Whatta Fiasco

On Friday night, right after work, Ariadne and I left on our drive to Des Moines in order to go to the fencing tournament in Ames Saturday morning. No Halloween for us, but it was worth it.

We were looking for a non-fast food place to have dinner seeing as we weren’t expected at our host’s home until nine. That’s when we saw the signs for the Toot-Toot Family Restaurant and Lounge. How could we resist? And when we pulled into the parking lot we found it nearly full, which is always a good sign for a local joint.

Luckily the name wasn’t inspired by musical fruit. Instead, based on noticing that the tourist information office is housed in an old railroad car, we guessed that it was train inspired. Much relief. Inside we found a crowd of good old, buffet-bellied boys in farmer’s hats and plaid shirts. And no muzak. This place is all about the food, and Friday and Saturday nights they have a wonderful seafood buffet. Crab legs, cocktail shrimp, popcorn shrimp, fried clams, ribs, turkey, steak, fish, salad bar, pie bar, and more. All for twelve bucks. Good food (but skip the steak) and an excellent deal.

Around about our second trip to the buffet, the little kids started showing up in their costumes after having gone trick-or-treating, witches, princesses, skeletons and stripy cat babies. It was a great find and I’m looking forward to trying the place again. Maybe next time we can get there in the morning and have breakfast.

Back home, Lisa went to a Halloween party thrown by a friend of ours for young adults her age. By all reports she had a great time and didn’t make it home until two in the morning. All was good.

Last night didn’t go quite the way we had expected. The plan was for hubby to pick up both the kids and I would meet him at his mother’s house and we would, all five of us, go out to dinner to celebrate Lisa and grandma’s birthdays. Hubby got the kids, hit the road and called his mom to let her know we were on the way to pick her up. But she had forgotten about the outing and had already had dinner. Oops. And this isn’t the only episode of memory problems she’s had lately. My concern level is increasing.

Anyhow, we decided to reschedule. Instead the four of us went out to eat and that was good. Max is looking thinner than usual, but not as thin as he was when he had been living on his own earlier this year. We had some decent local pizza, dropped Max off downtown and then went home.

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Some quick movie reviews.

Real Women Have Curves is a sweet (but not saccharin) movie with good heart but suffers from showing too much of its heritage as a stage play. The supporting characters were not all as well developed (ahem) as they deserved, and the dialog and plot were both a bit stiff. And then there’s that little matter of editing butchery. (I hope it was an editing gaffe and not oversight.) America Ferrera is lovely to look at but why, oh why, don’t we ever get to see her wearing that beautiful dress her sister made for her? I felt cheated. But it was a happy movie with strong women. Three and a half stars.

La Brasserie is one of those turn the tables on the chauvinist pig movies that I never would have watched if not for the cache of being subtitled. Lots of pretty women prancing around in their underwear. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of underwear in this movie. And sassy women. And women who are unbelievable doormats. Surprisingly, by the end I was charmed. Three stars.

The Business of Fancy Dancing, directed by Sherman Alexie (Smoke Signals), is not for anyone looking for past-paced action or tight plotting. It edges around its point as nervous and uncomfortable as the protagonist. It takes itself a little too seriously now and then, but it’s all worth it. What happens when you run away and find yourself dragging behind you that which you were running from. Three and a half stars.

I’m about half way through reading Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. It’s as good as I’d expect Nabokov to be, even if this one was translated into English by his son Dmitri. (And even if Vladamir did use the forward to complain bitterly at being compared to Kafka!) But that translation was what caught my eye. There’s a scene where our protagonist, Cincinnatus, is visited in his cell by assorted family members as he waits to find out when he will be executed.

“Take the word ‘anxiety’”, Cincinatus’s brother-in-law, the wir, was saying to him. “Now take away the word ‘tiny’, Eh? Comes out funny, doesn’t it?”

Clever, and I’m immediately thinking, what was the original Russian? Off to google I go to plug in anxiety+tiny+Nabokov and I come up with (among other things), a paper entitled A Chronotope of Revolution: The Palindrome from the Perspective of Cultural Semiotics. It’s quite a mouthful, but an interesting little paper explaining the implicit violence in palindromes. Especially Russian palindromes. The original Russian version of the quote above played on the palindromic ropot (murmur) and topor (axe). So Dmitri preserved the axe and translated the wordplay into an anagram with a figure and ground in order to express it. Lovely.

Oh, my favorite quote for the day comes from Idle Words:

Those of you who consider government inherently wasteful might note that the same public agencies that are actually fighting the fires [in California] are also providing superb, detailed maps and satellite imagery of the areas affected, updated in near real-time.

Of course, these is also a dark side – infographics so horrible that they make you want to root for the fire, just to see the server hosting them go up in flames.

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to note that apparently there exist people in this world who claim to have read George Lakoff’s Moral Politics without having figured out that he’s politically progressive. There also exist (in other ways very fine) people who prefer their macaroni and cheese with catsup. If I hadn’t seen the latter with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it either.

Driving through the Flint hills yesterday we passed a man pulled over on the side of the road. More accurately his car was pulled over and he was standing on the shoulder in the grass taking a prodigious and unconcerned whizz.
We took a slightly different route into Nowhere this time and I noticed fields of low dark shrubby greenery with lumpy bright white flowers. No, really. It was cotton ready for harvest. I don’t think I’ve seen a cotton field ready for harvest since I lived in Memphis and I had no idea that anyone grew cotton in Kansas. We drove through several miles worth of fields. And then there was the orchard full of absurdly tall and upright trees penned in tight and regular rows. Too tall to be fruit trees. After the cotton it wasn’t hard to guess. Pecans.

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A friend of mine has a husband who was having trouble understanding just how putting more memory in their home computer was going to make it run applications faster. Imagine that it’s Thanksgiving and you’re having a whole bunch of different dishes. You’ve got your turkey and a ham, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, rolls, green bean casserole, candied yams, three bean salad, fruit salad, deviled eggs, and whatever your aunt Sally is bringing. You’ve got so many dishes in fact that there’s no way you can fit them all on the table at one time and still be able to sit at the table and eat. So some of them go onto a sideboard, and some of them end up back in the kitchen. Now when you want another helping of candied yams or a slice of pie, you have to get up, go to the kitchen, get your food, and make your way back to the table before you can eat. But if you could put an extra leaf or two into the table, you might be able to make it big enough to fit everything on at once, and then no one would have to stop and traipse out to the kitchen just to get something else to eat. You still have to go to the kitchen to wash the dishes when you’re done, but things go much more smoothly.

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I had been led to believe that Lisa was doing quite a bit better, even with her limited opportunities and support structure where her mom is now living. She is a little improved, maybe, but nothing like I had hoped. She seems slightly more aware that she isn’t living up to what’s expected of her, what she’s capable of. But she isn’t yet motivated to cause any change in her life and no one she’s living with is making any effective effort toward getting her to that place. It’s reminding me too much of all those years when we would see the kids every other weekend and we’d spend that weekend trying to help them and teach them. But it wasn’t enough and they’d go back to their mom’s house and start the cycle all over again.

We’ve tried explaining to Lisa that she doesn’t have to live with her mother, that there are more options in her life if she chooses them. But Lisa wants to live with her mother. Her goal right now is to convince her mother to move back to Larryville. Lisa hasn’t figured out yet that they’re living where they are because her mother doesn’t want to work, and that with the help of grandma’s resources and Lisa’s social security check, she doesn’t have to. But convincing Lisa that that’s what’s going on might not be such a favor either.

Even if Lisa agreed not to go home at the end of the week, I honestly don’t know if I could find the patience to give her what she needs. Partly that would be because I know her mom would eventually snatch her back and undo any work that had been accomplished. But partly it’s because I don’t think I have that patience right now. Not right now. I don’t like that, but there it is all the same.

Will I or will I not make it to fencing tonight? They’re in the process of moving my production server at work to a new network and a new IP address. I’m sitting here diddling about while waiting for some sign of returned life from the server. Let’s just hope it all goes well and everything is back up in about ten minutes.

Today was the third day in a row I’ve made it out of the house without my cell phone. What’s more amazing is just how seldom I forget it these days, even though no one calls me on it. Or if they do call me, I tend not to notice because I keep the ringer off. And when I don’t have the ringer off, it doesn’t ring anymore. Maybe it’s been talking to my iBook. Sometime in the last few months its external speaker stopped working. I’ve always joked about clipping the wires on my PC speakers (ok, there was that one time…) but my electronic gadgets seem to have picked up on my anti-noise mood. Poor little blueberry iBook has seen better days, as has the phone. There’s every chance I’ll be getting a replacement phone long before I replace the laptop though.

The god of wireless service has upgraded their calling plans and it looks like we can get an upgrade in service with a lower monthly bill, but we’ll need at least one of the fancy new G3 phones. In the meantime, my crufty little Timeport is sitting on the charger in the kitchen at home. Maybe the cats will talk to it.

Ok, the new server is up but the DNS change is still flying about in little packets. (Sugar packets?)

I splurged on myself a tiny bit today. I just couldn’t stand it anymore so I signed up for GreenCine, the alternative alternative to Netflix. And not only do they have a bizarre and wide ranging list of movies, but they donate some (unspecified) portion of their revenues (not their profits!) to film happy projects and organizations. So I spent my lunch hour filling up my queue with an appropriately wide-ranging selection and I received notification this evening that three dvds have been shipped and are on their way to me already. Within the week I should be watching Real Women Have Curves (I missed it in the theater), The Business of Fancy Dancing (from Sherman Alexie who also did Smoke Signals, which you really ought to see), and La Brassiere (which is not French).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

We got a call from Max the other night. He quit his job as an outbound telemarketer, but not before he found another job. That was excellent news. His new job still isn’t the greatest, but he gets to spend time outside and has the chance to make more money than he was in his old job. His housing situation still isn’t stable but he’s getting along.

Lisa turns twenty-two tomorrow and we’ll be driving down to Nowhere on Saturday to bring her back here for about a week. We’re looking forward to seeing her but I’ll need to get some more cleaning done before then. I was a little surprised that Louise was so happy with the idea and doubly so when she offered to pick Lisa up to take her back again. But it turns out she wants to use that as an excuse to borrow a car to come up to KC so she can visit some friends. Still, there’s little to complain about on that front.

At lunch today I read the Libertarian party platform. It was… interesting. I’ve long been fond of the Libertarian party because of their stand on social issues and because of the generic goodness of a third party to unbalance things. I was even registered as a Libertarian for a while when it was first made possible in Kansas. I still think the party serves a useful purpose but I could not in conscience register as Libertarian now.

The game I played was, what if this platform was implemented entirely as written? Imagine it’s October 22, 2005 and our Libertarian president is sitting on the front steps of the White House helping his kids carve some pumpkins.

In that world, your ten year old niece could be working sixty hours a week as a taxi driver for three dollars an hour plus tips and no overtime. On her way to work she can stop by the corner store and buy her choice of valium, oxycontin, heroin, or marijuana to use while she’s driving her passengers around town. No prescription needed. Or she can just pick up a twelve pack. So long as she doesn’t hit anyone or cause any property damage, it’s just fine. Her parents didn’t want her to smoke but neither did they have the money to send her to school, so she got this job and declared herself emancipated from them. She’s now a legal adult. She carries a variety of private currency to pay tolls because all the roads are now privately owned and the US government no longer prints money. She’s like to buy her own taxi instead of paying her employer for the use of this one, but she can’t afford the interest rate on a private loan of that size. Her older sister drives a tank for IBM’s private security force, her mother works in an MGM brothel, and her father is considering seceding from the country.

Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little, in a few places. But reading the entire platform was trippy, particularly the economic related areas. I can’t say as I’m crazy about paying taxes and heaven knows our tax system could use a good long hard look and plenty of improvement, but I still think it’s worth it to have a government functioning well in ways that are useful.

The days are flying by and standing still all at the same time. I’m still getting used to the concept of having weekends again, but a regular schedule hasn’t been established yet. Most of the dishes are washed but I have a ton of laundry to do and I haven’t made any progress on cleaning up Max’s old room. I need to go to the grocery store. And it looks like I’ll be adding another evening workout starting next week. If it drives me crazy after a few weeks I’ll have to rethink and try something else. But having a workout buddy and getting extra aerobic work in on a regular schedule would do me good. There’s also the bit about it not taking up the entire evening because I’m still not in that good a condition.

Now I just need some more free time for reading instead of staying up later than I should like I’ll be doing tonight. But not too late.

I still didn’t get enough sleep, but it was a good weekend. Saturday afternoon was the dim sum extravaganza. Shrimp and pork everywhere in uncounted configurations! And more! The end sum of the dim sum was over three-hundred smackeroos, but considering there were eighteen of us, that wasn’t bad at all. The wait staff offered to take Ms. K. in lieu of the bill but her parents politely declined. Tasty food and good company. And taro jelly is surprisingly good. Much better than coconut.

Afterward we did a little shopping on the plaza. This is something I more normally avoid like the plague but the crowd that had money to spend wanted to go to a gourmet cheese shop. How could I not? Except it is very strange to walk into a shop like that when you’re already so stuffed you don’t even want to try any samples of the exotic cheeses. And I do love a good cheese. Maybe one of these days I’ll get extravagant and buy an assortment of unusual cheeses for a cheese and wine party. Stranger things have happened. I’ll have to remember that one, but get someone else to pick out the wine.

Then it was next door to the boutique pet bakery. No, they don’t bake pets, they bake for pets. Walking in and seeing the pastry case though was a trip and a half. I might have even tripped over my jaw. At first glance, it looked like a people bakery case filled with delicate and scrumptious, fancy little pastries. Exactly like. Until you looked a little closer and then you might have guessed that it was fancy pastries for a whole wheat, health food kind of crowd. And the chocolate was all carob. And instead of snickerdoodles, they had snickerpoodles. At a dollar and half per piece and more, it was a lovely selection of impulse purchase goodies for the pampered pooch strolling through the shops on a beautiful day. I guess there are some seriously pampered pets out there (not that they don’t deserve it) because they were doing a brisk business.

Then it was time to go home and take a nap. The only downside to dim sum? Eating too much. Some would say (and have!) that easting too much is much the point of the fun, but there’s too much and then there’s too much. When your gut goes on strike and you’re not appreciably hungry until twenty-four hours later, that’s too much. At least the dim sum isn’t something we do more than once a year.

Today I made it back to the library to drop off a book and pick up one they had on hold for me. When I got the notice in the mail, I figured it was for the overdue fine I have outstanding. I owed them a dollar, No biggie. But when I opened it up this afternoon, I discovered that not only had they purchased the book I had suggested, they had also put it on hold for me. I shouldn’t have been, but I was floored. Talk about a nice way to put my tax dollars to work. Of course, now there’s no more putting off reading the latest Daniel Dennett, since they were so nice as to buy it for me. Aw shucks.

Then, after dinner tonight, Ms. K. and I had some quality time together where we mostly walked around watching the traffic go by. And petting the trees. Trees need to be petted too, you know.

After two months of renfest, it took Ms. K. time to decide that I was an acceptable playmate. Blowing soap bubbles in the kitchen sink helped that process. Then there was the walking around with a baby riding your shoulders. Very popular with the six month plus crowd.

The excitement for today was getting a phone call at work from an old friend and hearing him break down and cry as he’s looking for a ride to the detox center. Hubby was able to get him there. Not for the first time. At least this trip didn’t involve a stop by the emergency room. I hope it goes well for him.
And now I have an entire weekend with no renfest. Which is not the same as nothing to do. Tomorrow is an extravagant dim sum brunch with a best effort at a crowd of friends. Afterward I’m sure we’ll find something to keep us busy and some left over spaghetti caused by a minor lack of communication this evening. (But left over spaghetti sauce is more than just fine.) And after I’ve slept and have eaten, it’ll be time to do some laundry and figure out my reading list for the next few weeks.