Holes. . . and a Discovery

I couldn't understand why the palm of my right hand hurt so much yesterday. It was over-all ouchie, but just at the base of my thumb it was particularly painful and red. I wondered about it all day. Then, around dinnertime, the coin finally dropped: on Saturday I dug two hundred and sixty holes in my lawn with a hand trowel. DUH! You think?

I'm a slow thinker. When rapid decisions are called for, I usually just freeze. If they got me on Hell's Kitchen, I'd probably just stand there with a spatula in my hand looking bewildered and repeating to myself, over and over again, "Oh my god! Oh my god!"


"Wake up!" Chef Ramsay would shout.  "What the **** are you doing?!"

"Yes, Chef! Sorry, Chef! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

Anyway. Two hundred and sixty holes exactly. I counted them.

A Hole is to Dig. I'm sure that my neighbors thought I was crazy, especially when I started in digging holes along the strip of grass beside the road. But I was planting daffodil bulbs. My father left a plastic bucket full of them on my doorstep. It's more than likely that some won't make it, but with any luck my yard will be dotted with daffodils next spring.

Most people plant daffodils in garden beds. But out at the old house we had a section of the back yard that was full of them every spring. My mother used to say that planting daffodils in that section of lawn was the best thing my father ever did.

I'm taking the idea one step further. I'm going to have daffodils all around my house. Don't know how I'll mow the lawn, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.

By the time I was done, having cut the grass just prior to the planting, I was so shagged out that I flopped on the porch and just evaporated. My shoulders were complaining bitterly at my treatment of them. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pounding against the back of the couch. But, yeah, it was a good kind of tired.

Today we've had two periods of torrential rain, so my daffodils are getting a good soaking.

Next, the hosta has to come out, to make way for hydrangeas. I don't think that's going to happen right away!

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Yesterday I bought a combination printer and scanner. I wasn't planning on doing it. It was just there, with a sign overhead that said $49. I couldn't believe they were serious. Ah, but t probably doesn't work with a Mac, I tthought. Checked the box. Yes, it does! It's been so long since I was able to print or scan anything at home; even so, I stood there and thought about it for several minutes. I told you; I'm a slow thinker.

Later in the evening, printer / scanner ensconced and software installed, I cast around for something to test the scanning bit with. I finally settled on the black and white portrait of Mom that's been sitting in my kitchen here ever since I moved in. It was taken by her sister-in-law, my Aunt Sharron, maybe twenty-plus years ago, and is hands down the best portrait of her that I have.

In the process of taking it out of the frame, I found three more photos concealed underneath it. Photos that I had no memory of ever seeing before. All of them terrific. In one of them, she's seated on a wooden rocking horse with her brother, my Uncle John, standing beside her.

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the one that's heading up this post. Maybe it's that she's standing inside the "hoosegow" that's out in my back yard right now. Maybe it's because I've come to think of the structure as "my TARDIS," and this makes me feel as if she's just popping off for a bit, out for another lark in time and space, you know it's bigger in here than it is on the outside, possibility, possibility, possibility, see you later.

Maybe it's because she looks happier than I ever saw her, ever, in the last five years of her life.

I'm not putting it back behind the other pictures. This one deserves a frame of its own.

-- Freder.

Mickey's Gala Premiere

*

. . . is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons ever -- and, really, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. It has no plot whatsoever. A new Mickey Mouse cartoon is having its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all of the Hollywood glitterati -- beautifully caricatured by the Disney artists -- turn up for the event. Garbo and the Marx Brothers are there -- hellfire, even Dracula, Frankenstein and Mister Hyde are there, laughing uproariously at all the inappropriate parts.

But that's neither here nor there.

My boss is the sort of person who will never call any job done so long as she can think of one single different way to do it. This is oftentimes infuriating to me, because I am the sort of person who calls a job done if it looks good and feels "right" and complete -- and it doesn't matter if I can think of a HUNDRED other different ways that it could be done. Everything can always be done differently, but will doing it differently make it better? Sometimes you just have to type the period and move on.

What I'm really typing around here is that my restoration / recut of the family home movies had its Gala Premiere at my father's house yesterday, to strongly positive reviews.

I pushed the job through, staying up until past three-thirty in the morning, because I'm basically seven years old on the inside and could NOT wait another day to get the finished product onto a DVD and watch it on my telly.

You know that you're working with some large honking files when it takes four hours to render them, another hour to export them to the DVD authoring software, and another forty-five minutes for the authoring software to compress them for DVD. At a couple of points I just wandered off and racked out on the porch while I waited.

The computer spit out its first disc a little after two AM, and of course I had to sit down and watch the whole thing, all 72 minutes of it (up from about 45 minutes in its original version).

All of which made going to work the next day a little bit heavy.

Over the next couple days I made ten more copies and packaged them up. Yesterday I hand delivered them to Dad, who, although he didn't know it yet, is my designated distributor to his side of the family.

My father's wife was acting extra weird yesterday. While Dad was updating me on my sister's condition following her heart attack (she's having a rough time of it), his wife interrupted twice to deliver lectures about asian cucumbers. What was that about?

I'd brought pizza makings with me to whip up a quick lunch for the three of us, and when I set the raw crust down on some paper towels to start working on it, she reached right in under my hands and flipped it over onto its top. Pause. I flipped it back. Pause. She flipped it over again. I finally said, "No, that's the bottom," and flipped it back. I mean, who's the pizza chef here anyhow?

All I can think of is that she's not used to having someone else working in her kitchen. I'd brought an eggplant with me to use on her portion. I meant to fry it up before putting it on. Instead, she grabbed it, sliced it -- and threw it into the microwave! Anyone who'd microwave an eggplant hasn't been watching Chef Ramsay as much as I have.

Without even giving me the chance to do it properly, she piled the eggplant so deep on her portion of the pizza (I mean, it was an inch and a half of eggplant stacked up) that all I could think of was "vomit." Sure enough, when it got to the table she took one bite, choked on it and beat a hasty retreat. That's what happens when you interfere with the guy who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how she managed it, but she did come back and choked the whole thing down somehow. She strikes me as the sort of woman who likes to prove a point.

I also learned that she is the sort of woman who, if she sees some job of work that she thinks needs to be done to your house, she will come over to your house while you are away and just do it whether you wanted it done or not. That's another thing that happened this week. I wasn't aware of it until they mentioned it to me yesterday. When I got home, sure enough, there was a metal plate screwed onto the side of my house outside the second floor landing.

You see what I have to put up with?

Moving right along. Dad wanted to watch the movies right then and there, so I had to sit through them again for about the millionth time. I guess my opening scenes were just about as effective as I thought they were, because not more than a few seconds in Dad announced, "I think I'm going to start crying."

Before yesterday, his wife had always refused to watch the home movies on the grounds that they were "his past, not hers" -- fuzzy logic if you ask me. But yesterday she sat down and joined us, and actually paid attention and seemed interested. If it was genuine, and I've no reason to assume otherwise, I call that quite an achievement. After all, I do imagine that there are few things in the entertainment world worse than having to sit through someone else's home movies. If I've succeeded in making them watchable and even enjoyable for people whose past it isn't, then I award myself two thumbs up.

-- Freder.

Of Weeping Angels and Weeping Chefs

My two current televisual obsessions are Doctor Who (no surprise there) and Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (perhaps a little bit of a surprise?).

Of the latter, I go into it without delusions. I know what's going on. Every single frame of it is nothing more than a commercial for Gordon Ramsay, and I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way. But its ostensible conceit -- the producers find restaurants that are on the verge of collapse, then bring Ramsay in to fix them over the course of four days, a process which usually involves fixing the owners as well -- is oddly compelling to me.

The foul-mouthed Ramsay generally finds disgusting food and even more disgusting kitchen conditions, on a level that make one think twice about setting foot in any restaurant, ever again. He also generally finds owners who are either apathetic, or deluded, or have lost their way in the daily grind. One, I would swear, was an undiagnosed Asperger's patient. He kept wandering around with a "deer in the headlights" look on his face, completely lost, while his father-in-law constantly berated and insulted him -- the opposite of a productive atmosphere. The show pays to have their kitchens cleaned and refurbished and the dining rooms redesigned, while Ramsay works over the menu, the chefs, and everyone else who gets in his way.

Except that sometimes he's been really nice. He seems to be a good judge of character, and a lot of what he does here is a combination of pyschotherapy and motivation. Sometimes the owners just need a good swift kick in the pants or a slap across the face, and he does not shy from delivering that. Other times they need support and a renewed sense of self-worth, and he delivers that as well, insofar as anyone could within the timespan allotted.

It doesn't always "take." Ramsay returned to a British Pub one year latter to find that the owner had reverted to his old ways and was alienating the staff and customers.

Regardless of the results, I can't seem to stop watching the damn thing. I keep seeing myself in the owners, and wishing that someone like Ramsay would come along and give me some motivation -- or a kick in the pants, or a sense of self-worth.

As for the Doctor, BBC America has been stripping the Russell T. Davies seasons at 5:00 PM weeknights, and I usually get home in time to catch most of it. It's a real mixed bag. Davies deserves kudos for getting the show back on the air, getting it a real budget, changing the format, transforming the show from a half-hour soap to a real prime-time contender. But also for hiring Stephen Moffat to write one story a season.

I don't like the Davies years well enough to spend $50 and up for the DVDs, but I have started going to Amazon, picking out the episodes that Moffat wrote and watching them full-screen on the new computer for just 98 cents a pop.

I've watched two of them now, and have been really blown away both times, actually applauding after last night's episode, "Blink." I'm sorry, but Davies isn't half the writer that Moffat is. I haven't seen writing this good on TV since the early days of Northern Exposure.

"The Girl in the Fireplace" is a virtual template for themes that Moffat would explore in greater depth when he took over the show. While checking out a seemingly abandoned spaceship, the doctor finds an 18th century fireplace that is actually a gateway into a little girl's bedroom. That little girl is being terrorized by clockwork automatons who scan her brain, declare that she's "not ready" and then leave. The automatons (and, now, The Doctor) reappear at various times throughout her life, and as the young girl grows to womanhood she finds herself falling in love with the curious stranger who reappears every time to protect her from the automatons. (and who never gets any older). As it turns out, she grows up to become France's Madame de Pompadour, and the automations want to use her adult brain to repair their ship. They've been building time portals into her life, and at last they've caught her at the ripe age. But if the Doctor closes down the time portals, he'll be stranded forever in 18th century France.

You see, it takes a long time to describe one of Moffat's plots.

If "The Girl in the Fireplace" is a thematic Statement of Principles, then "Blink" could well be the Pilot for Mofat's tenure on the show. It's remarkable in that the Doctor hardly appears at all. We're in the present day, while he's trapped in 1969 by  new series villains The Weeping Angels. This time, it's up to a girl from the present day who's never met the Doctor to get information to him in 1969 so that he -- get this -- can record a video that will one day be inserted as an easter egg onto 17 DVD titles; a video that will get information to the girl in the present day that will allow her to defeat The Weeping Angels and free up the Doctor's TARDIS.

Are you following this? Trust me, it doesn't even begin to cover all the wrinkles that Moffat gets into this story.

It is brilliant and clever and it takes the show to a whole new level. The original Doctor Who was not for everyone. It was cheaply made and eccentric and sometimes long-winded. I loved it without reserve in nearly all its incarnations, but could completely understand why lots of folks walked away.

This is different. If you've never seen the show, or if you've seen it in the old days and had enough, get your hands on a copy of "Blink" and start there. It's been many moons since I've seen something that made me want to grab people by the shoulders, push them into a chair and say, "Just sit down and Watch."

Blah-blah-blah, burble-burble-burble. Had enough? I don't blame you.

-- Freder.