Dead soldier

That little unit to the right is the cellphone I've been carrying for the past 5½ years, a Motorola T720. For the past 13 months, it's been in the shape you see here; if you talked to me on a cell in that time, what you didn't see at the other end of the line was me clamping the little beast to the side of my head to hold it together while we chatted. The moments when I was stupid enough to try to answer it at the wheel of the car (yes -- guilty, guilty, guilty!) were true adventures indeed; the phone always seemed to sense that that was the perfect time to truly split in two. My old maxim still holds true: Never let a machine know that you're vulnerable, because it will take immediate advantage of that. At least I always made sure that I never answered my busted cell with any kind of traffic around me. (Or cops.)

I should note that it broke the night that Barack Obama was elected president. I took a break before the polls closed, knowing that I'd be chained to my Web-producer desk when the results started flowing, and called a good friend to chat (knowing that her husband was also working Election Night, and not just in typical news capacity as a reporter or editor, but in a sequestered "clean room" analyzing polling results). When I disconnected the call to go back into the newsroom, I noticed that the plastic/polycarbonate/whatever at the hinge had broken off. Maybe the phone sensed the momentous change ahead; personally, I like to think that it actually happened while I was in the middle of an unhinged rant involving Karl Rove swabbing a prison floor wearing chaps with nothing underneath. Whatever the case, its days were numbered from that evening.

But there's no denying that in the end, it got a whole lot more days than it deserved, mostly out of inertia and life distraction. Finally, though, between its decrepit condition, its technological obsolescence and my two teenagers beating on me to get their own phones and get out of social jail, the time came to make the switch and upgrade the whole family. So now as I write, I'm sitting here listening to Keren Ann radio on Pandora on the iPhone -- my old phone couldn't touch that!!! I was WAY overdue for this switch (and not least as someone advocating aggressive moves toward a smartphone ecosystem at my workplace).

And yet, I have a fondness for sturdy tools that have served me well. I still have a few: Barring some catastrophe, I'll turn the odometer on my '90 Honda Civic past 200,000 miles before 2009 ends. Maybe that's obsolescent too -- goodness knows, I don't take it over mountains or over any great distances anymore. But it still gets me to work, and around the flat floor of the valley in which I live. In much the same manner, the old Motorola kept me connected with family, friends and professional associates for a good, long run. When the phone started beeping this evening with the signal for a low battery, I found it just a little too hard to take and pulled the battery out. The feeling was, if not nearly as intense, still not unlike the nights when I saw my two cats over to the great kitty beyond -- the passing of a nice, innocent era that won't come again.

Still, I do have Pandora.......

24 hours of great smells

It started on Wednesday night, with the turkey stock I did. Yes, it was the "Thanksgiving" turkey, which may seem late, but since my sister-in-law was kind enough to have us down for a smashing dinner on the actual day, we did our turkey much later, and everything hung in there nicely without any adverse bacteria. So the odor that permeated the house Wednesday was awesome, thanks largely to the sachet that makes any stock really go. Of course, there's no real need to be slavish about following the recipe to the letter -- I found myself out of both dried tarragon and dried basil(!), so I just subbed in some herbes de Provence. No problem. (Can't do without the cracked peppercorns, though.)

The ultimate destination of the resulting stock was a turkey and sausage gumbo. This particular recipe gives you a choice on the roux...and of course the roux is everything for a gumbo, right? I take the decadent pick on this once-a-year occasion and do it with the recommended bacon fat. (The funeral is next Tuesday. Be assured that I died happy and well-fed before the heart attack.) Most of the gumbos I've done have oil as the roux base, which is far saner, but the difference is very real. I always feel with a oil roux like I'm shifting around quicksand by the end; there's nothing wrong with it, it does the job, but it's a little more....I don't know, manufactured. The bacon fat, on the other hand, just binds incredibly well with the flour. By the end of the stir, you could almost believe that you're folding a lovely brown chocolate for a fondue or something. And if you're going to stand there for the better part of an hour stirring without a break, let's face it, you'd like to feel good about the time and effort. I did.

There is one real drawback to choosing this method, I should note: You're stuck with all this bacon at the end. It's unbearable, I tell you.

So after the bacon rendering, but before the roux, it was time to get the Christmas tree. (When I got to my wife's office, both she and my son Danny, five minutes apart, immediately said, "You totally smell like bacon.") This year, we hit the Boy Scout stand in Kendrick Park in downtown Amherst, which is adjacent to Doreen's office. And this is where the nose-o-meter redlined. First off, it snowed here yesterday, and then a Canadian high blew in -- cold, windy, crisp air. Our first true winter day, so the conditions were just right.

The trees smelled amazing, of course. But the kicker is that they keep a woodstove going in the little shack, and the blend of fire smoke and cut pine was just incredible. It took me instantly back to when I did this myself as a Boy Scout; I was in a very active troop and we always had some funding scheme going to finance our regular, year-round camping forays. (Including snow camping in winter. We were really hardcore.) Door-to-door candy bar sales; newspaper recycling where you'd hit up everyone for their papers and do the car weigh-in/weigh-out; you name it, we did it to scrounge money. The tree sale was a perennial, and one that the Scouts still have available to them long after newspaper recycling has become a memory, I guess. And we'd have a barrel fire on colder days. Quite the flashback. On top of it all, I always drive the tree home in my '90 Honda, so now it smells wonderfully piney in the car.

I don't know how I'm going to top all of this tomorrow. Is anybody having a beachside lobster bake that I can hit? I can bring plenty of gumbo.....

The vampire chronicles, part 1 (or so I fear)

So here I am at 3:10 am -- that's EST, folks, here in western MA -- having a beer and listening to Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief (a much-loved album, definitely one of my 10 Under-The-Radar Albums Without Which You Don't Have A Complete Record Collection), and generally being quite awake. This is pretty much a lifelong pattern. I wouldn't mind arresting it, and have temporarily at times; I was quite effective on my first year at my current job, for instance, rolling in at 7:30 am and working a quasi-normal day like the rest of the human race and then doing other human-race daylight activities like coaching youth soccer teams. That general schedule got torched about 14 months ago, when I was still posting my news organization's Web site primarily early in the morning but also tracking a Red Sox playoff run and the Obama-McCain debates/election...which riled my general adrenalin level enough to bounce me back into my usual night owl tendencies. And here I remain, for now anyway.

(Discursion: I'm listening here to "Matty Groves," an insanely violent and fascinating murder ballad from the British canon that in the hands of Fairport was turned into one of the most driving, interesting songs I know in rock. I don't think Britney Spears has ever sung a song that has two killings, a brutal observation on class structure and an outright cynical commentary on marriage in two verses! The Liege & Lief version is fairly mid-tempo and doesn't have quite the impact that the band has given it in later years, but it does have Sandy Denny singing it, which is more than enough to be great. She remains the best voice I've known in my lifetime.)

In truth, I'm a natural night owl. My mind is just active at this point of the day. I seem to write best from midnight to 3 am and always have. Sometimes I think I shouldn't fight it...and yet I kinda like daylight, and interpersonal relationships with my family (who all rise at 6:30 am on most days), and the other benefits that come with rolling in roughly the same timeframe as most other people. I fondly remember the days when I would rise around 7 am and go running -- what a start to the day! Now that's been turned on its head: I'm far more likely to be on a treadmill at Planet Fitness at midnight, and I'm very happy that the place is open 24 hours on weekdays.

And so much of the music I love sounds better at night. Am I supposed to listen to Nick Drake singing "Pink Moon" at 9:30 am? Preposterous. Liege & Lief is a perfect example of this problem: I'm just not going to concentrate on the lyrics, or feel like the minor-chord structure of some of the songs fits the morning. That's just me.

(Another discursion: Now it's up to "Tam Lin," another traditional ballad from Olde England that is the song that started my fascination with Fairport Convention and British folk in general, as far back as grade school. As I was making the crossover to FM radio, this was a song that would crop up now and then, and I can still remember ads for a concert with Fairport and Renaissance on a double-bill at the Trenton War Memorial in 1975 -- the first show I can remember wanting to go to. I didn't, though, didn't think to ask "Can I go?" and wouldn't see a rock concert for another year. How I'd love to time-travel back to that and see Sandy sing once! But this song has never lost its allure for me. File it under "British pregnancy-by-supernatural-being ballad," a phrase that may define the term "subgenre" as well as anything else I can think of...but one that's still active -- the Decemberists got their entire current album from this subgenre! It all started here. Great song. I didn't realize for many years that the person responsible for the beguiling guitar solo was Richard Thompson.)

So, for now I exist in the quiet corners of the night. I had thought I'd take the vacation week I'm on and work on my sleep schedule, but it hasn't worked out that way. So be it: I'll get back to this topic after I deal with some other lifestyle things, I suppose. But I would say it's a fair bet that there'll be a part 2 of The Vampire Chronicles, sooner than later.

Liege & Lief. Just go buy it. (I guarantee the deluxe version is more than worth it, too...and that sooner or later I'll spring for it even at the import price.)

New spaces

Spent my first time working in my wife's downtown office space in Amherst. A nice space - pleasant, cozy, easy to concentrate in. I've done a lot of this over the years; for many years, when she worked in the communications office at Mount Holyoke College (as I also did on a freelance basis for a number of years), I spent many, many winter and early spring months in there on weekends so that I could work on a large white-paper project I did for many years without having to be distracted by other humans. Much the same tonight -- I was doing some freelance editing for a client of Doreen's on a book project and knocked off 2.5 undistracted hours without much problem. I just have to remember to take some instrumental music in with me next time I go there -- she doesn't have any! Amherst neighbors should drop by and check her space out sometime -- it's where the Men's Resource Center used to be, directly across from the Loose Goose.

Also found out she has a nice hardwood floor. My back is a little tight from a bit too much time on the treadmill last night (3 miles at a good pace) and not quite enough stretching afterward. Live and learn. So I laid on the floor for a while, which helped some.

Calling Evelyn....

ping....ping....testing (just so you know it's not a submarine)

Evelyn, are you there?

ping.....ping....

Now that's change we can believe in, my friends

Under the Bush admin, the whitehouse.gov site had more than 2,400 search engine exclusions (no doubt after too many blogs exposed stuff like them messing with their Mission Accomplished video). Lots of people noted how quickly the site changed today, but the real change is here. Mark this as the first move toward transparency after eight years of resolute refusal to have the people watch any part of their illegal business.