It was a warm summer’s day, so I was sitting on the back stoop soaking up the sunshine with a book in one hand and a cool, refreshing drink in the other. Birds sang from the trees. Clouds danced across the skies. A really annoying bug flew into my ear, or that’s what it felt like, anyway. I dropped the book and stuck a finger in my ear to dig the bug out, but it turned out not to be a bug at all. A chunk of ear wax was rattling around in there. I hooked a fingernail over it and scooped out enough wax to make a votive candle. After flicking it into the bushes I scooped out another astoundingly huge plug of wax, then another and another. I’m pretty sure I could have gone on like that all day if the alarm clock hadn’t bleeped me awake.
I had a physical on Friday, mostly because my last physical was just before I retired from the Air Force seven years ago. Kids, don’t try this at home. You should probably see a doctor a little more regularly than your Unka Dave does.
It was the whole kit and kaboodle, starting with an exhaustive medical history, then moving on to the old standard “stick your tongue out and say ahhhh” right up to, and including, the part where I changed into a medical smock for an intimate groping.
Why do you suppose they still make medical smocks that don’t close with velcro? I don’t know how long I spent grabbing for those dangling fabric ties and finding nothing but air. When I finally did manage to snag them, it took me a couple more minutes to match them up and then I had to figure out how to tie a bow behind my back. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to practice that, so it took me a good while. And that was just the middle one. Everything else has velcro on it, why don’t these? I would’ve been done in seconds.
I had to sit on the table to start the examination, so I tucked the gown in around my butt to keep it as warm as it’s possible to keep your but warm in a hospital gown, which is not very much. It did less than any good at all, because just a few minutes later the P.A. wanted me to lie back and hike up my gown in order to palpate my liver and spleen, so she threw a sheet over my waist to cover my naughty bits. At this point it occurred to me that I could have saved us both a lot of time if I’d wrapped the sheet around my waist after taking off my shirt and pants. It’s not that I’m not modest; I am, but during a medical exam, what’s the point? Sooner or later you’ll be asked to turn your head and cough, and there isn’t a man on earth who has any modestly left at that stage of the game.
I got a clean bill of health for that part of the exam, but I still have to go in for … the colonoscopy! Duh-duh-dunnnnnn! I’m told I’ll be sedated for that, thank goodness, so no detailed description will follow (thank goodness again).
Oh, what a night! We spent yesterday evening at the Edgewater Hotel, soaking up some delicious spirits at Distill America, the annual exhibition of local (and a few not-so-local) distillers. I was very pleasantly surprised by how many distillers are right here in the Midwest. Off the top of my head, I can think of two here in Madison (the Old Sugar Distillery and Yahara Bay, in case you’re in the area) and we met about half a dozen others from the Milwaukee-Chicago area. There’s a lot of booze being made right in our backyard.
I was also pleasantly surprised by how many really delicious spirits there are. Until recently, almost all the liquor I drank tasted like gasoline to me, so I was never a liquor-drinking guy. I might have had a lightweight cocktail like a Tom Collins every so often, but for the most part I kept the high-powered stuff at arm’s length because it had no appeal for me. As it turns out, I didn’t like it because I’d been drinking cheap, low-grade liquor.
Probably the most delightful surprise of the evening was Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Talk about a spirit that I always thought of as rocket fuel – vodka was it. I thought only Russians and college students could drink vodka in any quantity, but Tito’s is dangerously delicious. I slurped up my tiny half-ounce shot and asked if I could try another (he had some infused with a citrus fruit called Buddha’s Hand that complimented the vodka very well).
After the show we hopped in the car and did a little drifting around the inner circle road of capitol square. Just kidding. We had a room at the Edgewater. We would’ve spent a little more than half the cost of a room on cab fare, so we figure we’d splurge and fix it so we wouldn’t have to go anywhere at all after the party was over, and it turned out to be one of our better ideas, one we’ll have to think about when the Great Taste of the Midwest rolls around next year.
Some Wall Street investors made money as the mortgage market boomed; others profited when it fell apart.
Having reaped big gains during both of those turns, Greg Lippmann, a former star trader at Deutsche Bank, is now catching the next upswing: buying the same securities built from mortgages that he bet against before the financial crisis erupted.
Seriously? Seriously? A worldwide economic collapse wasn’t enough to warn investors not to do this? I don’t know what I’m more disgusted by, the realization that this was never made illegal, the implication that investors seem incapable of learning from their mistakes, or the sad fact that a majority of the nation isn’t out in the streets with pitchforks and torches, bent on revolution.
I’ve just come home from my annual trip to the Madison model train show, where I was doing a pretty good job of sticking to my promise to myself not to spend a lot of dough in spite of all the tempting toys.
In a room as big as two football fields, I found a vendor just inside the door that was selling a pile of passenger train cars for eight dollars apiece. In very short order, half the pile was my pile and I was heading to the checkout with a light heart and a big, happy grin on my face, even though I was practically stealing those cars. They were forty years old and didn’t have nearly the level of detail inside and out that pushes the cost of the cheapest passenger cars made today into the forty-dollar range. Models like that are the reason vendors can sell the empty plastic shells for eight bucks, but empty plastic shells are what I run on my layout, and the ones I picked up today are just as pretty as most of the cars I already have, so hey, lucky find.
Then I went and blew my steely resolve by dropping eighty bucks on a locomotive. I really don’t need a locomotive, but it looked so pretty, damn my eyes. It’s going to look especially good pulling all those passenger cars.
So much for promises. On the bright side, It’ll be a whole year before I can break them again.
Modern diesel locomotives have working brass bells on them, same as steam engines from the old days. Nobody knows why – it’s probably because there’s an ancient federal law on the books that nobody’s bothered to delete, or it could be just because it’s an old railroad tradition. Instead of being mounted on the top of the loco it’s usually hidden away behind a fuel tank or inside a wheel well, but it’s still there and they still use it. You probably heard it the last time you were waiting for a train and you didn’t even realize where that sound was coming from.
Here’s what I wonder: Who makes bells? There are thousands of locomotives running around the countryside, maybe tens of thousands. If every one of them has a bell on it, somebody somewhere is working furiously to cast bells who otherwise would have shut down production decades ago, because who needs bells these days? Just railroads, that’s who.
As we were settling into a staff meeting this afternoon, Carolann made reference to a pop tune that I didn’t recognize. Aaron caught the reference, though, and commented on it, to which Carolann replied, “Yeah, I’m guess I’m dating myself with that one.”
“It’s Valentine’s Day,” Aaron answered. “If you can’t date yourself, who can you date?”
On the advice of a good friend, we splurged on a bottle of Hendrick’s so we could enjoy classic cocktail night with a classic gin. The before-dinner gimlet was delicious, and the after-dinner perfect martini was, well, perfect. Best thirty dollars we ever spent.
It was a dark and stormy night, filled with snow and sleet driven by a lashing wind. Why would any sane person want to spend any amount of time walking the streets of Madison tonight?
Well, because there was all-you-can-eat sushi at Restaurant Muramoto tonight.
We thought about going to Restaurant Muramoto tomorrow night, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, but getting a reservation turned out to be a problem and, besides, they didn’t have all-you-can-eat sushi tomorrow. So we celebrated Valentine’s Day one day early. We’re pretty flexible that way.
What we aren’t, though, is all-you-can-eat people. We tried our darndest and, if I may say so, acquitted ourselves well, but we didn’t even come close to making them regret the folly of their ways. We ordered three rolls (eight pieces each) and twelve pieces of nigiri, with a pile of asian slaw on the side. We were both pretty hungry, and it was scrumptiously good food but, at the very end, neither one of us could manage to work up the gumption to tuck into that last piece of sushi.
I think the rolls were better than the nigiri, which is little rice cakes topped by slices of fish. I loved the salmon nigiri, and the albacore was very tasty, but everything else was too subtle for my tongue to pick up much taste.
The rolls were wonderful, especially the Tokyo Picnic and the Rainbow rolls. I wish I could remember what was in them; I’ll take notes next time. I’ll be burping for a month, so “next time” won’t be until late March at the earliest.
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