Gin was already in our dining room by the time I got home, roughly an hour and a half early. It was, after all, the day before a long weekend and employers are more apt to suggest or be open to the idea of shortened days just before an extended leave. I have yet to quite parse the logic of that, but on the other hand I’m not sure I want to know since that would be uncomfortably close to biting the hand. I was rushing when I arrived; my early exit from work was choreographed with one purpose in mind: Get in some exercise before the food-oriented weekend.

Unlike most lunch hours, I had spent Wednesday’s noon break doing laundry and anxiously waiting for an important phone call that never actually came. But the early exit had left an opening prior to my normal quitting time and still before the scheduled dinner with HB and Gin. I raced to get my gym bag together and sprinted out the door, even overtaking Gin and Nik as they ambled out to make another bold attempt at shopping before dinner.

I met Doza in the parking lot, with unusually perfect timing, and had the foresight to double check about reserving a racquetball court at the front desk which helped since all but one were filled and several times during the match I caught some forlorn looking would-be player peering in through the small window in the door. The games were interesting; close, competitive and see-sawing back and forth in score. I won the first game by a single point after surrendering a fairly comfortable lead. The second game Doza won although it was my turn to rally back from a deficit. By the third game we’d played through 57 points, including a lot of long rallies and quite a few sideouts: We easily split 125 serves. I did manage to win the third game (and the match) with a startlingly simple realization that I tend to hit the ball too high up on the wall and give my opponents plenty of time to recover. By aiming a little lower I was able to score more points on the rally.

Still, it was a great match and I left feeling more than a little tired and more than a lot hungry. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant Gin and HB love called Jorge’s Tapatio. They have decent food, all you can eat hot tortilla chips and salsa, generous combination plates and pocket-friendly prices. Our town isn’t big on the dining selection, but if you want Mexican food, you have plenty of good options ranging from full sit-down fare like Jorge’s to little hole-in-the-wall Taquerias. Many of them are very good, too.

We got up fairly early on Thursday to get ready for the day. Nik and I called our respective parents on the drive over to HB and Gin’s place and then piled into Nikki’s Civic for the trek to San Jose and Thanksgiving feasting with Lister, Whimsy, RR and others. There were around 15 people there most of the day and long into the night. The dinner featured a Turducken (turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken) and a 12-pound prime rib infused with enough garlic to stun a yak. In the end I think Turducken is a better concept than actual dish since duck is kind of an acquired taste (although I happen to like it okay) and chicken and turkey are sort of indistinguishable when cooked together and placed on the same serving platter. Which is not to say it wasn’t good, just that I was sort of expecting to see slices of turkey/duck/chicken hybrids and once I saw Lister trying to carve the thing I realized that was simply not an option.

As usual my favorite part of Thanksgiving was the side dishes: Green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, squash and buttery sweet rolls. I ate enough for several men my size and sort of regretted it the rest of the evening as we sat around and grunted at the TV while the Sharks managed to lose another game. Later we played Gang of Four in which I, of course, lost horribly but did manage to pull the GoF-equivalent to the Royal Flush: A Gang of Six Tens. There is no higher hand in the game, and I used it to hilarious effect against Lister’s smug Gang of Four Sixes. A momentary triumph, perhaps, but worth it all the same.

I drove home rocking to The Killers’ Hot Fuss which I’ve even managed to get Nikki rocking to and finally made it to bed around 3:30 am. Friday was supposed to be a much more productive day than it was. In fact most of what I got accomplished was a thorough cleaning of the house with Nikki’s assist and a lot of TV and video gaming. I certainly wasn’t about to go shopping, but I had sort of intended to do some other productive sorts of work that ended up not really getting done. Saturday Nik and I went to breakfast at Nation’s and then packed up for the overnight trip out to her mom’s surprise birthday party.

Surprise parties are a little baffling to me. On one hand, I see the appeal of having a big shindig in an unexpected way. On the other hand, people don’t seem to do them right, I don’t think. For one thing they always plan surprises for significant milestone birthdays. In this case, Nik’s mom turned 50 on Friday. As part of the act we had to make ourselves scarce that day, which made Thanksgiving up at their place a little impractical (hence the San Jose trip). But in order to pull all this off, we had to leave her feeling quite upset that we were “ditching” her on her 50th birthday. To me, nothing spells suspicious like having your whole family act like your milestone birthday means essentially nothing.

Also, the party was set up at a country club restaurant which HB’s dad (who is married to Nik’s mom) rented out for the night. In order to prepare the event, he had to convince her to go out to dinner for her birthday (a day late I might add). As of an hour before her extremely elaborate party she was begging her husband to just let her stay home and be low-key for the night. This seems like a pretty significant roadblock and one that is bound to throw more monkey wrenches into plans than people like to admit. You’d think that just including the guest of honor into the fact that there was going to be an event would alleviate some of these issues. Perhaps let the scope of the event be the surprise.

Nik threw me a surprise party a few years ago. Now granted, I knew something was fishy. I’m not stupid, although I am a bit spacey at times so when she got all insistent that I not look at her computer for a few months and she got very upset with me the night before my birthday when I dragged my feet about helping her clean the house (and I mean clean in a way that she never bothers with) I thought “huh, that’s weird.” She also went well out of her way to run the show for the whole evening, “We’re going to dinner here at this time and the movies there at that time and then…” Not that mind since I like to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. But the odd phone call to a friend on the way home from the movies struck me as exceptionally odd. And it got my radar up. By the time we reached our apartment, I was on the lookout for oddities so when I noticed her mom’s car in the parking lot I knew as I walked up the stairs.

And this is what I mean by surprise parties being weird is that they take all this extra effort and trouble for the planners which is bound to make the guest of honor suspicious and if it gets ruined by one little thing (especially at the last minute) the whole thing feels like a letdown. And I did feel badly for not playing off my surprise better. I was excited by the time I walked in the door, but the big grin on my face gave away that I knew what to expect. The point I’m making here is that I’m not sure who surprise parties really benefit. I understand their appeal in a theoretical sense, but their actual execution is so difficult and the payoff for the target is so fleeting, I wonder if it can ever be said to be worth all the effort.

Anyway, we all had a lot of fun and the whole weekend passed by far too quickly. It wasn’t until the middle of the night last night as I woke to get a drink of water that I realized how lucky I really am. Being thankful for things is sometimes a very abstract state: You realize you are grateful that you have family and friends who care about you, you feel fortunate to have enough of the things you need and there is a sense of relief that you don’t have to try and come up with stuff to feel blessed with. But when you get to a point where you can’t be certain what is going to happen in the next two hours you have to be focused on the things that are stable and are worthy of gratitude. I sipped the water and stared out the window at the early morning darkness.

The cat wandered up, bleary-eyed and mewing softly. My hand absently stroked her head and after a moment I put the water away and walked back down the hall and into bed. I pulled the warm covers up to my chin and shivered for a moment as the chill from the night air fled my skin. With a sleepy sigh, I gently kissed Nikki on her cheek as she slept. Thank you, I whispered in my mind.

Who Wants Some Links?

These are leftovers from Wednesday. What can I say, it’s leftovers all week.

• TiVo, shortly after announcing iPod capability for TiVo2Go, seems to be suggesting that they might finally start supporting Macs. I want to believe, but the holdup has me wondering: They seem suspiciously reluctant to give a reasonable date and we’re talking about software that has, theoretically at least, been under development for over a year already. I think it’s safe to say that they did pretty much nothing on it up until this point and now that they finally see a compelling reason to support an Apple product (iPods with video) they have to scramble to deliver what they already should have made available.
• So at first I was unimpressed with the XBox 360. Actually, not really unimpressed, just uninterested in actually acquiring one. New hardware such as the PSP, Nintendo DS and XBox 360 is, in and of itself, pretty mundane in my mind. But I am a gamer and when a game intrigues me, I feel the urge to obtain it and/or the means with which to engage such entertainment. In this case the launch titles of the 360, aside from the typically ho-hum graphical upgrades to a slew of popular sports titles, held—so I thought—nothing of note. Then I looked deeper into Perfect Dark Zero. There are two opposing forces at work here: One is that Rare has released nothing of note in a long time after originally being a very celebrated game development brand name. The other is that this game sounds like what I wanted from Halo 2: Online co-op, detailed multiplayer and an enjoyable single-player campaign. It is indeed the co-op that really sells the concepts presented here in my mind, which of course means that the previously mentioned means to an end does not just require my own financial sacrifice/investment into the next generation of consoles but a trusted companion’s as well. And that may be asking just a little too much this Christmas.
• Okay, is it just me or do we need to stop acting like Wayne Gretsky is so special that he doesn’t even have to play by the rules? It was bad enough when he played at the end of his career and he got all those superstar calls (ie, some defender cleanly poke checks him and even though the “Great One” doesn’t fall the D-man gets a tripping call) but he’s getting them now as a coach? Come on.
• So I have an OS X problem that I can’t solve. Specifically, HB wants to mimic a feature that XP has in which video files stored in a folder have their file icon represented by a screen capture of the movie itself. OS X does this with image files, but video files always default back to the filetype icon (MOV, WMV, etc). Even if OS X doesn’t support this natively you’d think there would be a way to script a folder action that would open the file, take a PNG cap of the first frame, save the PNG as the file’s icon and move on to the next file. Yet neither HB, I nor anyone else I’ve asked can seem to find something like this. I was tempted to try and write some Applescript to do this very thing for him, but I don’t know squat about Applescript. I did find this script which doesn’t do what I want but is sort of in the ballpark. Maybe it is useful for someone to modify? Alternately, if you know of any good Applescript tutorials, toss ’em my way.

Whenever I start to write something and I think, “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this,” I go through a little phase of internal deliberation during which I usually settle on some sort of compromise. “I’ll just be vague about it,” or something similar. I’m big on compromises, because to me they feel like solutions. I like solutions: They’re masculine, action-oriented, results-bearing. We solved that problem. Grunt.

The problem with compromise is that while they are (or at least they usually are) solutions, they aren’t always good solutions. For example my maddeningly vague mentions of some huge event last week. The event wasn’t really that huge and it turns out it may not result in the Hallelujah Chorus and refrains of “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” after all. This is a fundamental premise of life, in which things that could be great can’t possibly always be so and things which we don’t expect to be worthwhile at all can at times startle us with their unexpected delights.

So in this case I wish I’d simply said nothing until there was actually something to say, and no one would have to feel disappointed for me and I wouldn’t have to keep being vague without context.

Call it a lesson learned.

Miss Elainey Us

Ohh, look! I can surf the Webs!

• Check it out, you can actually buy a replica of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.
• Gaming Horizon has new Tomb Raider screenshots. They look pretty nice, I must say (even if Lara Croft is seeming a bit anorexic). But visuals are not the issue here, of course, the gameplay is. In a series that has been stale since (no exaggeration) the third title (did anyone not loathe TRIII?), they’d better bring it with this iteration or I forsee the Tomb Raider franchise becoming as much of an industry object of scorn as Sonic the Hedgehog. Come on, you know you hate Sonic for the endless string of disappointing titles bearing his name. You ain’t gotta lie to kick it.
• Joel Spolsky has marvelous insights on the record companies’ desire to introduce variable pricing to iTunes Music Store.
• Amen.
• Okay, so soon TiVo2Go will be able to transfer to video iPods. Does that mean that they’re about to start supporting OS X (finally)? From the article:
  

  There is no information available at this time regarding support for transferring recorded shows to Apple Mac OS X personal computers, although one might infer that supporting MPEG-4 video will allow Macs to play such content.

  Uh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up, TiVo.

• Mmmmm…. Mp3 player in a NES controller. Brilliant!
• You should check out Bob Elsdale’s photographs. He has some stunning stuff on there: Animals, surrealist photos and some very impressive Photoshop work to go along with the excellent photography. The site has kind of a dippy flash interface, but it’s worth the annoyance.
• It is imperative that you stop what you’re doing and go download this collection of pop songs done in old school NES style. My new mission in life is to get “Final Countdown” in NES glory established as my cell phone’s ringtone. Also, it is curious how much Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” when digitized as such, sounds like it could have come directly from some obscure RPG back in the day.
• I’m telling you, landlines are old and busted. Internet calling is the sorta-new hotness.

This is not a real post, just so you know. This is just an update for people who may have felt like they were sort of hanging after Tuesday’s cryptic hinting. Your reward, of course, is more cryptic hinting: Today went well, maybe better than expected. I should have a full account either tomorrow or very early next week.

I play racquetball. Not competitively, of course. I, after all, suck at racquetball. But it’s a fun game and I do it so as to avoid becoming a fat slob requiring a separate love seat for each butt cheek. It’s a legitimate concern.

For those who are unfamiliar, racquetball is played in a medium-sized room with high concrete walls, one smooth-surfaced door and a small rubber ball that has a bit more bounce than a tennis ball. The eponymous racquets are a bit smaller than tennis rackets with shorter handles and perhaps slightly wider heads.

The idea of the game is sort of like playing tennis against a wall: Hit it before it bounces twice back at the wall, taking turns with your opponent, until someone misses the front wall or lets it bounce too many times. Often there are open spaces in the courts high up on the back wall for spectators and those who suffer from claustrophobia. Hitting it out of play is also cause for losing the rally.

Where the game gets tricky is that for the most part a well positioned player can get to more or less anywhere on the court because they aren’t that big. Also, bounces off of walls other than the front wall don’t count against a player who is receiving a hit, which means often you can use the back wall to reduce the distance you have to move to get to a hard-hit ball. The key is to get your opponent to commit to one thing and then do another or force him to move one place to return a hit and then use his less than ideal position to finish the point with your second hit.

It’s harder than it sounds.

Now, racquetball isn’t exactly a dangerous sport. Your biggest problems come from the occasional serve return that wings off the back of your neck or smacks you in the leg. Nasty welt aside, it only stings for a second or two. You have to wear protective glasses, but these are a formality since most people probably don’t come close to their eyes with anything very often, if at all. The only other factor is those concrete walls, which you can avoid if you simply choose not to sacrifice your body by diving face-first into them to chase a ball.

Danger or no, rest assured that if there is a way to injure yourself in spectacularly clumsy fashion—no matter how unlikely—I find it and test it out.

So here’s the scene: I’m playing Doza in a pretty close game. He’s far, far better than I am but on occasion I can keep it interesting and I’ve even won a game or two. It’s game two of three in the match, he’s already up by one. The score is close, but getting a bit out of hand as he serves: 8-6 and he’s scored four in a row, coming from behind. All day my hits have been flying out of the court so I’m trying to stay back. Usually when you hit a ball too hard too close to the front wall is when they sail out of play.

Doza serves to the right side, and I easily handle it, but since it was fast moving and a bit out of reach I have to stretch and settle for a soft lob back to the wall with no hope of aim or direction. Doza fights the return a bit, but lobs it up high toward the ceiling so it bounces up and over my head. I back-peddal quickly and catch it before it gets to that nasty low spot off the back wall where you can’t get underneath or behind it. By necessity, my return is high but Doza waits for this hit off the back wall and cuts in behind it, accelerating it forward and higher. It swings back into the right corner and I hit it high but soft, so it floats casually back to Doza as I find myself badly out of position.

At this point he has many things he can do. If he ropes it to the left corner, I might overcommit to getting it before it comes off the back wall and miss it completely. But that’s a high-risk proposition because if I do get there or judge it correctly, I have a chance to get a medium strength backhand in that hugs the left wall. Those are hard to hit without jamming the racquet into the wall. He could also try to dink it low and force me to sprint for it, but I’m already moving and I have a tendency to dive for low ones. I make it about half the time, too (even if I end up lying down and unable to get up in time for the next hit). So Doza does the right thing, he hits is firmly but high into the back left corner. I can make it, but if he did it right I’ll still be out of position and giving him another chance for an aimed shot.

He misses the hit a little long, so it doesn’t fall short back to the court. That gives me enough time to bank it off the back wall with a hard hit that will fly all the way back to the front wall. I had moved up to the middle of the court as the ball flew, so I’m running toward the back wall as it comes down, rebounds toward my swinging racquet for the necessarily solid contact.

Here’s the point where things get a bit hazy. One thing that is true about hitting off the back wall is that if you do that but hit it too soft, it won’t make it. The other thing that is true about hitting off the back wall is that you have to get the shot straight or else it banks too much, looses too much speed, and won’t make it. So I reach back and belt it. I mean I give it a good wollop.

Only I’m still running toward the back wall. And now the ball that I just hit straight into the wall as hard as possible is coming right back at me.

The way the next two seconds unfolded in my mind are thus: A blur of blue goes from small to immense in my field of vision with such rapidity that I don’t even react. A slap of stinging pain strikes me as the ball rebounds off my face. Instinct kicks in, and I reach up for my face, spinning away from the impact. Then a blossom of agony erupts in my skull as my forehead connects with something very, very hard and extremely unforgiving: The concrete wall.

I collapsed to the hardwood floor, clutching my head, hearing nothing, seeing only black with flecks of white. I thought, insanely, “I wonder if this is what they mean by ‘seeing stars’?” Doza tried to ascertain if I was in serious trouble or just needing to writhe for a while. It crossed my mind that I had heard my safety glasses skitter across the floor just after I bashed my noggin into a very unyielding wall. Or had the ball knocked them off when I smacked it into my own face?

Eventually I was able to open my eyes to a cloudy world. I staggered up and off the court, in search of a water fountain. I kept checking my head for blood, but my fingers came back drenched only in sweat from the game. Good news, except that a bloody mess is for whatever reason something that I consider easier to explain than a random bruise on one’s dome. Indeed, minutes after my altercation with the wall, Doza noted that I was developing a significant knot over my left eye and it had developed a crisp purple hue.

Since then the purple coloration has faded into a disgruntled-looking pink, but the swelling hasn’t gone down in the least. And I’ve had a headache ever since.

Plus, I lost the game. I’m not exactly competitive in the traditional sense, but if I’m going to suffer a near concussion, don’t you think for no other reason than dramatic impact that I should have won?

So I got some exciting news in the form of a possibility late last week. Without getting specific—and therefore getting myself into trouble—let me say that certain solutions may present themselves to several looming problems. As a guy who prefers to reduce problems wherever possible, this is obviously a positive development.

However, the news is tenuous, dependent upon several things happening just so and also a lot depends upon me in terms of how well I can represent myself. What that means is that I spent the entire weekend feeling like I was under a lot of very intense pressure. It’s a stressful thing to want something, but not want to get your hopes up for fear of being assaulted by crushing disappointment and then subsequently finding that the attempts to drive hopeful thoughts from your mind increase the level of stress. Cyclical and recursive in a way that no one would enjoy, that’s how I’d describe the whole weekend.

My efforts to distract my mind from obsession have yielded the following results, which you may or may not care to join me in regarding. Really, it’s up to you.

Ring-a-Ling

I got a new phone. From work, natch, so it isn’t some super sexy slab of awesomeness, but it is 4,399,716,884 times cooler than my old phone. It’s a Motorola v276 and it has a few spiffy features I like. The one thing it has is a functioning voicemail feature, where my previous phone did not.

It turns out that not having voicemail is a strange thing. One might think the reaction to having no voicemail is “I should make sure to have this phone with me at all times since I can’t miss a call and find out what someone wanted.” Maybe a normal person would subscribe to that concept. But not me. I decided that if I wasn’t going to be able to return missed calls, I didn’t care if I missed them at all. As such I barely ever carried my phone around with me.

Now there were other factors: I generally hate having excess stuff in my pockets and the old phone was compact but it was a brick. It’s easily twice as heavy as my new phone and it has maybe 40% of the features the new one does. That discomfort made it even more unlikely to be carried. I also never got any accessories for it, so it had no case, no belt clip, etc. When carrying it can only be accomplished via pocket and that is a poor option, the concept of a cell phone rapidly loses appeal.

In addition to better form factor and a few key accessories (as dorky as a belt clip makes me look, at least it’s a tolerable transportation option, and as long as my comrades and associates can get ahold of me, I assume they’ll cope with having to be seen with a Class-A nerd), it has a camera which is fun in the sense that having a crappy camera on you at all times is fun. I figure it like this: For all those times when I thought, “Man, I wish I had a camera for this—no one will believe it!” Now I do. It’s a little thing, but it keeps me entertained.

I do wish it came with a few games and an easier way to get the excessively lame ringtones updated into something awesome, but it’s better than nothing.

Actually, is not having a cell phone better than having even the coolest one ever? If so, I guess it isn’t better than nothing, but it’s better than before. Improvement: It’s also a good thing.

Strange Design Decisions

A few days (weeks? I dunno, they all blend together) ago I was talking about the flexibility of Unix-style operating systems and contrasting that with OS X, which is sorta Unix-style but covered with a think blanket of sassy GUI goodness that occasionally hampers the “selling point” of Unix.

So last week I was trying to accomplish something with iCal: Specifically getting a recurring event to happen on the last day of the month. The article I found explained how to accomplish this with a fairly simple set of command line acrobatics but the end result had me scratching my head.

This, in essence, is why the developers in the open source Unix universe spend so much of their time carefully crafting sometimes arcane configuration files for all their projects. It’s not that everyone will want to do something out of the ordinary, or even that anyone will want to do something the developer didn’t think was important, it’s that they might. What I think Apple, despite all their design brilliance and the generally high quality of their software, misses often is the fact that things can be simple without being crippled in terms of flexibility.

Update

As it took me forever to get this post finished, I have since encountered further developments on the front mentioned at the top of the post. It turns out that Thursday is now significant. As the outcome of that day will impact the next several years, I classify it as significant.

I’m sorry if my definitions are not up to your lofty standards.

I can only deal with Serious Life Stuff via silliness and being random. Just work with me here.

• Some dude made the Best Sandwich In The History of All Sandwiches. He’s dead now, of course, but I imagine it was totally worth it.
• I got an email about the Netflix settlement, and thought it seemed… hokey. Then before I had a chance to do anything with it, I see a site all about how the settlement sucks. Since the one-month non-automatically-reverting upgrade was dumb in the first place, I might actually help them out with this one. I’m always down to stick it to some lawyers.
• There’s an interesting article floating around about the Cult of iPod. Worth a read.
• Speaking of Apple stuff, HB and Gin are switchers now, which is funny because while Lister and I are both fans of Apple’s computers, neither of us tried to convince them to do anything unusual. They did it on their own accord. Weird. Anyway, they now own a nice 20″ iMac and two iPod nanos. They’re totally going to start wearing black turtlenecks and thick-rimmed glasses any day now.
• Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention is that there are a couple of new dealies in the Meta section over there on the right. One is a Feedburner feed, which you should use because RSS is awesome and using it lets you be cool, gives me a chance to track who’s hip to the ironSoap game and leaves your hair shiny without all that excess buildup. There’s also a service over there that lets you get ironSoap delivered via email, if you’re a big fan of email and my relentless blathering. Chalk it up to “features no one requested but I thought would be pretty cool anyway.”
• Today’s headline is ripped off, rather blatantly, from a headline a friend of mine wrote for our high school newspaper. He was a very funny guy, and I imagine he still is, even though I barely ever get to talk to him anymore. Lame.

Last weekend we were gathered ’round our new coffee table. By “we” I mean Lister, Whimsy, HB, Gin, Nik, myself and Eggman. By “new coffee table” I mean a cast-off from HB and Gin’s spare-room-turned-exercise-room that I nicked while helping HB muscle an oversized TV into their bedroom. Our motivation for being around a coffee table was to play Nik’s new party game, Loaded Questions, which involved asking pseudo-personal questions, secretly writing down the answers, reading them aloud at random and trying to get the question-asker to guess who answered what.

One of the questions was to name the most over-used cliché which caused a bit of consternation to our group since we’re all smart enough to know what a cliché is but some of us had trouble coming up with one. Of the six answers given I think only two were what would readily be identified as clichés in the traditional sense of played-out platitudes. Since then I’ve been taking a more marked notice of instances where clichés get thrown around. Today, for example, I was tempted to write at the top of this post, “When it rains, it pours” An obvious cliché, true, but the reason these sayings get repeated to the point of reducing them to triteness is that there must be a nugget of truth buried within. Or at least a common enough situation to warrant their application.

This week started off in fairly normal fashion. I had visited Bosslady over the weekend to pick up some assignments which would keep me busy and occupied throughout the week with contract work. As I came in to my day job I was thinking there would probably be plenty to do there as well, considering the fact that we were getting ready to power down the server room in less than ten days to do some serious clean-up of systems and wiring that had gotten out of hand through new hardware installations, maintenance work on the room, an upgrade to Active Directory, etc. But busy is okay. Busy is not bored, after all.

I should have known things were headed in a grim direction when Nik called after visiting her Pain Management specialist. She’s been having trouble with her back for a couple of months and they had gotten to the point where she’d gone for an MRI to see what might be the cause. It turns out she has a herniated disc in her lower spine, which is a not exactly a comfortable condition and is, apparently, an unusual condition for someone Nik’s age. The immediate impact is that she was forced to resign from her job at the grocery store because the list of limitations her doctor placed on her was unacceptable for the management. This, in turn, has had a pretty profoundly negative impact on Nik’s mental state because, frankly, she really liked her job.

It’s a sort of tricky situation to navigate as a husband because, just as frankly, I thought her job was basically pants from various perspectives. It required odd hours, limited income, a commute, schedule interference and—of course—manual labor. But regardless of the negatives from my perspective, she really did like working there and that’s something that one can’t readily dismiss. It’s not that I have trouble concealing some secret glee or anything, more that she’s pretty shaken up and while I can be supportive, I can’t really muster up a load of sympathy because my head doesn’t compute the idea that this is a particularly negative development. From where I sit it just sort of seems like, “Well, there you go: It’s not a good job for you to have.” Then she sits there, morose and unhappy and I’m left feeling (deservedly) like a heel because I don’t comprehend.

While this is going on, I woke up Tuesday morning feeling very out of sorts. My body had that deep-bone exhaustion that portends some sort of influenza, and it was only my even deeper loathing of calling in sick that forced me through the motions of my morning ritual. When I arrived at work my primary task was getting a replacement development server set up, and by 11:00 it was becoming rather obvious that it was going very poorly. A splitting headache had decided to join the party and frustrated that I couldn’t get any consequential work accomplished, not to mention that progress was being actively stunted by my growing incapacity for rational, pain-free thought, I made a command decision to go home for lunch and simply not return.

I secretly hoped that by fudging a sick day with a half day I might manage to weasel out of a full-blown illness. Instead I woke up Wednesday feeling even worse than before and at Nik’s urging, called in sick for a full day of recuperation-based moping. The one thing I must note about being sick in modern times is that while only a decade ago the temporarily impaired were forced to suffer through the drudgery of daytime TV, there is no shortage of quality entertainment options available to modern man, when you take into consideration the expansion of cable programming, TiVos, DVDs, wirelessly connected laptops and video game consoles with long controller cords that can reach a couch located across the room. Still, being sick is still accompanied by an annoying series of sensations that can only be described, mildly, as unpleasant. When your very skin feels like an affront to your otherwise perfectly rational nerve endings, it’s hard to enjoy the trappings of modern life to their fullest.

This morning I woke feeling only marginally, if at all, better than yesterday. I groaned from beneath my mound of blankets and pillows until far later than strictly necessary, weighing the relative merits of using another nine hours of sick leave. In the end I let work itself be the deciding factor and checked my email. The crushing weight of what seemed like an endless stream of urgent requests for web-related intervention roused me into a sort of unwilling action as I tried to pull myself together to make the six-minute commute and avoid being buried from another day of stagnation, work-wise. I wasn’t feeling the whole thing to begin with, which made me quite crabby and I moodily sulked downstairs to my car.

You know the sinking, wash-of-cold sensation you get when you discover something extremely unpleasant has just occurred? It turns out when you couple that with an already miserably hot sensation of lingering illness, you get something that I imagine were possible to successfully bottle and load into a syringe would render all other methods of torture instantly obsolete. The pile of glass around the passenger side door of my car spoke a volume of what had taken place in the cold of the previous night. The seat that was now covered with bluish shards of shattered safety glass no longer held my nicest jacket; the floor before the seat that had only a few hours earlier been home to my gym bag was now also barren, save the irregular shapes of sharp edges, refracting the blazing morning light. My glove box also lie open, empty except for a single fast-food straw I keep in there, just in case.

I spent a good portion of the morning getting further behind in work as I waited in furious silence on hold with the insurance company, glass repair shop and police department. By the time I finally made it to work I was in what may best be described as the foulest mood of my entire life. As the day went on my mood got a little better as I managed to pull the perspective of the day’s events into their proper context. It did little to soften the wrenching annoyance of the whole process, but it did make me less apt to physically assault any co-workers who might have attempted an ill-advised joke at my expense.

My only response so far has been to craft the following post, which tomorrow morning I will affix to the mailboxes around our apartment complex in an attempt to take the proverbial wild shot in the dark. Plus I think putting my thoughts out there for all to see will give me a sense of extremely self-important and uncommonly smug satisfaction:

Are You the Irresponsible Baboon Who Broke into a Saturn Outside of Building 20 on Wednesday Night?
Then congratulations! You’re now in illicit possession of:

• My Gym bag containing an iPod shuffle, a pair of stinky gym shoes, a Master Lock, my gym shorts and T-shirt, a pair of sweaty socks, my favorite pair of earphones, a half-used container of raquetballs and a first aid kit.
• My jacket.
• The contents of my glove compartment.

I’m not sure what possible use the proof of insurance, registration and the car’s manual could be to you. I don’t know what you want with my rank gym gear nor why you needed a jacket so badly as to swipe mine. I really don’t care since your intelligence is not under question: I’m completely convinced of your status as a Class-A ignoramus.

If it was really worth the effort, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt as to what your motivation was, other than selfish mayhem. In any case, consider the iPod shuffle my gift to you. Consider it a reward, of sorts, for being a particularly primitive neanderthal.

What I really want is the bag, jacket, headphones and glove compartment contents returned. They have no obvious value to you, so returning them should be of no particular consequence, you soulless twit.

If you return these items to the office, you are free to keep the iPod shuffle, no questions asked, although I will wish that the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpit hair. Don’t take it personally, I wish that on anyone with loose enough morals to steal from others without regard for what, exactly, they may be depriving them of.

Should you muster a few spare brain cells with which to clumsily operate the iPod, also be my guest to listen to the included music, which is likely of far superior quality to your own inebriated musical taste. The ancillary benefit of decent tunes may be looked upon as a secondary reward for your oh-so-clever felonious actions.

May their dulcet tones lull you in to a pleasant slumber in which you dream of a world in which thievery is punishable by the sharp removal of a hand.

Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood Saturn owner

Anyway, I’m going to bed now. I’ve pretty much had it with this week. And the uncomfortable thing that keeps running through my head is that It’s only Thursday.

For the love of all that is pure and true, there’s still two more days of this. It’s a good day the waiting period for firearms is three days. That’s all I have to say about that.