I can barely manage one thought a month.*
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*This doesn’t count.

I finally got around to reading a novel a friend gave me a while back, Beyond Sleep, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans. Enjoyed it immensely.

On Sunday I heard live jazz performed at a private home in Washington, DC.
The vocalist Ilona Knopfler was captivating, Steve Rudolph put on a great show on the keyboard, and my friend Victor Dvoskin brought his usual blend of intellect and passion to his accompaniment on the bull fiddle. After the first number, my hard-to-please college buddy, whose dad played jazz in New York City, turned to me and said, “We could be hearing this at Carnegie Hall.” But strangely enough, we were in the airy living room of a Russian émigré couple on MacArthur Boulevard. The afternoon more than lived up to the promise of the previous concert in January, featuring guests from Philadelphia and New York joining Steve and Victor.

Did I mention that this month is use-it-or-lose-it month at my place of employment? As usual, I have accumulated many hours of leave in excess of the number we can carry over from year to year, so, much as it pains me, I am taking time off work in May to the tune of 2–3 days a week. It is so indescribably liberating to be walking down Wisconsin Avenue at 11:00 in the morning, or 2:00 in the afternoon, dropping in to the hardware store or coffee shop. It makes me wonder: What have I turned into?

I still intend to write up a post titled Rhinochromatography. I don’t know why I haven’t got around to it.

Time for a nap.

I’m not going to make excuses. That would be as boring for me to write as for you to read. I’m not going to point at some other blogs that have been relatively quiet, as if to say, “Hey, that’s what winter is all about. Fields lie fallow. We sleep a lot, perchance to dream.” And so on.

Now, it is true that I’ve read several interesting books and would like to write something pithy and interesting about them to prove to myself that I understood and retained just a bit of them. It strikes me that February would be a good month to do that. So hold your breath, count to 10 to the tenth, and maybe find a pretty book review or two in the Basement.

I’m also overdue for a comment or two about Russia. Lots of stuff keeps happening there, for some reason.

In the meantime, go visit the new blog created by a colleague, Energy For Us All. It’s devoted to renewable energy, and I think it shows great potential.

I hadn’t realized there was a pent-up demand for peeking at other people’s “work spaces,” or whatever you want to call them. But I guess it’s human nature, еspecially in these virtual times we live in, to be curious about how other people structure their personal space—their actual physical living place; or let it be structured, if we might assume the existence of a countervailing nonhuman structuring force that bugs the control freaks but provides such a cozy world for the inspired, the distracted, the … slobs.

Be that as it may,* as a semiconscientious blogger who may have a devoted reader, I feel it’s my duty to satisfy the curiosity that, left unfed, would eat away at the innards and, in a colossal ripple effect, like the butterfly in the Amazon, destroy Western Civilization, or at the very least, cause the cancellation of the Super Bowl. Or the banning of commas.

So here it is—my hallowed “blog space”:

The wine is Dr. Loosen, a nice little white from the sunny slopes of Germany. The wallpaper is the cover of a Soviet children’s book from the 1930s, Вчера и сегодня (Yesterday and Today), written by the great Samuil Marshak and illustrated by V. Lebedev, about whom I know nothing—sorry, V.! The bronze Taco valve serves the first and second stories; the green-blue one (with the blue-green corrosion at the joint) serves the basement.
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*Isn’t that a lovely phrase? I would use it all the time, if I could. [back]

It all started Tuesday, when the database server became unavailable. Again. On Wednesday I started researching hosting companies. On Thursday I signed up with one and started moving files, replicating databases, etc. On Friday I changed my domain’s DNS servers. The rest is cleanup and learning my way around the new host’s impressive array of management tools. And wouldn’t you know, it’s cheaper than the old host. This move was long overdue, actually, but I’m lazy and loyal and prone to stick with people until things get atrociously bad.

And somehow it all worked out. Well, not just somehow. The tools at the new provider are excellent. All I lost (I think) is a month’s worth of posts on my family forum—luckily November was a slow month. (I thought for sure I did a backup when the database came back online after Thanksgiving. Turns out the last backup I could find was when I upgraded WordPress at the end of October—drat! Silly me: I thought I could count on my hosting company to back up my databases so that my backups were just icing on the cake.) Maybe I’ll get those posts back, if my database at the old host ever comes back to life (my contract with them doesn’t run out for a while, so I should still have access). Or maybe I won’t. No big deal.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I had been holding my breath or something for three days. A sort of constriction in my chest. Now I think I can relax. A bit. It is technology, after all. The minute you’re lulled into thinking you’ve got it under control … Pow! If it’s not a bad line of code or a hard drive that gives up the ghost, it’s a lightning-induced power surge or a cable that was taken out and reinserted one too many times, or any number of human-generated flubs or well-targeted “acts of God.”

Then again, what if all my silly little webs went down? I think the world would survive, and probably I would as well. I shudder to think what’s it’s like to be responsible for systems that lives depend on. Permanent thoracic constriction, no doubt. Or seventeen layers of redundancy. Or both.

(Sheesh. What some people will do for a shot at a free iPod. And I don’t even like iPods. I’m perfectly happy with my crummy old Zen Xtra, “with Its Large, Blue Backlit LCD Screen.” Really, I am.)

I was amused by the assumption involved, until I realized it was more likely a conclusion, since he actually knows me. But “five examples”? Had I displayed that much weirdness? Or is it, in fact, an assumption about everyone—that they are at least that weird, fivefold weird, every man jack of them? What to do, what to think …

Naturally I parried, but Thomas stuck me good. Then I forgot about the whole thing.

Until today, when I saw something in the restricted area of the Basement, where the dials and knobs are, and levers marked “Humor Level” and buttons labeled “LAUNCH” and “DELETE”: a link to a link on Thomas’s site that links to mine. Yes, I got dizzy. And as a result, I typed up five things.

Now, I still think this particular edition of “blog tag” will be less enlightening than some others I’ve seen. Does a weirdo ever think he’s weird (really)? Or take so-called normal people: do they know they’re doing something weird? Right—they do when someone tells them it’s weird. But do they end up agreeing it’s weird, or do they just think the other person is the weird one?

Who’s to say what’s weird, anyway? Haven’t you ever said, “Boy, that’s weird!” and had others respond in unison: “No, it isn’t!” You haven’t? Boy, that’s weird.

Weirdness is clearly in the eye of the beholder. (In fact, the word weird looks weirder and weirder the more you look at it.) The list I produce will almost certainly not be the list my family would draw up, or my coworkers, or my friends, or that person at the Safeway today who was looking at me funny.

But enough temporizing. Herewith, Five (random) Examples of How Weird I (possibly) Am (you be the judge):

1. I refuse to drink cheap beer, but will cheerfully drink cheap wine.
2. I never wear sunglasses. (Well, almost never. Very, very, very, very rarely.)
3. Every single T-shirt I have owned for the last 30 years has been given to me. (Not counting softball jerseys.) I think the last T-shirt I bought was from the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.
4. I have not gotten rid of my LPs (hundreds of them, many of them duplicated on CDs I own [some triplicated as mp3 files]).
5. I cut my own hair.

There! That was fun.

Behold the haggard blackguard,
Of bleary mien and weirdly green,
Lost at sea, tempest-toss’d,
Leaning o’er the watery deep,
Perhaps to sleep—his final nap,
Or maybe … maybe just to …
You know … toss his toast …

Now that’s weird!

1. Launching a redesigned website at his day job. The really fun part is cleaning up afterwards. It’s not just that things don’t always work as planned. It’s the old links. Once you let a link loose in the world, it takes on a life of its own. Thankfully there’s a neato utility called ISAPI_Rewrite for us saps using IIS that allows us to capture invalid incoming links and convert them on the fly to perfectly good new ones, with users none the wiser and not discomfited in the least. (Apache admins just use mod_Rewrite—or so I hear.)
2. Applying for a job … while launching a redesigned website. As the latter took precedence, the former may have suffered. Oh, let’s be honest: it suffered. In the event, the prospective job seemed less attractive after the second interview, so it was probably all for the best. But it would have been nice if I had spent more time reviewing my own résumé—that question about the “web policies” I’ve created and enforced really did have a good answer, I swear.
3. Driving up to Boston for our kid’s graduation from college. Visited Walden again—this time watching intrepid, or slightly insane, locals in wetsuits swimming the length of the pond at full tilt, and others doing likewise but at a leisurely pace with many pauses for sky-facing flotation. (According to Thoreau, the pond is 0.55 mi long and 102 ft deep at its deepest point. That’s a long way down if you get a cramp!) Also kids wading in the lifeguarded part and small groups, or couples, or loners sitting in the many small alcoves, on the stone slabs leading to the water, some reading, some writing, some drying off after a dip. Quite a contrast with our October visit.
4. Let’s leave out all the petty but compelling details of modern life, like a car that won’t start (or, more precisely, will start but won’t stay started), or neighborhood yardsales-cum-potlucks, or concerted efforts to divest ourselves of stuff on eBay …

Now, these would sound like excuses, and probably lame ones, if I had actually committed myself to entertaining you. But I haven’t, so it’s just an explanation, that’s all, and an excuse for me to stretch my fingers.