September 2006 Archives

Recent conversation between me and my younger son, D-, who I was helping prepare a draft college essay on "How I Decided on My Intended Field of Study". In D'-s case, his intended field of study is education/teaching.

Me: "It says here you need to write about the decision process you used to settle on being a teacher. Why don't you start off with saying some things you find appealing about teaching?"
D-: "I like chalk."
Me: "Well, that's a plus. But could you come up with something a little more substantive than 'I like chalk'?"
D- (dripping exasperation): "I said, 'I like to talk.'"

Good, that's good, we'll go with that. And maybe we can use the chalk thing, too.
K-

I'm still here. Just very busy that's all. There're the usual fall time sinks of band performances and football games. Then I've agreed to be scoutmaster of my son's Boy Scout troop for 6 months while the real scoutmaster is on sabbatical. I'm still spinning up on that. Last but not least there's "The Project".

D-'s Eagle Scout project is in high gear and making sure he stays on track has kept him, and by extension, me, very busy. He's building compost bins. Four of them, each one 6 feet wide by 3 feet tall by 8 feet deep. More than 5 cubic yards each. That's a lot of compost.

Here's the progress so far. The bins are situated in an area that had to be excavated by a Bobcat. To complete the job, D- is lifting and toting wood, digging a whole lot of dirt, hauling rocks, and doing all sorts of manly things. I get to help, which for a guy who is as incurably lazy as I am, takes some motivation. I assiduously avoid jobs that require me to get out wheelbarrows, shovels, picks, and post-hole diggers, all of which this Eagle project requires.

Once this project is complete he has to write a report and get his Eagle Scout application in to the Boy Scouts before he turns 18 in mid-November.

Bless his heart, I think he's going to make it.
K-

I've been having a little problem with spam email at work lately. Not a big problem but a problem nonetheless.

I use my work email address just for work-related activities and then only selectively. For instance, I won't use it for software registration or ordering things for my job since my address could be harvested by spammers. Up until recently I got zero spams at work. My employer's spam filters were working pretty good.

Then I started getting some. It was the usual crap: phony investments, a couple of prescription drug ads. I received enough spam, and the increase was so noticeable, that I contacted the company postmaster, the guy in charge of running our email system. Do you know what he told me?

Eighty percent - eight zero - of the email that is sent here is filtered out as spam or virus-infected. He told me that current estimates are that two-thirds of all email is spam.

I never would have guessed it was that high.
K-

This cropped up as a link in the "How-To" part of my Google personalized home page. I'm thinking someone didn't get any comments on his blog.
K-

A milestone unnoticed by me occurred earlier in the summer. It was in late June by my calculation. I only just realized its passing. And you'd have thought I'd have noticed it.

I've now lived more than half my life in Maryland.

It'll be exactly 26 years tomorrow. It's weird. I fancy myself someone from the Great White North. Born in New Jersey, a boy in Massachusetts, growing up in Michigan. I still feel like I'm from Michigan. Yet I've now lived longer south of the Mason-Dixon than north.

What's weirder is that no matter how long I live in Maryland, I can never be a native Marylander. Not born here, not a native. Makes sense to me. But does that make me a New Jersey native even though I only lived there the first month of my life? God I hope not. Native New Jerseyian.

I could never bring myself to say that.
K-

I sat in a dreary conference room on the 10th floor in one of the dozens of office buildings in Crystal City. There were no windows with views to distract us. The presenter talked from plastic slides rather than the overhead projectors we use today. The lights were out; the viewgraph machine alone provided illumination. The meeting began at 8:30.

By 9:00, I was already bored.

Crystal City is a place totally and utterly devoid of charm. It exists because the Pentagon exists. Tall glass and stone structures line either side of Route 1 in a north-south arc from the Pentagon through Arlington to Alexandria. Thousands of workers - military and civilian - come there each day to do the business of this nation's war fighting.

By chance I happened to be sitting in the northernmost building of Crystal City. Crystal Gateway 4 the developers called it. The Pentagon was about a half mile away. I decided I would venture into one of the outer offices during our first meeting break to catch a glimpse of it as well as the Potomac River and the Capitol. It was a nice day; the view would be good.

Just before nine, an office worker came into our conference room to tell us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He had no details. My initial thought was "How on Earth could a plane run into the World Trade Center?" Our meeting kept going though everyone was unnerved by the news.

Not too long after, that same office worker came into our room to tell us the second tower in New York City had been hit. The meeting quickly came unglued. But there were no TV sets we could watch. No one nearby had streaming video on his computer. We weren't sure what was happening in New York but for now, our work in Washington was set aside. Milling around was all we could do, all we could focus on.

Finally, about 9:30 we decided to resume work. The meeting had just gotten underway when that same office worker came in a third time to tell us we had to evacuate the building. The Pentagon had just been attacked.

I ran across the hall into a vacant office. From my 10th-floor vantage point, I could see the south side of the Pentagon. Thick, black smoke billowed up into the sky from the building's far side. But that was all I could see; the Pentagon itself obscured my view of the crash site. I wrote one final entry in my notebook before leaving: At this point (approx. 9:45 AM), Crystal Gateway 4 had to evacuate because of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

That day, the usual 50-minute trip back to my office took seven hours. I was anxious, frightened almost. I heard sonic booms that I initially thought were more explosions. The radio provided no solace, no answers. Only horror and sadness. I returned to hear that one of my co-workers - one I didn't know - was working at the Pentagon that morning and had been killed in the attack.

Five years later, the Pentagon is completely rebuilt, just the way it was on September 10, 2001. From the outside, you can't even tell the place had been hit. It looks the same as it always did.

Five years later, a big, yawning hole exists where the World Trade Center used to be. Ground Zero we call it. We wrangle still on how the site should be rebuilt. We can't decide what to put there, how it should look.

Five years later, we're told we're safer. I don't believe it, the longer lines at airports notwithstanding. Today the President will tell us he's spent the last five years fighting terrorism.

Five years later, I tell him the perpetrators are still at large.
K-

As far as I'm concerned, there's been a dearth of movies worth seeing this summer. I saw A Prairie Home Companion early on. That was good. Then Superman Returns with the kids. Meh. I finally saw a summer movie I can wholeheartedly recommend:

Little Miss Sunshine.

No review though. I'll let you do your own research.
K-

One of the great unsolved mysteries of my life - not that my life is fraught with opportunities for unsolved mystery - is the whereabouts of all my boyhood memorabilia.

When I was a kid, I was active in the Boy Scouts. We can debate the Scouts as a relevant organization later but for me it worked out well. I had no athletic talent, no musical talent, and no Lothario talent. But I liked being outside and could (and still can) walk pretty much from here to John o'Groat's and back without breaking a sweat. Both useful characteristics for enjoying Boy Scouts. It was a good match and as a Scout, I collected all sorts of stuff: patches, rank badges, my Eagle certificate, and more.

But it all vanished. With the exception of a very few things, I had none of my childhood memorabilia to share with my kids. Nothing. All those souvenirs I collected as a child - in Scouts and elsewhere - were gone. What was worse, I had no recollection of having done anything intentionally with them. I'm not a sentimental guy but I would never knowingly throw away my Eagle certificate.

"How could you get rid of that stuff?" my parents always asked accusingly. "We saved it for you. If we knew you were going to dump it, we would have kept it." I had no good answer. I was hoping to find it cleaning out my mother's house after she died. It was not to be.

A few times, I asked my brother if he had it. "Nope," was his invariable reply. "All I have is my stuff. You know you're always throwing things away. You must have thrown it all away. You know that broke mother and dad's hearts."

Everyone was so sure that I had been given this stuff and I was irresponsible enough to toss it. I figured it all got lost during one of the many moves I made when I was young.

Tuesday night my brother called. "Guess what I found?" He recently moved and is still in the throes of unpacking. He's the exact opposite of me. A total packrat with more shit in his house than you can imagine.

"I don't know. Jimmy Hoffa?"

"All your Scouting stuff. I guess I had it after all. Ha, ha. Isn't that funny? It was in my storage closet in a gin box labeled "knickknacks." I was going to toss the box but then decided to check it out. Good thing I did, huh?"

And, sure enough, he had it. All that memory-laden stuff I had from when I was a kid. Things I'd earned and collected in Scouts, at summer camps, and in school. Stuck in a box wrapped in newspaper for the last 28 years has caused it all to reek of mold and mildew. But the mystery is now solved.

I have half a mind to convene a séance just so I can shout "I told you so" to my parents beyond the grave.

A sampling these relics appears after the jump.
K-

True story. Had to share.

A colleague just came into my office looking for a wire hanger. He's probably 30, if that. He had some sort of lab emergency down the hall that only a wire hanger could fix. I only have wooden ones on my coat rack.

"Do you have any wire hangers in here?"

So I screamed at him "NO WIRE HANGERS! EVER!"

He didn't get it. He left nonplused. Thanks, Faye.
K-

Maryland had oceans of rain the last week of June. Since then we've been dry. Lawns around here are brown not green, trees are dying under the stress, central Maryland is back in a drought. We've been praying for rain.

I just took out the recycling for pick-up. There was spitting rain. Ernesto is coming to answer our prayers. Ten inches of rain today.

Thanks, Ernesto.
K-