Kratzen vom Rathaus

The Real Reason I Don't Go to Large Concerts Anymore

"... and their Honda Civic Tour is playing at the Sleep Train Pavillion next month..."

WTF?
Play along with me, people. I still like to pretend it's about the music.

ATGATT, Baby!

ATGATT is an acronym used by motorcycle riders with a certain mindset about riding. (They want to live.) It stands for All The Gear, All The Time. And for those of you who remember the saga of Bob, my magenta leather riding jacket, you'll be happy to know I wear the thing pretty much all the time. Well, okay, I wear it just about whenever I don't ride the bike. I prefer my SWAT suit on the highway, thanks, just because it zips together to form a one piece suit. But Bob is useful as well as pretty- with many handy pockets and just the right weight- so that's the jacket I almost always grab when I'm NOT riding.
This morning, as I trundled down the stairs to take the Jeep to class (if you're late, take the car- and I'm always late on Saturday mornings) my right ankle buckled on one of the steps down to the garage. It was an amazingly hard hit, and trust me, I'm a good judge of stair tumbles. I have more experience in them than I'd care to admit. As I lay at the bottom, throwing fallen hockey sticks off me one by one and trying to calculate whether my ankle was really hurt or it was just shock pain, I realized I had hit my back on the corner or the steps and my right elbow on the edge of the wall. It took me a minute because neither of them really registered until I ran back through the impact in my mind to determine exactly what had happened. Luckily, I happen to be wearing a jacket with impact protection in both places. Ha! Score one for the biker lifestyle. My ankle and knee are both a little tender, but I'll take that kind of trade off any day.
Maybe I should start wearing my helmet around, too...

And Finally, The Fixator

Well, here it is. The long overdue Lynn post with the reveal of her external fixator. Forgive the photos, they were taken with the heepy's camera at random times along the way. Yes, I am such an evil friend I took pictures of her going into the ambulance. It made for some sorely needed laughter in the hospital as well as fine payback for Lynn's cell phone being all in French when I tried to access it to contact her family.
Anyway, Lynn is getting less self-conscious of the device, so I'm going to talk about it. It's really an update of the Ilizarov external fixator developed over fifty years ago in the Soviet bloc. If you ever wondered about ancillary costs of the cold war, here's one. Western Europe first seemed to get their hands on these in the nineties. We got them after that. Lynn's is the latest tech, with angled, adjustable suspension rods that provide for accurate bone placement in all directions. To a geek like me, the combination of science and real quality of life saving application is a beautiful thing. To Joe and Martha Schmoe, it's evidently horrifying. Lynn couldn't even look at it for the first weeks, until I got it through to her how marvelous the device actually was. It's a shame. I know people are squeamish. And if you are- ummm, don't scroll down- although there's really nothing to see. The gauze bits cover all the pin points and rods that go through to the bone. Lynn has eleven of them, which isn't bad. They hold the fractured leg bones in exact placement, allow for quick and precise regeneration of the kind you'd never get in a cast, and the fixator itself will support 1600 lbs in an emergency. This is not ugly. It is wonderful, and I think it's time more people understood that.

Another Definition of Dark Horse

Those of you not still slightly nauseated by the sight of Cuervo might remember that last Saturday had something other than Cinco de Mayo going on. Out here in the Hayward Rathaus, at least, it was also Derby Day- that spring Saturday where I make a nice southern meal, watch three hours of pomp followed by two minutes of racing and pretend I was actually sober back during the Derby Day celebrations of my mis-spent college years. Derby Day was a lot like a Buffett concert: everyone says it's all about one thing, but mostly it's just an excuse for a whole lot of fun. And in the case of the Derby, you get to see some of the prettiest athletes ever.
I love horse racing. I love the horses and the way their muscles undulate when they go all out. I love the fabulous clashing colors of the silks and the weird sort of retro feel to the whole affair. What I don't like is all the tobacco smoke that seems to pervade, or the fact that it's considered a low class pastime and that self-perpetuates. It's sad to see the sport of kings reduced to an old-fashioned form of keno for burnt out drunks. But the triple crown still remains above the detritus, at least. I consider that a good thing.
And so it was that I grumbled my way through class last Saturday, wondering how I was going to get both a derby pie and two racks of ribs cooked before three when class lasted until noon. (Yes, I know I can't call it a derby pie. Really, silly little restaurant, you have a fat lot of nerve. I also use band-aids and Kleenex, regardless of who makes them. So lay off.) To make matters worse, I realized halfway through class I had forgotten to record any pre-event coverage. But I got home to find out Tony had not only taken all possible DVR precautions for me, but had also climbed out on the roof and set the antenna to get broadcast coverage in HD. My husband loves me very much. We reclined on the couch and watched a surprising amount of interviews and whatnot. God save the queen, if only because she made for a lot of fuss and TV cameras that might not have otherwise been there. Because of this, I never did get around to getting the ribs in the oven.
Which turned out to be a good thing.
At 2:55PM, just after the parade to the track, a commercial coincided with the oven buzzer and I pulled my freshly made pie out of the oven. As I took care of that, there was a pop from over by campus. At the same time Tony muted the TV and I got a kick out of how the sudden silence was almost palpable. Then Tony cursed and I realized that it was so quiet because absolutely nothing was running: not the refrigerator, not the oven fan, not even the slight hum of the kitchen fluorescents- and absolutely not the TV. The screen was completely dark. Bad word!
Tony immediately came out to the kitchen to console me. But somehow I found the whole thing funny. I grumped a bit as I watched the clock slip past 3:05 on my heeptop and knew the winner was already being blanketed with roses. But the irony of it was awesome, it was like the old cliche of the power going out right when the TV sleuth is about to reveal whodunnit. It was even better when Lynn called to tell me she had watched her first Derby, based on my enthusiastic endorsement of it, and how fabulous it was. Thanks, Lynn.
All told, the power was out for about three hours while PG&E replaced the transformer. They're really very good about that sort of thing. When I lived in Belmont, I remember watching from my window while a guy on a pole fixed the lines in rain and wind so hard his slicker was flying out horizontally from his shoulders like a flag. So I don't blame them.  Really, I don't blame anyone. After all, everyone knows that anything can happen in horse racing.

OCD Revisited

Several months ago, I blogged about Kings Island and the Enchanted Voyage ride, which led me on a day-quest for the mp3. Then, like all of you, I forgot about it until some random person- who is very nice I'm sure, I just don't know them- posted a comment a week or so ago. I assume he was doing a search for something related, who knows. But he commented, which brought the post back from the depths. It also brought it to the attention of my good friend Lila.
Because she hates you all (or perhaps just because she ROCKS) here is the mp3 from the Enchanted Voyage in its entirety- meaning various versions of the same little jingle (actually a subversive little Hanna-Barbera commercial because the Tafts owned both KI and HB at the time) to go with the theme areas you went through on the ride. The xylophone is my favorite- it went with the 'scary' section.

Last Chance: The mp3 launches immediately. If you never went on the ride, it will be annoying. If you did, it will be nostalgic and will stick in your brain with the tenacity of JBweld. You HAVE been warned...

Enchanted Voyage Theme

Wild Kingdom

If you've never been to our house, we live in the suburbs and major metropolitan areas are not that far off. But the area is also close a greenbelt and has a slightly rural feeling, despite the fact that we've all got about ten square feet per house lot. That's what makes it interesting. Even though our yard is a joke, we don't have much of it and what we do have is almost all vertical, we certainly get the wildlife.
First there was the deer. One of the reasons we chose this neighborhood was because I spotted one of those "rats with hooves" (neighbor's term) here when we first scouted this area. The deer are really prevalent this year. I was aware we were in for a particularly deer-ific year when there were eight of them in the vacant lot across the street on Christmas Day. (Proof that Rudolf is a myth, I suppose.) We have two that are pretty regular right now- a buck and a doe who seem like yearlings. I think they're a little young to have fawns of their own, but maybe that's just my conservative upbringing.
Poppy was probably a little young too, but she still had her babies. And while on Possum Watch 2007, I have been surprised by others tripping the Possum Alert System (otherwise known as our patio light, which has a motion sensor.) The first surprise was the most heart stopping, as a I bounded to the patio blinds expecting baby possums only to see a cute, little skunk about five feet from the doors. Uh, nice skunk. Go on about your business, nothing to see here.  The poor baby was limping ever so slightly on a front paw. A few days later a huge raccoon was limping a lot more obviously on his left rear paw. Huh. It seemed unlikely that Poppy was fighting something twice her size. Finally, we saw what we assumed to be her boyfriend lumbering through the yard. We named him Porky because he was a huge barrel-chested opossum that probably would have initiated bar fights had he been human. Whoa. I just turned the porch light off and let him get wherever he was going before he broke a bottle over something's head out there. Why is it all the smaller mammals get better use out of my patio than me?
But it's the birds that make up most of our wildlife viewing, in sheer numbers if not in actual mass. We keep bird feeders of various sort that I spend the money to refill from the crazy bird store (named for the kindly eccentrics that staff the place, not for any neurotic birds.) Word seems to have gotten out that we got the Michelen five star rating, because they hang out in droves out there and we go through a huge volume of seed in a surprisingly short time. Sometimes, we even get to see more than just feeding. Our next door neighbor's house is so close to ours that we have a good view of his eaves from Tony's office window. So Tony spent a fair amount of time watching little birds grow up under these eaves. Evidently, the tiny ventilation holes in his house are perfect for starlings. Unlike our huge, grated ventilation holes, which are perfect for kestrels once they tear the grate off with their talons. Ahem. Anyway, two little birds fledged last week. This was wonderful to watch. At least it was until a feral cat snuck up the side of our house and grabbed one screaming chick. Eeep! You could just hear a Marlin Perkins voice-over on the hardships of life in the animal kingdom. We then spent a bit of time trying to keep the cat away from the other baby bird, which was a bit easier when two stray pit-bulls showed up. They were a boy and girl dog out for a spring romp and the girl was obviously a new mommie herself- she had so much milk, she looked like a mutated cow. Ow! I took our new dogs for a walk and tried to find the owners- after all, it worked for Muck. I don't know what it is about this neighborhood that they like their pit bull mixes so much, but every one I've seen has been well trained and well loved. I took these two around leash-less because I only had to clap and call and they'd come bounding back to heel. Great dogs. So I was glad when somebody finally recognized them. After all, there are hungry puppies somewhere. Sadly, we couldn't keep them for a while to protect the other fledging bird, who disappeared in the night. Either he got airborne or eaten. I don't want to know which.
A slightly bigger bird made its appearance this morning. In a re-enactment of the opening scene from Hitchhikers, the one where Arthur Dent goes about his morning not registering the bulldozer, I traipsed back and forth in front of the kitchen window trying to tell myself something was amiss. As I went to the coffee machine, I realized there was something dark in the backyard just beyond the bird feeder. What I consider the backyard is about twenty feet deep, so I really should have taken a second look. Walked past the kitchen window three times getting the machine ready to brew. Only when it was actually brewing did I take the time to look up. Straight at the turkey vulture, who was watching me with an intensity that made me wonder if my doctor wasn't telling me something. I jumped, which made him floof. Tony, the avid birdwatcher, happened to be working at home so he got a few pictures before the vulture took off. That's our little grim reaper pictured above. Yeesh. To his defense, there have also been a huge amount of wild turkeys this year, so many that I've actually heard them as well as seen them from time to time. Where there's an increase in turkeys, I guess it stands to reason there should be an increase in turkey vultures. But really, not on my back patio thanks. It's a wee bit unnerving.
There's also been the usual assortment of birds: finches are here for the summer, doves live in one of the feeders and the hummingbirds buzz each other in little dogfights for rights to the lavender and their feeders. It kills me all this goes on in an area where I can be on three expressways or intra-city rail in a matter of minutes.

I Left My Ossicles in San Francisco

Living out here in a multicultural melting pot, I often take things for granted. Which is why when I popped into the local Nijiya Market to grab something quick before class, I managed to make it all the way to the pre-packed sushi before realizing the background music was some of the twangiest crying-in-my-beer country and western music I've heard outside of Renfro Valley. I stood there for a moment, surrounded by groceries with undecipherable labels and listening to some song right out of Appalachia, wondering what I would have made of it twenty years ago. Global village indeed. I always liked the idea of that. I just never figured the town band would be playing bluegrass.