Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Last night was the awards banquet and rescue auction for the Bichon Frise National Specialty show here in St. Louis. All the bichon powers from the Denver/Springs axis were gathered at one table, plus a couple of old friends from as far away as Pittsburgh. As that sort of dinner goes, it was exceptional: We had roast tenderloin of beef, with new potatoes, carrots, and string beans. (I gave my string beans to Carol, but the rest of it was spectacular--even the carrots.) The weakest part of the meal was the cheesecake dessert, but that was certainly workmanlike, and we all enjoyed the meal immensely, at least on the merits of the food.

I admit, I was something of an outsider. All but one of our tablemates were women, and most of them had attended a seminar on dog reproductive health and whelping earlier that day. I like puppies a great deal, but I'm not passionately interested in seeing them happen in Technicolor and real time. And of course, the old pros at the table all had their own whelping hax, honed over many years of ushering new puppy life into the world. Much was said about the "stuck puppy" problem, which is about what you think and can be fatal. I was hoisting a nice, medium-rare chunk of tenderloin on my fork when one of the venerable whelpers at the table offered the wisdom that "you can insert your index finger into the bitch's rectum and re-orient a stuck puppy..."

Some mental images take a minute or two to remove from one's head. I seized that opportunity to set my fork down and head for the men's room, hoping that we'd be on to something better by the time I got back.

And we were. The rest of the meal was uneventful, and we nibbled our cheesecake while the raffle prizes were awarded (generally hand-made bichon crafts) and the auction conducted, for the benefit of the national Bichon Frise Rescue group.

This morning was a quiet one for me; Carol wanted to watch the Obedience and Rally events, and I mostly kicked back and read a book, unless one of our friends was in the ring. Obedience is just that: tests to see how well a dog listens and obeys relatively complex commands. Rally is peculiar; it's basically close-order drill for dogs, with dog and handler working through a course of various commands like 270-degree and 360-degree turns.

I fetched back lunch and snacks as needed, and held QBit down while Carol practiced shaping the hair over his rump. (QBit does not like having his butt fussed with. Maybe he's heard too much about those whelping seminars.) By midlate afternoon all of our friends had had their turns in the ring, and we went back to our room and napped for an hour. We caught a quick supper outside at Panera (or St. Louis Bread Company, as they call it here) in gorgeous if slightly humid weather. Carol is now bathing Aero, and after she dries him, our more experienced friends will be over to the room here to offer advice on getting him brushed and scissored into championship form.

Aero hits the ring tomorrow eleven-ish, and whereas he's in pretty good shape overall, he is competing not against two or three other bichons (as he often does at smaller dog shows) but well over a hundred. Carol's putting her back into it and we're hoping for the best, but much depends on how well Aero "baits"; that is, how focused he is on Carol with a piece of bacon between her lips. Aero doesn't bait easily, and he tends toward rowdiness. The dog show thing for him is a glorious opportunity to wrestle with his own kind, even (or especially) when he should be daintily prancing around the ring. He'll get his chance, and I'll be on the sidelines, taking movies and praying that nobody nearby is in heat. Sex trumps even bacon--but you knew that.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

Well, we got here late yesterday afternoon, as planned. Still, as relatively painless as the drive was, it took its toll. Somewhere in the Great Big Illinois Nothing along the western reaches of I-88, I started to get a scratchy throat. By the time we got to Downer's Grove, I was sniffling--but there's no way to blow your nose while attempting a transition onto I-294, trust me. Carol gave me a Zicam as soon as I could take one hand off the wheel for a few seconds, and half an hour later, we go to the condo intact.

That last forty minutes was some of the gnarliest driving I'd done since we left Phoenix six years ago.

We didn't feel much like prowling for supper after a drive like that. My sister came to the rescue by ordering a take-out Italian feast from Salerno's on Wolf Road in Mt. Prospect, and once a little of their superb chicken tetrazini went down the hatch, I was a far happier guy. Julie is walking now, and big sister Katie is very close to carrying on coherent conversations. Kids grow up fast when you're not looking, even if you stop looking for only a month or so.

I was in bed by 9:15 and slept until 6:30. I'm still sniffling, but don't panic: It's the same damned cold I always seem to get after a period of intense stress and expenditure of energy. There's a lot to do this trip, and I'm by no means done with my book, but I'm taking today off, and in a moment I'm going back to bed for awhile. If I can keep my butt in bed and not expend any more energy than I already have, the cold will be gone tomorrow morning. That's the plan, at least. I'll let you know how well I do.

I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I've never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night's sleep every night I'd be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive Insurance commercials.) So I finally gave up about 5:15 and got dressed. I went out on the back deck to see what I could see of the Moon and Venus, to find that the positioning was optimal bad vis-a-vis the huge pine tree behind the house. My eastern horizon is very good, where I have an eastern horizon--and alas, the Moon was rising right behind the tree.

However, by 6 AM the pair had cleared the tree, and were getting very close. I put my Canon G-10 on its greatest zoom, propped the camera on the deck railing, and took some shots. The sky was getting pretty light at that point and I knew I wouldn't get much contrast, but there's something a little subtle and spooky about what I did get, and I'm quite happy with the shot overall. When I knew that the occultation was only a few minutes off, I went back in and got Carol up. We both watched it from the deck, passing my 8 X 50s back and forth and marvelling at the terrific weather.

I haven't seen a lot of planetary occultations, and there's a fundamental difference between those of planets and stars: Stars are point sources of light. When a star goes behind the Moon, it blinks out instantly. Planets fade as their disks are covered by the Moon's limb over a period of a few minutes. As I watched Venus dim, I realized that this was the first planetary occultation I've watched through binoculars. Every other occasion (I think maybe three) I was watching through one of my big scopes. I regret a little not having put the 8" scope on the back deck last night, but experience has shown that the deck is not a very steady platform for observing. (And the driveway looks west, with the house blocking the eastern horizon completely.) There's something to be said for brand-new experiences. Why always do everything the same way?

...were without incident, but not without irritation: Virtually the entire 200 miles to Denver I had to fight a 30 MPH crosswind, and I was very glad that our good bright sun had dried out the roads before we left Ogallala at 11:00 AM. QBit started getting kennel fever in the great big featureless nowhere that I-76 crosses in northeast Colorado, and Carol had to put him in her lap to keep him from chewing a leg off.

We took a short detour up to Lake McConaughy before setting out this morning, and found that the lake is now two feet higher than we've ever seen it, and higher in fact than it's been since the now-fading drought got serious in 2001. Whatever's been eating Nebraska's climate seems to have gotten fixed somehow, and since our atmospheric CO2 level has kept increasing all the while, I can only conclude that--gasp!--climate changes all by itself, in ways that we simply can't predict because, like the Wizard of Oz admitted in the basket of the Omaha State Fair balloon, we don't know how it works.

Anyway. The short form is that we're back in Colorado Springs, where last Thursday's blizzard shows a bare few remnants in habitual shadows but has otherwise melted into the soil. The house smells like plasticizers (as it always does when we're gone for a month) but the plants survived, and although we're exhausted and will be digging out for a day or two, the trip is over and I can get back to work on the book. I'm a little late with Chapter 8, but I'm now 105,000 words in (of about 175,000 words total) and I suspect I'll make the rest of the deadlines with a little scrambled eggs and caffeine.

We made 460 miles today, from West Des Moines to Ogallala, Nebraska. I would have posted last night, save that the iBahn Internet system used by the Sheraton in West Des Moines simply wouldn't work. They want $10 a day for the service, which could not complete a DHCP transaction to save its pointless little life. They gave me my money back, at least. And let's be clear on this: The hotel is excellent, with some of the best beds we've found anywhere along I-80. The food is great, the service wonderful...why is Internet access so hard for them? i-Bah-n.

So here we are, at the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala, watching an already soggy world freeze solid right outside our window, while the wind howls like something out of a bad Vincent Price movie. (So much for Global Warming.) The last 50 miles were a bit of a thrill ride. It had been sunny and 62 degrees noonish when we blew through Omaha (which, alas, has recently begun looking like the name of our President, at least from the corner of my eye) with the temps dropping steadily after that, amidst a constant 25 MPH crosswind. Come North Platte we were seeing light rain, which soon turned to sloppy snow. By the time we got off I-80, things were starting to look like black ice, and I was very glad to be done with the day's wander.

But enough about the weather. On Sunday, Aero decided that pulled pork trumps the desire to jump on the other contestants, and on the second day of the Clinton Iowa Kennel Club dog show, he beat Leeward's Ron Stoppable and got his sixth point. (Ron, a formidable 2-year-old recently arrived from Finland, got the point on Saturday by beating Aero.) Nine more (plus a second major win, meaning a win against at least three other Bichons of his sex) and he's an official champion.

It was the way we like our dog shows: two contestants, and each one takes home a point. Nobody loses, everybody gets some pulled pork, and the whole gang goes home happy. If only the Hugo Awards and government bailouts would work as well.

Carol and I left Chicago yesterday afternoon, and made it to Clinton, Iowa by suppertime. We’re now camped out at a Best Western on US 30 somewhere between Clinton and the next town west, DeWitt. I’m still depressed over Mike Sargent’s death and haven’t felt much like posting anything here, but judging from this morning’s email, people are starting to worry about me, so I figured I’d better surface and at least wave.

Hey, I’m all right. I get quiet when I’m sad, and between the ongoing crap weather and all the death and illness among friends and family, I haven’t had much to feel good about.

But today I think we turned a corner. Carol and I got Aero cleaned up and brushed out this morning and entered him in the Clinton Kennel Club dog show at the Clinton County 4H grounds in DeWitt. Carol’s been working very hard at sculpting his coat (under the tutelage of master groomer Jimi Henton) and he looks better now than he ever has in his two short years. He performed reasonably well this morning, in a small slate that included only one other male bichon. He probably would have won, but instead of prancing sedately around the show ring under the judge’s watchful eye (the judge’s name is Fred Bassett, by the way) Aero kept acting up and turning around to look at the dog behind him and get into play posture. Carol has tried various treats to keep his attention at shows, including the usual cocktail sausages and raw meat, all to no avail. Today we tried little pieces of Twizzler licorice, which didn’t work any better than raw meat. He’s a hard dog to motivate, I guess.

The second day of the show is tomorrow, and Aero gets another chance to behave and perhaps win a point. We’ve brainstormed what to wave in the air to keep him focused, and we’re down to desperate possibilities like dead squirrels and dirty diapers. We have a chunk of a fair bacon cheeseburger in the mini-fridge, and if that doesn’t work, I’d be scanning US 30 for roadkill…except that tomorrow is the last day, and after that we’re (finally!) heading for home.

I got a couple of really nice things for Christmas. Carol gave me a Canon G10 camera, a device that probably contains more intelligence than NASA had at its disposal in 1965. In fact, I'm still getting used to some of that intelligence, but...more on that later.

The other thing worth noting is a hand-made item from my sister Gretchen, before whom all things in the textile kingdom bow. Months back, when Gretchen asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told her, Make me a pasta poncho. I told her what I meant. And she did.

You see the results above. She took an ordinary 48" X 26" bath towel in appropriate tomato red, and somehow (this is a black art to me) inserted a turtleneck dead center. So whenever we have pasta now, I just pull it over my head, and I'm set. Nothing to tuck, tie, or button. And when I invariably dump some of the sauce on myself, well, it's machine-washable. (I always seem to wear white shirts the nights I make our trademark Front Range buffalo spaghetti sauce.)

The photo was taken yesterday evening, just before I lit into a pile of whole wheat spaghetti. I had a minor problem; I'm alone in the house. So I took the new Canon G10, put it on my tripod, and placed it across the kitchen table where Carol's chair usually is. While digging through the manual looking for how to use the self-timer, I discovered that the G10 has something new (to me): a face-recognition self-timer. It works like this: You set up the shot, select the face timer, and then trip the shutter. The camera waits until it sees a new face in the field of view, and then kicks off the self-timer. So all I had to do was amble (not run) over to my chair, grab my utensils, and look the camera in the, er, eye. Bang! Timer starts running. Five seconds later, photo happens.

It doesn't have to be a solo portrait. Get the family together in one frame, trip the shutter, and the G10 will wait until it sees you (or at least one more face) in the frame before it starts the timer. Sheesh. For a guy who began in photography with 120 Tri-X Pan film and a motheaten folding bellows camera (patched at a bellows crack with a small piece of Curad Battle Ribbon) this treads on the thin edge of spooky. I can see myself the day after Christmas 2019, arguing with my brand-new Canon G256:

ME: "Hey, lensface, this time take the glint off my skull, ok?"

G256: "Sure thing, boss. I can render CGI hair if you want."

ME: "Don't be a wiseass. You know what I mean."

G256: "That would be an image closer to your genetic reality."

ME: "A genetic reality that hasn't been fully expressed since 1982 or so."

G256: "But that's the Canon slogan for 2019: Reality never looked this good!"

ME: "Take the best picture you can. Don't screw with reality. Just. Take. The. Picture."

And I'd get the CGI hair. Just what the world needs: A WYGIWITRSB camera. ("What You Get Is What I Think Reality Should Be." )

Not that I'm complaining; the G10 is a pretty spectacular camera, and it doesn't talk yet. It can take macro shots that are almost like what you'd see through an inspection microscope. The thumbnail at left is a 1N23 microwave diode, slightly larger than life size. (The real thing is 5/8" long.) Click on it. Dare ya. Count the dust grains. Wow.

Anyway. Gretchen made a pair of ponchos and gave one to each of us. We hung them on hangers in the laundry room just off the kitchen so they're handy, and as soon as Carol comes home again I'm going to throw her a spaghetti feast like she's never seen before--and if I miss, well, she'll be wearing the poncho.

2008 was Not My Favorite Year. Too many deaths, too many illnesses, too many trips to the dentist, and too many financial collapses. I have high hopes for 2009, but that's part & parcel of being a Pollyanic Old Catholic. Hey, when you're down this far, every direction is up, right?

So in this, the last (I sincerely hope) Contra entry that I will ever edit by hand, I present my plan file for the coming year:

• Get Contra settled in to its new home on contrapositivediary.com under the WordPress platform. Easy one, though we'll know more tomorrow.
• Begin and complete the rewrite of Assembly Language Step By Step for the Third Edition, and hopefully see it into print by the spring of 2010. This is a big-un, and the top priority, as there is considerable money riding on it.
• Finish and publish Cold Hands and Other Stories, my second SF collection. Richard Bartrop has already sent me sketches for the cover art, and they look great. As soon as I can get "Drumlin Wheel" completed and cleaned up, I have enough material for a book, and after that, finishing it the book is just a few days of focused work.
• Finish Old Catholics, or at least get another 50,000 words into it. (I have about 27,000 words down now.) This has been fun, and it's certainly the quirkiest thing I've ever attempted to write.
• Build a couple of radios. I have the schematic for John Baumann KB7NRN's 2-tube FM BCB receiver, and that's tops on the list.
• Get my 40M dipole out of my alarm system's hair and do some hamming on the low bands.
• Get a 6M vertical of some sort situated in the attic.
• Get the last crown installed in my mouth. (This should happen in early February.) That's the end of a miserably massive piece of oral rehab that begin in January 2008, and (mercifully) this last step involves no cutting.
• Finish and launch a couple of model rockets with the local club.
• Read Many Books.
• Eat Less Sugar. Eat More Meat. Lose More Weight. (More on this shortly.)
• Enjoy the immediate presence of my wife, my dogs, and this extravagantly beautiful world.

Other things will certainly happen along the way, and maybe half of the above list will not happen, though I have great faith in the second item and complete faith in the last.

As for tonight, well, Carol and I will remain at home, watch a movie, brush dogs, and maybe have a glass of wine. There's a decent conjunction of the Moon and Venus just after sunset, and I intend to gawk at that a little. Come midnight, I may jump up and yell "Bang!" in honor of fireworks, if I'm still awake. (If I'm not still awake, the kids down on Villegreen will handle it for me, and I'll be awake one way or another.)

Happy New Year from both of us; like, how hard could that be?

I'm not even sure I've mentioned that Carol and I are in Chicago for Christmas, though it's a shorter trip than most and (as always) nothing has happened quite as quickly nor as well as we had hoped. This is worse weather than I've seen on a trip here in years: bitter cold followed by three days of more or less continuous precipitation. (As I was saying while shopping the last few days to anyone who would listen: "So much for global warming." Let's see if we can make it a meme, or at least a contrarian tagline.)

Yesterday was unusually bad here in Des Plaines. Our condo is only a few minutes from Randhurst Mall, the oldest enclosed mall in the Chicago area and at one point in the mid-60s the second-largest enclosed retail space in the country. So I decided to head up there, hit Borders on the outskirts, and then prowl the mall for some last minute gift ideas in the smaller shops. It took me half an hour to get there in our rented Camry, slipping and sliding down Rand Road at ten to fifteen miles an hour, dodging whackos in their CJs who didn't seem to grok important things like the reduced coefficient of friction. And when I got there, egad: They had closed the mall three months ago. (One downside to being an out-of-towner is being out of the loop. Hey, you coulda told me about that! This is my hometown! That was my mall! Most of my underwear came from Randhurst when I was a teenager!) When the snow melts (if it ever does) they're going to tear the mall down and build a "lifestyle center," which is code these days for "more damfool condos."

Well, they're certainly going to tear it down. Whether the condos actually happen or not, we'll see. In any event, some of the outlying big-box stores were open, and I picked up some odds and ends at Borders and Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Spotted a book I had heard about and meant to grab for some time: Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, (reviewed briefly here) which is a polemical history of the battle over whether fat or carbs make you overweight. You've all heard my opinions on that, and with some luck Taubes will have organized the research into a form that I can digest and cite to the carbohydrate deniers when they dive down my throat for eating bacon and eggs regularly and yet having the temerity to weigh less now than I have in 20 years.

I barely got home intact after threading the ice ballet back along Rand Road, and (having nabbed a reasonable night's sleep) will shortly be headed off to Crystal Lake (a 35-mile slither out Highway 14) to pick up Carol, visit her mom, and then mid-afternoon head back down to Des Plaines for our Polish Vigilia supper at Gretchen's. Vigilia is Polish for "vigil," and it's a Polish custom we observed on Christmas Eve when Gretchen and I were kids. In short, the family gathers for simple foods from the old country (ok, augmented by some odd Americanisms like Hawaiian salad) sweet red wine (the first Gretchen and I had ever had) and a blessing ritual I didn't appreciate until I was much older: Breaking oplatki (a thin white wafer like Roman Catholic communion hosts) with one another and offering a blessing and a wish for the coming year.

Do read what I wrote back in 2001 about Vigilia and oplatki. It's as true now as then, especially with our nephews grown men with ladyloves of their own, and Gretchen's girls becoming interesting individuals in their own right—and at top volume. After a run of years when it seemed like every Christmas there were fewer hands across the table to offer oplatki, life is reasserting itself, and reminding us that renewal happens. Bidden or unbidden, recognized or unrecognized, God is with us, and (as slippery as things get at times) life is good.

• Carol and I just finished the bulk of our Christmas cards. The cards we bought this year had little sparkles glued (badly) to them, and as we processed the 70-odd cards going out, the cards began shedding, and sparkles are now showing up...everywhere. I'm looking down at my shirt cuffs right now, and they're blazing like a disco ball. Next year: No sparkles!
• Illinois' illustrious governor will soon (we hope) be matriculating to the Governors' Wing at the Joliet Correctional Center, and I am displeased to announce that he went to my high school. In fact, he was a freshman when I was a senior, and his sneaky little face is in the Lane Tech 1970 yearbook. Pete Albrecht was also a freshman that year, and narrowly missed out on the cooties inherent in having a future felon governor in your homeroom. Pete tells the story at greater length (with scans from the yearbook) over at InfoBunker. (Scroll down to the December 9, 2008 entry.)
• David Beers passed along a link to what might be the absolute worst idea of 2008: Google Code's research project aimed at allowing x86 native code to run in a browser. Hoo-boy. My question: If the Cloud is so great, why risk being pwned at native-code speeds? (And isn't this what Java is for?)
• Google Books has very recently posted back issues for a number of venerable magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, CIO, Ebony, Jet, New York, Vegetarian Times, American Cowboy, and who knows what else. (I don't see a master list of magazines.) The PM collection runs from 1905 to 2000, and isn't just a scattering of issues, but damned near all of them. So what was PM's cover story the month you were born? (Mine? "Mermaid Theater." Wow.)
• Alas, you can look at the Google Books magazine back issues, but you can't save them to disk or print them out. Or can you? (I haven't tried this yet.)
• The wonderfully named Nevada Lightning Laboratory has managed to transmit 800 watts of power across five meters' distance, besting the previous record of 60 watts across two meters, set by MIT. The technique is not new, and was patented by our boy Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. Very cool, but are my wire-frame glasses going to melt when I step into the field with my Tesla-powered laptop?
• This Friday's full Moon happens only four hours from Lunar perigee, and is the biggest of the year, 14% greater in angular diameter (not especially noticeable) and 30% brighter (way noticeable!) than the apogee Moon we saw earlier this year. That's bright, it's high, and if you've got snow all over the place, midnight will be knee-deep in moonshine. (Not that kind.)
• 200,000 inflatable breasts got lost on their way from China (where there is evidently an inflatable breast factory) to Australia (where they were to be polybagged with a men's magazine) and have only recently been found in Melbourne. Just thought you'd like to know.

Earlier this afternoon, I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for literally years: Configure a dedicated domain for ContraPositive Diary. It's done, and I've pointed contrapositivediary.com to the WordPress instance I created back in September on Fused Network. I'm still learning it, testing it and interviewing widgets and plug-ins, so although the domain and the blog are now live, there's still not much to see.

That will change on January 1. On that day I will stop editing Contra entries by hand (as I've done since 1998) and begin using WordPress. Entries from 1998-2008 will remain pure HTML and be accessible as such. I'm going to copy them from duntemann.com over to contrapositivediary.com, but the copies on duntemann.com will remain there until I kill the Sectorlink hosting account and move the domain over to Fused Network. I intend to keep my LiveJournal account, and use the LJXP crossposter plug-in to automatically cross-post anything I post on WordPress to LJ.

There's a lot of other stuff on duntemann.com that has to go somewhere. The duntemann.com domain is begging for a new index page anyway, and I'm working on how to organize it. I do know that my Maker material on electronics, telescopes, and kites will all be rewritten using CSS and placed under my junkbox.com index. I intend to install a new instance of the Gallery photo manager there, and move the Tech Projects portion of gallery.duntemann.com over to gallery.junkbox.com. Beyond that, well, I won't know until next year.

Some conceptual issues remain undecided; e.g., should I continue to group short link citations into larger Odd Lots entries, or just post them as I find them as individual entries? The way I do it now is an artifact of how I create Contra entries generally: I keep a text file in a window and add short items to it until I decide it's time to format them and post them as a group. That becomes unnecessary with WordPress, and I can streamline the whole process by just popping up Semagic (or something like it) and posting them Right Now instead of storing them locally until I have time to format them for uploading.

WordPress itself is an amazing thing. I'm still trying to figure out what all it can do, either by itself or with the jungle of plug-ins you can find for it. What I know it can do is save me time, which seems to be in shorter supply every year, and that, ultimately, is what the whole exercise is about.

Carol rode a Canadair regional jet home yesterday, and I am mysteriously a much happier man. (We have not been apart for this long in one chunk since she was in grad school in Minnesota in 1976.) I have not in consequence been much inclined to write on Contra today, but I must mention something that will be worth looking for: A three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent Moon that will be potentially visible today and especially tomorrow. See it if you can, in the west just after sunset. Spaceweather has some details. I would have looked tonight but it's sleeting here in Colorado Springs, and I got word from Gretchen that there is considerable sympathy sleet in Chicago this evening as well. But if it's clear where you are tonight or tomorrow (or the day after, for that matter) don't miss it.

Thanksgiving Day. Giving thanks is a special case of living mindfully, which is always a good idea, whether or not there's an open manhole a few steps ahead. The older I get, the more mindfully (and thankfully) I try to live, not only because I've discovered so many fascinating things to be mindul of (and thankful for) but also because I don't have an unlimited number of years yet to be mindful.

It is a very good time to be mindful. When I was young I knew what a "water bear" was from crude little drawings in a library book, but now I can see them with electron-microscopic clarity, and understand that surviving from the Cambrian era, well, damn, that can't have been easy. (It's easier to grasp a billion years when you're fifty-six than when you're seven.) And I always thought that barred spiral galaxies were the coolest kinds, but it wasn't until the past few years that the Hubble Space Telescope could show them in a glory that still makes me gasp. There may be better times to live in the future (and I have strong faith that there will be) but there have never been better ones in the past.

This year's Thanksgiving Day is a little more poignant than most. Carol and I have been apart for a month now, and there's nothing to make you feel thankful for something like losing it, even for a little while. (She'll be coming home soon, soon enough that I've begun washing towels, rugs, and the big comforter on our bed. Living with multiple dogs is a grubby business.) And, as I've related privately to some of my online friends, this has been a weirdly grim six weeks in and around my inner circle. The number of deaths, major surgeries, and life-threatening diagnoses among people I care about spiked a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn't just deaths among the old, but among young people in their 30s and 40s with small children at home. Tragedy clusters sometimes. Be thankful in the calm between storms.

I am. For Carol, of course, more than anything else on Earth. For small things (like water bears, galvanized iron pipe fittings and Compactron tubes) and big things (barred spiral galaxies, comets, icebergs) and things distant in time more than space. (Origen, Lady Julian of Norwich, Roger Bacon, the Colossus of Rhodes, glyptodonts.) I am very thankful for my parents, who suffered too much and died too young but never failed me in any way even if they imperfectly understood me, and for people like Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Louie, who seemed to like me more than I sometimes deserved. I am very thankful for my sister Gretchen, she of wry humor and skilled hands, and my cousin Rose, who walked between the railroad tracks with me because that was just how life worked in 1957. I am thankful that my brother-in-law Bill happened to Gretchen when she most needed him, and for the girls they have brought into the world (better late than never!) who are growing up fast and may well live into the 22nd century. I'm thankful for Carol's sister, her mom (and her dad, whom we all miss keenly) and our nephews Matt and Brian, both now men in their own right. Close family ends there, but moving outward the lotus opens up quickly, with cousins and friends and mentors and other people who have changed my life without intending to, nor fully grasping the impact of their kindness and counsel.

I have a private prayer that I say every night, in my last moments of mindfulness before turning out the light, telling Carol that I love her most of all, and stilling the racket in the back of my head:

Lord God, I thank you for letting me live in this time, in this place, in these circumstances, among these good people, and within this beautiful and extravagant creation!

For so it is, and so I do.

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In case anyone is wondering, I won't be by myself all day. I'll be having dinner with some folks from the local Bichon Frise club, people who truly have bichons like some people have mice. I'll be able to wrestle with a huge bichon named Jackie Gleason (all 26 pounds of him!) and perhaps get a look at our host's Mog collection. I'm counting the days until Carol comes home, but in the meantime, I'm mindful of the fact that life could be a whole lot worse!

• The pseudobachelor life does not become me, but I'm working on it. So far, the heuristics seem to be: Stay in touch (our cell phones are being given a workout), stay busy, and socialize whenever possible. I've also found that I must get out of the house at least once a day or I get bitterly depressed. Today, at least, I had a mission: I FedXed Carol some papers and things that she needed, and grabbed lunch at the Black Bear while I was in the area. On the way past the Shell station (hardly the low-price leader hereabouts) I noticed that regular was down to $1.99.9. I do not remember the last time I saw gas break $2.00.
• I didn't read Slate for at least a month prior to the election, because by a month prior to the election I had already heard quite enough about the election without going to Slate. Alas, Slate still isn't over the election, but here's a very good article on why we are always so angry. The author seems to see unchallengeable genetic predispositions, but I see spoilt brats: People who give rein to their anger are immature, undisciplined dorks. (Read the blogosphere for abundant examples.)
• And the severely liberal Slate has finally copped to something I learned 25 years ago in Rochester, New York: In tony urban neighborhoods where then-stylish wood stoves burned through the winter, you couldn't hardly breathe. Wood is not clean heat. Wood is filthy, borderline toxic, dangerous-to-your-children heat that does not belong in urban settings, or anywhere with more than one house to five acres. (I cop to having had a wood stove on a third-acre lot in Rochester. I was part of the problem. I apologize, and I won't make that mistake again.)
• This seems too good to be true—or at least permanently true—but it seems like a US court has thrown out most business-practice patents. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
• Well, Manischewitz Egg & Onion Matzos are back at the local King Soopers markets. I brought home two boxes yesterday evening, and could barely get in the door before ripping one box open, slobbering a whole cracker up with butter, and stuffing it back with hazardous haste. (Had Mike Sargent not tipped me off, I doubt I would even have looked.)
• It's not just simple utilities like MozBackup. (See my entry for November 8, 2008.) AVG Antivirus triggered an alert on an essential Windows file, user32.dll, claiming it was infected with a trojan called Generic9.TBN, and recommended that users delete the file. Urrp. ClamWin is looking better all the time.
• I rented The Golden Compass at Blockbuster the other night, and I will say this: It sports the coolest steampunk backgrounds and retromechanicomagical gadgetry of any film I have ever seen, and if you're a steampunk freak, don't miss it. However, having seen it, I know precisely why it was a fantastically expensive flop: It was utterly cold, and not because much of the action took place in the perpetual arctic dusk of Svalbard. I mean it in the sense that I detected little humanity in the characters, with the single exception of the broadly-drawn Texas aeronaut, Lee Scoresby. (The anti-Catholicism of the books was so muted that the Magisterium might as well have been a crew of Sith lords in baroque attire.) When the film was over, I was awed, but depressed. That's the job of an art movie, not a big-budget, kid-oriented, special-effects blockbuster. I doubt that the remaining two volumes in the trilogy will ever be filmed.

• I got drilled and post-ed yesterday and am mostly over it. The weirdest part of the whole procedure was listening to Dr. Salcetti cranking the implant post down into my jawbone with a small tool that sounded like—and in fact actually is—a miniature ratchet driver. (We will not speak of the earlier sound, of her drill going into bone, both sounding and feeling like a drill press working its way into something gummy.)
• For the first time I managed a major-release upgrade of Ubuntu without any fussing. Going from 8.04 to 8.10 took about half an hour, but it went absolutely without incident. (In the past I've had to restart the upgrade after it froze, and once I just gave up and did a clean install after reformatting the partition.) I don't see a lot of differences in Intrepid Ibex beyond the wallpaper, which initially puzzled me. It looks like a soda glass ring on somebody's dirty leather couch arm, but after staring at it for a moment I saw the ibex. Sorry; I liked the heron better—and I tremble to think what the wallpaper will be for v9.04 Jaunty Jackalope next spring.
• Well, alas, Kubuntu didn't fare as well—the upgrade crashed somewhere partway through, and the instance (which is still shown as v8.04 in grub) will not boot. At some point I will reformat the partition and reinstall from the ISO. KDE 4 is an acquired taste, but I've watched it evolve for many years and won't stop now.
• November 2008 is the 25th anniversary of the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0. David I will be printing selected "How I discovered Turbo Pascal" stories in his blog, and although mine is well-nigh legendary (I practically had to be beaten over the head to try it) I will be writing it up and sending it to him shortly. Damn little in tech has ever affected me more than that!
• Bob Ballantine W8SU sent me a scan of John T. Frye's 1985 obituary the other day, and it was severely disturbing: Frye died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maybe it could have been an accident, but somehow I doubt it. Too many lonely writers (Piper, Disch, and others) have died by their own hands. He is buried with his parents at Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. Scroll down or search for Frye in the plot listings.
• Finally, Pete Albrecht reports that the New York Daily News spoke of an election day get-out-the-vote promo in which Krispy Kreme handed out "donut-shaped stars." (See the figure caption.) I've seen these in SF (recall that long-forgotten turkey, Nova by Samuel Delaney) but never in a donut shop. Maybe Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker works there. Talk about fresh from a hot oven!

There's an odd human tendency to expect the worst in the absense of sufficient data. One of my readers wrote to me in a panic regarding my sadness of yesterday, saying: "Tell me you're not separating from Carol!"

People, get a grip. Carol's mom had a medical emergency and Carol is in Chicago looking after her. Our relationship has never been stronger. Carol's mom means a lot to me. I was still getting over the last vestiges of a very bad cold. I'm having my jawbone drilled for a dental implant tomorrow morning at 8 ayem sharp. My dinner exploded. You'd probably be a little down too.

As for dinner: I was being a bachelor, and I emptied a can of Bumble Bee canned salmon into a Corelle bowl to heat it up. I grill fresh salmon a lot, and I have reheated the leftovers in the microwave many times. Alas, canned salmon is packed in brine. Brine is a good conductor, and brine and microwaves have fun together. As best I can tell, a brine pocket somewhere inside that pinkish lump boiled and blew off the microwave lid and itself out of the bowl and all over the inside of the oven. I salvaged enough for dinner and for today's lunch, but that left me wiping out the oven for most of half an hour last night. I'm annoyed because it was a science experiment, and I'm supposed to understand a thing or two about microwave physics.

And my dogs. Well. QBit and Aero were playing tag all over the upper level right before dinner. They chase one another around at flank speed, leaning into the turns, yapping and growling and evidently having a fine time. I had gone to the powder room down the hall to get rid of some well-used diet root beer, and while the process was underway, the two of them barrelled unexpectedly into the room. QBit ran behind me and dove under the toilet tank. Aero, in hot pursuit, hopped up on his hind legs and put his front legs on the rim of the bowl. I half expected him to attempt a leap over the bowl on top of QBit, and tried to dodge. The rest I leave to your imagination. And now, whether I'm home alone or not, I close the door.

As for the election, I don't have much to say. It turned out almost exactly as I had expected, and I don't see any serious damage. Hey, we survived Bill Clinton. We survived GW Bush. Hell, we survived Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson, compared to whom even GW is Gabriel the Archangel. We will survive Obama, to whom I wish all the best, and to whom (if they existed) I would send a case of Tut-B-Gone mummy foggers to deal with the lobbyists now lining up outside his door. Our problem is not now and will not be Obama. The problem is the parasites that gather about high office.

As for my Outrageous Proposition (see my entry for October 30, 2008) I think it went pretty well. Thanks to all who followed the rules and shared their thoughts, and I apologize for not participating more vigorously myself. Headcolds don't schedule their appearances in advance, and this one really took it out of me. But I encourage everybody to go back and read the comments. Aren't those better than raging rants? Isn't life just, well, better without anger?

I will be drugged tomorrow and may not post. After that, the cone of silence once more descends over politics. Like canned salmon, a little goes a long way. (Especially when you heat it up too much!)

Uggh. Today has been misery punctuated by mere discomfort, and you won't get anything profound from me tonight. What time I didn't spend in bed with Aero's butt in my armpit and QBit lying across my ankles I spent reading in my big chair, pulling Kleenexes from the box as needed and tossing them atop my desk when I finished with them. A few minutes ago, I looked at the pile of snotty Kleenex and asked myself, "Did I do all that nose-blowing this afternoon?" I was so bleary I barely remember.

Yet objective evidence (the head-sized pile of snotty tissues) suggests that I did.

And on that note I will make a very strong recommendation for the book I am mostly through reading, though I will probably have to read it a second time once I'm no longer blissed out on antihistamines. Do not miss this one: Mistakes Were made, But Not By Me, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. (Thanks to Michael Abrash for recommending the book.) It is a masterful piece of pop psychology, beautifully written and well footnoted, that offers to explain why we justfy foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful behavior. It has been a painful read in that I have seen myself in every other paragraph, and you will too. It has been a hopeful read, however, in that I have been intuitively struggling against these damaging psychological mechanisms for much of my adult life; in fact, the book has allowed me to define what I mean by contrarianism: the act of swimming against the torrent of stupidity and falsehood that flows from the deeper mind.

If you are a person given to certainty, the book will enrage you, since it almost defines certainty as a species of mental illness. (This is also the thesis of another book that I have read but not yet reviewed here, On Being Certain, by Robert A. Burton.) No matter what you're certain about, you're wrong. So am I. All knowledge is tentative, and our memories are full of holes and scrambled pointers. I'll start talking about that once I feel better and this damned election is over.

At this point it's time for shower and bed, and my nose is running. Damn. I'm out of Kleenex. I was sure that the box was still half-full!

I apparently brought a headcold home from Chicago, and it was in full bloom by this morning, so I don't think I'll be able to continue my anger-free politics series tonight. Things got off to a good start, and the LiveJournal comments are worth reading. I hope to get back to it tomorrow, if I can get a decent night's sleep. Right now I'm pretty wobbly.

Halloween is slow this year. It's 7:15 PM and even though it was a gorgeous day and is still 68 degrees outside, we've had exactly three groups come to the door so far. To be fair, the last group consisted of most of the ten-year-old girls in the western hemisphere, all of whom wanted to pick QBit up and hug him, and were willing to fight one another for the privilege. I quelled the riot before it got ugly, and passed out a decent number of Kit Kat bars so that I won't be tempted to off them myself tomorrow morning. QBit concealed his annoyance, even though what he wanted were not hugs but handouts.

I do want to relate one anecdote from our Chicago trip. We were hanging out in Gretchen's family room after dinner, being funny as is out wont. (Gretchen and Bill are good enough at it to do it onstage.) We were talking about Katie Beth's exploding vocabulary, and I was reflecting that sooner than we think, Katie (who will be two in a couple of weeks) will be engaging us in real conversation. So, in a fit of godfatherly ridiculosity, I looked soberly at Katie and asked her, "Where do you stand on the issue of transubstantiation versus consubstantiation?"

Katie wrinkled up her forehead in rapt concentration for a few seconds while she thought it over, and then, through a radiant smile, announced, "Pie!"

She probably thought I was asking her what she wanted for dessert, but clearly, the girl would make a good Episcopalian.

Yesterday was our 32nd wedding anniversary, so Carol and I took the puppies up to Woodmen Kennel on Wednesday and then blasted over Ute Pass to one of our favorite places: Mt. Princeton Hot Springs Resort. It's a little south of Buena Vista, Colorado, and only 110 miles from our front door. I reported on it briefly back in 2004, but the resort has changed hands in the past four years and the new owners are putting a lot of work and money into it. Brand new log cabins are going up on both sides of Chalk Creek, and there's a pavilion for weddings and other events. All that being the case, it's no longer the cheap date it was in 2004, but I definitely feel it's still worth the price. (~$120/night in the off season, including October.)

The gimmick is that by the side of the creek, water comes bubbling up from parts unknown at 133° F. By judiciously mixing the hot springs water with filtered creek water (which is Rocky Mountain snowmelt and generally in the mid-high 40s) they keep two huge pools steaming away at human-tolerable temps. The large pool (at left in the photo above) is a trifling 95°. The small pool is kept at 104° and is basically a 35' by 15' hot tub. If that's not hot enough for ya, there's a steam room in the middle. The resort's most unique gimmick is the creek pools: Because the water comes up from the ground on one bank of the creek, the resort has artfully arranged boulders on the creekbed so that the hot water mixes dynamically with water from the creek, keeping the temps generally in the 102° vicinity. And they're adjustable: If you want a cooler pool, you shove a boulder a little to let more of the creek in. If you want a hotter pool, you put small stones and creekbed sand in the cracks to keep more of the creek water out. Part of the fun is that the seep rate changes from second to second, so now and then you get a burst of hot water or ice water and there's no way to know what's coming. The brave are regularly observed to hop from the hot pools right into Chalk Creek. They always seem to sound European when they yelp. You'd think that they don't have cold rivers in Germany or something.

The resort is open year-round, irrespective of temperature. (They do close when snow makes the county road impassable.) This includes the creek pools. We want to go back in January to see how much steam comes off the 104° pool, and whether the Europeans are still hopping into the creek.

The resort uses the hot water for everything. They have to; every well on the property brings up hot water, though not all of it is at 133°. The rooms are heated with hot springs water. There are little radiator/fan things in the walls and if you want heat, you turn on the fan. If you don't want heat you get some anyway; there are pipes everywhere full of 133° water. The solution: Open the windows. The toilets flush with hot springs water. Think about it. (And don't flush while sitting down...) The faucets run hot springs water from both the hot and cold spigots, but the water going to the cold spigot runs through pipes somewhere that bleed some of the heat off, probably into the creek. The downside there is that the longer you run the cold water, the hotter it gets. Showers are of necessity quick.

The food is good, and the restaurant plays some satellite channel that specializes in top 40 songs from the 80s, everything from Roseann Cash to Dire Straits. Lots of Dire Straits. Out by the hot pools, they play jazz banjo improv, or else whatever the crew on duty happens to like. It was tough to predict, but after a couple of days, I realized that I will take jazz banjo over jazz sax six throws out of four.

Yesterday morning we took the road west, up into the mountains, to see the fall colors. We chose wisely: The colors were at their peak, and were breathtaking. You could trace the paths that water takes flowing down the mountains by the bands of yellow aspen groves. After the first hour or two, I was very glad I have a 2GB SD card in my camera.

At the end of the "good" dirt road pavement was the famous Colorado sort-of-a-ghost-town, St. Elmo. The opening of the central Colorado mineral district in the early 1880s made St. Elmo happen, and the Denver, South Park, and Pacific narrow-gauge railroad kept the supplies flowing in and the ore flowing out for almost forty years. St. Elmo is not quite dead; people still live in some of the ancient buildings, which are painstakingly kept looking ramshackle because it's what people expect, even though the old photographs make the town look far better, and almost sprightly. Land there is mind-bogglingly expensive, and encumbered by deed restrictions that require that your buildings look "historically accurate," which as best I can tell means looking like they're about to fall over. Maybe living at 10,000 feet will do that to you.

The old DSP&P right of way is still there and can be traced, and parts of it are now a hiking trail. I tried to climb a 100-foot embankment up to the trackbed from one of the small lakes that the Forest Service maintains along Chalk Creek, but 10,000 feet will do other things to you as well, especially when you're 56. Note that it didn't stop me; it just made me angry, and I will return and get up to the alignment at some point in the future.

In summary: Our trip was a complete success. Carol and I allowed ourselves the privilege of staying in bed and cuddling until 8:00AM—which is easier when Aero hasn't been throwing himself bodily against the walls of his kennel to get our attention since 6:15. We took care to remember not only why we fell in love but why we stayed in love all these years: We continue to look at the world like a couple of wide-eyed kids, practicing the art of being delighted. Taking delight in one another makes it easier to take delight in the world, and vise versa. (Being jaded is for statues.) 32 years? Heh. We're just getting into second gear!

At Denvention 3, at the Denver Convention Center. I used to hit just about every worldcon or NASFIC, but my life got a lot more complicated in the mid-80s, and the energy I used to put into writing SF began to go into computer books. Then when Keith and I kicked off our own publishing company, yikes! So I haven't been to a Worldcon in 8 years, and haven't been to a con at all since the 2005 Windycon when ISFiC Press launched The Cunning Blood.

It was nice to be back, and it took me awhile to discern why: This is a Worldcon of Unusual Size, which is to say, small enough not to exhaust me with its hugeness, but still big enough to draw old friends from the far corners of the country into a single graspable space. Why it wasn't more popular is a puzzle; Denver is a Huge City of Unusual Size (HCUS) too, small enough to not overwhelm but large enough to be quirky and interesting. It's also one of the cleanest and most beatiful huge cities in the US, followed by Seattle and then (perhaps) Chicago, both of which suffer incresingly from size and congestion. I'm getting to be more of a small-town guy as I get older, and in my perspective even Denver is a shade big for permanent residence, but if somebody bombed Colorado Springs, I'd probably just scoot up I-25 and stay here. (Pete Albrecht continues to worry about us moving to Nebraska, but I've grown mighty used to dry climates since I first discovered them in 1987.)

I got here Thursday about suppertime and checked into the Westin Tabor Center, which has great beds and showers but lousy soundproofing, and perhaps the noisiest plumbing of any major hotel I've ever visited. This morning I awoke to a sequence of three showers, one to either side of me and then another above me. I know, I know, I'm an Insomniac of Unusual Sensitivity (IUS) and waking me up doesn't take much. The toilet tank refilling made a sound that should be sampled for a film involving spacecraft of unusual propulsion systems (SUPS) which is odd, considering how gutless the low-flow flush process itself proved to be.

But the first item on the agenda was the Flying Pen Press premiere party over at the Tattered Cover Bookstore, at which Jim Strickland would be reading briefly from his second novel, Irreconcilable Differerences. The book is terrific and I'll post a detailed review here shortly; I want to read it again now that I have it in paper. But it may establish a brand-new subsubgenre that I might as well call "cyberbilly," which is to say, cyberpunk in the small-town American heartland. Jim reads fiction well for an audience, and while most of the other books presented left me cold, I was left giggling by a short snippet read from David Boop's new book, She Murdered Me wth Science, which, well, defies description. David has done time as a stand-up comic and it shows, and the event as a whole reminded me that I've read my own work in front of an audience precisely once, and need to practice a little.

Yesterday morning I finally got down to the convention proper, and started running into people almost immediately; first Eric Bowersox, then Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein, then Bonnie Jones, Kelley Higgins, and (later) Bill Higgins. I had lunch with Mike and Alice Bentley, and eventually collided with Jim Strickland and his wife Marcia Bednarcyk. We camped out on one of the nice sofas set near the autographing tables and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon there, hashing out the issues of how the SF publishing business is changing, and how writers of insufficient reputation (RIR) can take advantage of the changes we're seeing. "Write more!" was Eric's completely incontestable answer (directed primarily at me), but tonnage, while important, is not sufficient. The issue remains open, but I got some great insights from both Marcia and Alice Bentley, who works part-time for Studio Foglio and pays attention to other small and very small press operations in this industry. There may not in fact be a general solution to the problem, but being more visible among the people who read your kind of material is something that kept coming up. This (obviously) leaves less time for actually writing it, especially for guys like me with Unusual Sleep Requirements (USR) but as with almost any system of many equations, there's a sweet spot on the curve somewhere. The main challenge is just finding it.

I'm about to go back over there and see what else may be going on. I have a couple of sessions marked with stickies in the nicely-implemented pocket program, but I will be heading home again later this afternoon. A little con goes a long way with me, but as Worldcons go, I have so far enjoyed this one a great deal.