Author name: Rod

Down at our Nest in Seward this weekend. Happy Wife found a message in a bottle during her walk with the dogs on the beach. After we got the Police song out of our heads and let the paper dry out, what was legible suggested a poetic goodbye to love lost. Some dude named Jesi. We’re assuming he’s a he. Hearts, some broken, had been drawn on the back of the message. Happy Wife taped the pieces together and kept it. How often do you find a message in a bottle?

Presently waiting on a firewood delivery. A cord of white birch that the seller assured me is seasoned and dried. He was supposed to be here at noon, then he phoned at noon and said he was still in Kenai (~100 miles away) dealing with “fuel issues,” and now it was looking more like 3:00 pm. He texted me at 3:30 and said he’d been delayed by road construction. Made sense — so were we on our way down from Anchorage yesterday. It’s now 4:45 pm. I just texted him again. He replied that he just had a flat tire in Moose Pass. Weird, since Moose Pass is before the road construction not after it. Hmm.

Perhaps it’s time to get desperate, a message in a bottle maybe: “Anyone out there seen my firewood?”

Update: 5:45 pm. Now he had a flat on the trailer tire! He called and said he will offload as much wood as possible into his pickup and bring it here, but he’ll have to make several trips back ‘n forth to the crippled trailer to get it all. Poor guy. I called a number of likely places in Seward to see if they had a trailer tire but everyone’s closed for the night. Friends of ours down the beach road have invited us out to dinner tonight, AND they have a bottle of wine they want to share with us. You do what you have to do.

Got an internet bandwidth upgrade today. The flow into the house had been 1.0 Mbps, now 10.0 Mbps. Imagine you’re in your backyard, frustrated, trying to water the flowers with a nozzle pressure akin to a ninety year old urethra when suddenly, upstream, somebody undoes the kink in the hose. Sweet Jesus!

Let’s back up.

It all started with a phone call to Amazon customer support wherein I wondered why the movie I’d just ordered from them would not start. Downloading downloading downloading ….

Sir: We recommend >=3.0 Mbps for HD video. Have you tried the SD version?

Why no, I hadn’t.

Refund.

I purchase the SD version. Downloading downloading downloading ….

Email: Uh, yeah, me again. No go with the SD version either.

Re: Sorry to hear you experienced problems with Amazon Prime Video.

Refund.

I go to the web site. FAQ says: While we support 1.0 Mbps for streaming video, we recommend >=1.5 Mbps for SD.

Here, “support” means we’ll answer the phone and disappoint you by saying that 1.0 Mbps really isn’t enough bandwidth for streaming movies.

Ugh.

But I love Amazon so the following day I visit our ISP to upgrade our bandwidth. The man behind the counter raises his eyebrows when he brings up my account, “Okay then, 1.0 Mbps, wow, looks like you’re due for an upgrade.” His look of dismay akin to that of a dental hygienist when you haven’t brushed in four years.

Now, instead of bits entering the house through a straw we have a hose. Want a drink, get a bath.

All that was left to do was to reroute the Cat5 cable I’d run from the Blu-ray player, under the living room rug and to the internet wall outlet, through the crawl space instead. This, because Happy Wife had rhetorically asked, “Is that wire going stay there?”

Why no dear, I have a solution!

I drilled two holes through the floor, one through the cherry wood floor in the living room, and you want to have all your wits about you when you drill that one so it is in fact just one and not two or three because you mis-measured the reentry point for the cable. This precision required repeated round trips into the crawl space and back upstairs again, and now I understand why it’s called a crawl space.

This morning I’m experiencing a sharp pain in the general area of my 2nd Chakra, which, who knew, is essential to the proper function of my creativity, sexuality, finances — finances? — and other psychological mysteria.

Polar bears devour what’s left of a whale harvest. Kaktovik, Alaska.

Dogs during a mountain hike yesterday. Fall color just beginning to emerge up here.

Extra credit for readers who know why this place is called Powerline Pass.

BIGGER.

Selfie of Happy Wife at Snow City Cafe breakfast bar this morning. If you ever hear me talk about the lemon sucking look, this is what I’m referring to.

Amusing review of a compendium of really bad prose.

I realize I’m a blogger of comparatively zero significance, in terms of the influence my posts have in shaping or changing the mind of any blog reader out there, and maybe I deserve my place in the flyover of the blogosphere, either owing to the low quality of my posts or because they generally lack any intellectually provocative content — I mean really, beyond my mother & father (Hi Mom!) who cares what Happy Wife and I had for dinner last night. I get that.

But with regard to the Syria thing, can somebody explain to me why we, the USofA, are the only country in the entire world with the proper motivation and military chops to carry out a punitive missile strike on Assad’s assets, specifically the places where he either stores and/or produces chemical weapons? Why isn’t anybody talking about — and if someone is and I missed it please provide a URL where I can be so enlightened —  the one exception that seems abundantly obvious to me — Israel!

Obvious for two reasons: 1) moral/humanitarian motivation, and 2) military practicality & feasibility. As I’ve said elsewhere on the internets, Can you think of a population of people who should be more thoroughly & morally outraged by the government directed murder of innocents with poison gas than the people living in the modern Jewish state of Israel? Secondly, practically speaking, Israel borders Syria. Damascus and all other places within Syria where poison gas stores/facilities reside are geographically very close to Israel, closer even than the Mediterranean Sea where I suppose the US military would position its carriers from which we would launch our missile-laden strike fighters. And clearly Israel has the strike fighters and missiles to surgically disable said stores/facilities. The Israeli Air Force recently demonstrated this capability inside Syria where they obliterated stockpiles of weapons headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So Mr. Obama, why is it again you say the U.S. is the only country in world properly motivated and capable of doing this?

I can imagine one objection to the Israeli option: “Are you daft, Nibbe? If Israel were to take out the chemical weapons facilities with strike fighters it would provoke a regional war, draw Iran into the conflict, greatly destabilize the region and put “our” oil supplies in jeopardy.” But as I just pointed out, Israel has already deployed strike fighters against weapons targets in Syria, no middle-east-wide war ensued and the price at the pump was unchanged. Besides, the only middle eastern country the U.S. imports a significant amount of oil from is Saudi Arabia, and even that represents only 18% of our net annual total. So even if an area wide conflict erupted if Israel took care of this, we (USofA) could simply use our power to protect Saudi Arabia and keep the shipping lanes open. Seems like a much better and more justified use of our military power than provocative bombing in Syria.

Date night tonight! I was alerted to this fact this morning by Happy Wife before she left for work. Ordinarily home-based date night is Wednesday or Thursday. This puts me on the hook for dinner.

The lead I am challenged to follow:

BIGGER.

All ingredients locally provided except the chicken and feta. Peas from our garden. Preparation by Happy Wife. Baked-to-crisp prosciutto — TO   DIE   FOR.

What will I do? I can’t top this. Duplicating it would make me a copycat, a plagiarizer, a fraud!

Maybe I’ll just make her favorite, prepared with my own flair, a kind of Caprese salad —  Burrata cheese (hard to find!), heirloom tomato, avocado and fresh basil. Served with EVO and salt. A chilled, unoaked Chardonnay. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

I’m off to find Burrata. Wish me luck on that. If I can’t find any, I’ll need a chef, and quick.

Spent the past weekend at our “Nest” on the beach, working. You don’t ordinarily associate beach with work, but da light fixtures, day no hang demselves. Also finished the hatch door to the attic, which I’d fashioned from bead board leftover from another honey-do project in the kitchen. And it rained, I had no distractions (Happy wife & the beasties stayed in Anchorage), so momentum was on my side. Victor the electrician stopped by and fixed the outdoor light. The prior weekend I thought I’d fix it myself, got as far as establishing there was no power at the fixture or at the switch inside, then I gave up. Turns out the wires from the breaker to the switch had been cut and were hidden among a snarl of other wires in the breaker box, and I just missed it. Working in the confined space of a breaker box, bare wires sticking out here and there, without dropping power to the mains is not something I’ll ever be comfortable with. At one point I heard Victor get on the wrong side of some 110 when he touched a wire he thought was cold. He took this in stride; like a beekeeper getting stung he just rolled with it. Occupational hazard. No biggy. Me? Amps and bees frighten me.

Best $85 I spent all weekend.

So you might find it surprising I installed the light fixture myself. Here’s the thing: three wires I understand. A tangle of Romex and other wires choked together in a breaker box, not so much.

Three S-turns. Turned out nice, I thought. (Victor battles the amps in the breaker box).

Returned to Anchorage Saturday afternoon, washed the car and then Happy Wife and I went to a fund raiser for the Anchorage symphony. We were invited to come and  join a table of people we’d joined last year at a different fund raiser… because, I was told, we made the table fun. That put pressure on us to bring the levity along again.

We do our best:

Now, should you think we’re all just a bunch salmon smokin’, 4-wheel drivin’ bumpkins up here lacking any appreciation of the arts, well, you’d be wrong about that!

BIGGER.

That’s Latisha up their singing. From Ypsilanti, MI. The male duettist is from Flint. Both were American Idol contestants. An impressive set of pipes Latisha has. At one point, with full orchestral accompaniment, she belted out an enthusiastic version of “I’m Every Woman,” encouraging the women in the audience to stand, sway, and sing along with her. Experiencing a moment of gender ambiguity the man in front of me, dressed in a kilt, stood.

The evening ended with a ornament-topped desert and two encores, one of which was a pretty tight rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, complete with some pretty slick solo fiddle work.

 

I just learned that the glob of gastric gunk removed from Harry, in medical lingo, is known as a Bezoar.