming up on a year at my job. Over the course of a year I manage to do horrible things to the software configuration on my computer. Installing and uninstalling trial products, there are shards of software all over the place. It was time, past time even, to reformat the hard drive and start anew, which I did yesterday afternoon. While that was going on, I was faced with an office that had its share of creeping clutter. Editing drafts stood in stacks on the corner of the desk. New project files were scattered among personal notes. It was time to clean house.

The biggest problem with cubicles is that they are designed to have you work while facing away from the door. A visit has not choice but to interrupt and, possibly, surprise you. Sandra gave me a little mirror, but people were still managing to sneak up. I have moved my computer monitor so that it's facing the doorway. I'm sitting at a bit of an angle to the desk and my back may be a bit torqued by the time I'm done, but it's worth a try. It's been said that if you're surprised by people's arrival, you'll be surprised by their ideas.

There's a big meeting this morning, announcing details of a reorganization in the group to which I'm assigned. I don't think that the changes will have any major, immediate impact on me. The director who called the meeting said that there would be cake. I was supposed to bring food to my manager's staff meeting, which was trumped by this other, bigger meeting. So now we have two Finnish coffee breads and a can of Spam Lite.

Sandra's cousin, Phyllis, is spending the weekend with us. She's flying from Chicago this morning. Sandra will meet her at the airport and, after errands, go to the camp for the night.

From the My VCR is Flashing 12:00 Dept.
There's a whole economic world of which I'm only dimly aware, that of ringtones. In brief, you can buy (or rent or lease or whatever the right verb is) short clips of music that play when you receive an incoming call. You can have different ringtones for different callers. In addition, you can have what are called ringbacks. In this case, the person calling you will hear a musical clip. I stumbled on to a service that would have let me use Freddy Freeloader from Miles Davis as my ringback tone. I think that these tones cost a dollar or two a piece, but I'm not sure if it's a one-time charge, a subscription fee, or something else. Apparently, enough people have figured this out to make the ringtone business very popular for the wireless phone companies.

New releases of Apple's iTunes and my new friend Replay Radio have made it even easier to record Internet radio shows for later playback. The radio shows were a part of my work day for several years and it's comforting to have them back. I'll wax nostalgic another time about radio, listening to Carl de Suze on WBZ and WBZA in the early morning darkness on school day, hearing Mississippi Harold Wilson play Paul Butterfield's East-West in a late 1960s night.

Michael Francis worked in our yard yesterday, splitting and stacking wood, straighten up some construction equipment of Mike's that we've kept in back. MF is bulking up for football. Earlier this week, he was carrying packages of roofing shingles up ladders and was sore for a couple of days. Football practice starts at the first of August.

In separate calls, I had good conversations with Mike and Adam last night. Our wives were out for the evening, so the guys got on the phone. The conversations meandered nicely on a summer's evening - from work to baseball to the expansion of the Smith College campus and the need for science and engineering program for women to communities and business networking (the meet-and-greet kind, not 800.11g). I brought them up to date on my health. I'd been having a couple of bad days, but, about 1:30 yesterday afternoon, the wet, wool blanket lifted and I was able to do stuff again. I'm really blessed to be supported by such a wonderful family and so many good friends. As I often quote Luis Tiant, they make me do better than I can do.

Adam, Jennie, and Lily spent Tuesday night at the camp. Yesterday morning an engineer from Verizon came to look over the settings. (See, I told you this was going to be a saga.) The engineer told Adam that getting phone service to our camp was going to be a big project. The last phone connection is at pole #22. We're at pole #30. The poles are 150 feet apart, many surrounded by tree cover. Adam said that the engineer estimates that the work will take a couple of weeks. I can't locate my phone-company-to-UTC time conversion table, but I think that two weeks is optimistic.

The sound of a phone not ringing

The pleasant young man from the phone company showed up at the camp yesterday morning. He was wide-eyed, an expression common to first-time travelers along the muddy camp road. He may have even been surprised that I spoke English. He asked if we'd ever had phone service at the camp before. I said no, but that our neighbors did. I directed him toward the woods in back of the camp and assured him that there was another house not too far away.

When high-speed Internet access was first offered, starting in the late 1980s, there was a good deal of talk about 'the last mile', that often-expensive and troublesome segment of cabling from the main service lines to the homes. It's not quite a mile from the nearest wired telephone at the lake. It's more like 300 yards, but the woods are thick and the ground underfoot can be ledge or swamp. The neighbors on the south of us get their phone service from one town, the neighbors on the east from another. (The neighbors on the north and west are fish.) The southside neighbors had to pay for their own telephone poles (as they have often reminded us). The installer couldn't quite determine how the eastside neighbors got their service; the line disappeared into the trees.

So, we have the makings of a saga. The installer said that he'd have to hand this request to the engineering team for further investigation. This will take a while.

Not far away, in the small town of Shutesbury, some clever people have assembled a wireless network around Lake Wyola. I think that there are enough year-round residents that we could put together such a service at Queen Lake. I may get a chance to talk about it with a few folks at next month's lake association meeting.

OK, so Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields believe that antidepressants can help people and Tom Cruise thinks that antidepressants are evil (transcript).

Last night the Canadian Parliament voted to allow same-sex marriages for all of Canada. It's still not clear if all provinces must go along. Prince Edward Island, along with Alberta, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories do not permit same-sex marriages. Besides, PEI has other things to worry about. The government is setting up cameras to take pictures of people illegally dumping trash in the woods.

Once more into the woods

Friend Tom often talks about corporate DNA, the tendency of an organization to revert to its original style, goals, and actions even as it tries to change. I thought about Tom during the 45 minutes that I was on the phone with Verizon as we a) tried to figure out why our phone line wasn't installed at the camp last Friday and 2) what we could do about that. Each person in customer service, billing, repair, and, of course, the eCenter (!), was very nice, very empathetic. The system in which they worked and with which I had to contend is, however, genetically Ma 'We are the phone company and we know what you need.' Bell. In my case, when I filled out the form on the web and selected Verizon as my long-distance carrier, I didn't select a plan. The online forms didn't require a plan, but the folks in the back office did. So, the order was put on hold. A very nice person named Bonnie figured out what had happened, reopened the order, double-checked the work order, reviewed the directions to the place, and said that I'd be getting a credit on my first month's bill because of my troubles.

We're going to try again today. The installation is scheduled for some time between 8 and 12. The camp will be a good place to be today. It's warm and quite humid now.

Also, I came home from work early yesterday and feel better, but not all better today. At my appointment yesterday, I learned that my doctor is moving to California at the end of August. He's been good - forthright, empathetic, good-humored, as well as competent.

Sandra and I had dinner outside last Saturday night. This was the first time we'd used our outdoor fireplace for cooking. The steak and potatoes came out well, perhaps a bit al dente, but very tasty. For dessert, I toasted marshmallows on the coals, using a skewer that my father made a very long time ago, long before there was thought of gadgets such as this.

At work we take turns bringing in snacks for the team's weekly staff meeting. It's my turn this week. I'll bring some Finnish coffee bread and the obligatory can of Spam. I doubt that anyone will want the Spam. It's best when served fried or grilled, bringing out all of its artery-clogging goodness.

There are some vegetarian readers of this journal. A visit to the Potted Meat Museum might make a few more converts.

Cooking with gas

The telephone installer didn't show up on Friday. I did manage to get some work done in the quiet. I also played with my new picture phone a bit. Sandra finished her errands in town and joined me shortly after noon. The nice guy from the heating company, Larry, finished the installation of our new gas cooktop.

We investigated the neighbor's tree that was hit by lightning (the tree, not the neighbor). There was no damage to their buildings. One tree was split and knocked over, blocking the driveway. Another had a black burn mark running its length. The next day, we could hear our neighbor and his son-in-law working with their chain saw.

We'd set aside Saturday as day of peace and ease. We walked in the woods, paddled around the north end of the lake in the canoe, swam, read, dozed, stacked wood and gathered kindling, dined on steaks from the grill. My father couldn't make it up the stairs, so we had early afternoon coffee and snacks in the shade near the boathouse.

On Sunday Sandra went to the Cape for Russell's first birthday party while I went grocery shopping for my father and did a few other chores around the house. Michael Francis and Joe rode with Sandra. I'd sent a text message to her cell phone. Joe (age 10) showed her how these messages work. So simple that even a child can do it. Verizon Wireless should package a child with each new phone.

The concept of free long-distance calls is a new and strange one. Until 20 or so years ago, phone charges were measured by distance - a call to Florida, Florida was a lot more than a call to Florida, Massachusetts. Fiber-optic cables have made national distances disappear. My father would prefer to (and does) drive 40 miles to talk with his friend Ted rather than make the long-distance phone call. This new cell phone plan will change things, but probably not quickly.

I attended a regional school system, two small towns joining together to make one small high school. The other town, Ashburnham, was outside of our local calling area until my junior or senior year. Until then, a call to a friend in the next town (a toll call) required much pleading.

My father hasn't been able to get to the dump for a while. Not that he makes much trash; the house is quite tidy. As I was taking one bag of trash and other bags of paper and cans for recycling, I asked if there was anything else. He asked how much room I had in my car (a Subaru wagon). When he was assured that I had plenty of room, he pointed me to three trash bags with cement that had gone bad. (Moisture had seeped in and hardened the mix.) Anyone have anything that needs to stay at the bottom of a lake or pond?

On the back road that leads from my father's house to the Wal-Mart in Gardner, there's a sign by the driveway of a small house: "Worms 24x7".

Woody and Marian were having company this weekend, so Marian baked cookies. She laid them out on the kitchen table to cool, covering them with paper. They had to go out for a little bit. When they return, not a cookie was to be found. The company wasn't coming until the next day, so Marian had time to make another batch. This time, she put the cookies on the dining room table, covered them, and went out. Upon return, not a cookie could be found, just a very happy dog.

We received a bill from the circulation office of the Worcester Telegram. The bill is for 34¢. The good news is that it's a final notice.

One of my favorite sites (though PG-13 and usually not safe for work) is Fark.com. One of the recurring features at the site are their Photoshop contests. Participants are given a theme and they have to use Photoshop (or other image-editing programs) to alter a picture to make it fit with the theme. This weekend, one of the contests was If the world were more like a cartoon...
By the way, Blogger has added a new feature that makes it much easier to add pictures to blogs. I'll try to be judicious in the number of pictures that I include here because I know that pictures can be very slow to load on a dial-up connection, which I hope to have at the camp real soon now.

Summer workers, some are not

While the installer from the phone company is stringing a phone line across a mosquito-laden swamp, the guy from the heating company is making the final connections on our gas range, and my father is learning how to set up voice dialing on his new cell phone, I'll be trying to get something that looks like a day's worth of work at the camp. Think it'll happen? Me neither.

This week we learned that lightning hit a tree in a neighbor's yard at the lake. This is the second strike in a few years. I'm not glad it's them, but I'm glad it's not us, too. One time we were expecting company at the camp. My mother had laid out the food on a table in the middle of the room. Lightning blew out a lighting fixture overhead, exploding the light bulbs and spraying the food with broken glass. We liked the people who were coming to visit, so we threw the food away.

The camp is at the edge of what was, a 100 years ago, a farm. There are still pieces of barbed wire along the back edge of the property. Lightning hit a tree, travel down toward the ground, jumped on the barbed wire, ran the length of the wire and knocked some boards off of the back of the sauna.

In Massachusetts, you have Cambridge and Amherst. In California, you have Berkeley. Coloradans, jumping up and down to catch the attention of coast-to-coast flights, shout out, "Hey, you want loopy. We got loopy right here." Hofu, human-flesh-flavored tofu.

Happy 1st birthday, Russell.

Would Kerouac have a Support the Troops magnet?

I was standing at the counter at the Verizon store in the mall, buying a new cell phone for my father and getting a free upgrade for myself. The young man next to me at the counter, holding half of a phone, asks the sales person, "Can you check again? I know had insurance on this."

Yesterday I found a solution to a scripting problem that had vexed me for more than a week. For those of you who care about such things, it had to do with handling very long pathnames in Windows. The problem had been blocking me from taking care of several other things, so I'm looking forward to visiting my to-do list anew. Tomorrow I'm going to work from the camp. We're having a phone line installed, but I expect to be working offline most of the time. I've signed up for a free NetZero account. We will get Internet access for 10 hours per month and will experience some ads.

We (I) often play the "What if" game. What if I had tried something different for supper instead of the old tried-and-true? What if I took that job last year where I'd be writing process documents for the pharmaceutical companies? It plays out on larger scales as well. People like to ask Peter Kramer, "What if van Gogh had had Prozac?" On yesterday's The Connection, the host and guests wondered what if Allen Ginsberg was releasing Howl now? Where would he shill the book? Jerry Springer? The Daily Show? Howard Stern on Sirius? "... who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, ..."

Musicians aren't like the rest of us. Here's the science.

The BBC is running this story about a big table and chair. Little do they know that Gardner has big chairs, too. I used to pick up the newspapers for my delivery route just to the left of this chair.

A couple of studies are showing that insomnia, more than just a side effect of depression, often precedes and may even trigger depressive episodes.

Eye to eye with a dragon fly

It's like there's a slit in a sack of bird seeds. A little leaks out and then more as the slit widens. Sometimes you can stop and repair it in position. Sometimes you have to lie it on its side to slow the out-going rush so you can make repairs. Depending on where the breach is, it can be difficult or easy stop the leak, repair it, and replenish the bag. I came home from work mid-day yesterday and lay down for a couple hours. I feel better, with only a slight case of overwrought similes as a side effect.

In an effort to recover the tough afternoon, I stacked wood for nearly an hour. It was warm, verging on hot, but there was a comfortable breeze and the work was mostly in the shade. A dragonfly followed me around like a pet. As best as I can determine, it was a unicorn clubtail.

Adam called late in the afternoon, reporting on their trip. He and Jennie raised money for stroke research (runners raised more than $3M total), completed their races, and brought back stories of strength and courage. We're very proud of them. Prices for Wyeth, the makers of Advil, (WYE, NYSE) peaked Monday morning and fell back.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned here that I'd had a BB gun as a kid. That surprised Adam. We never had guns around when he was growing up. But, as much as I could be, I tried to be a normal kid. I even went through that shoplifting phase in junior high school. While other kids were boosting clothes, candy, toys, and canoes (yep), I took books.

Silvio Berlusconi went to Finland and complained about the food. Pickled herring, beets, and turnip?

OK, it can stop now. I have had songs from the Anne of Green Gables soundtrack in my head since our return trip to Northampton on Sunday evening. It's nice enough music, once a year, maybe once every two years.

G'bye, Lucky. He was Adam, Jennie, and Lily's cat and passed away on Monday from renal failure.