At War With HGTV and DIY

Our Super Agent Marie said that we should be madly packing right now. She doesn't understand that we don't madly do anything. We will go about our packing business sedately, complaining all the way. And take a lot of coffee breaks to pat ourselves on the back that we packed three boxes today.

We will soon be moving to another house. I think. Super Agent Marie tells us that everything is go, except for this and a little of that, but it is all falling into place. Marie is optimistic by nature. I, in turn, concentrate on planning. I have found that one can make a career out of planning -- in fact, I have. The trick is to plan and plan and figure that somehow the work will get done.

As you can see I am talking about personal stuff. My Chief Critic and Adviser Marilyn tells that I need to blog about personal stuff because that is what people want to read. She says that when I write about history or 'facts' people turn off. I start to reply that I don't care about what readers think -- but then I figured I better be careful because that may not be 100% true.

But you see, moving has presented us with a conundrum. I think it all has to do with HGTV and DIY, which are two television networks whose mission it to tell you that you are doing everything wrong.

To begin, we are moving into a smaller house, and our bigger house furniture simply will not fit. Logic says sell the stuff or give it to the kids or have a garage sale or donate it to somebody. With this in mind we can: (1) simply move and tag everything that is to go and then get rid of the rest; or (2) get rid of the rest now and move what is remaining. But HGTV and DIY has explained to my wife that we have To Stage our house in order to sell it.

Staging is based on the premise that buyers are too stupid to imagine what an empty house will look like furnished. So you need to present a furnished house to prospective clients with no clutter. (Did you know you aren't not allowed to show family pictures!) There are actually companies that will come in and put temporary furniture into your home for staging purposes.

Who comes up with these ideas? Somehow in years past houses got sold that were completely empty. To my way of thinking I would prefer to see an empty house so I can imagine where our furniture might go. In fact, the house we are buying was empty. But it seems that I am old fashioned in my thinking.

So you see the conundrum here. Do we move just what is essential and leave enough to stage the house? That sounds like a double move to me. And when and where and how do we get rid of the furniture that we need to get rid of. Post staging?

I've called AT&T and asked if they can remove HGTV and DIY from our channel line up. Nope.

I've given a thumbs down on Stupid Staging but Marilyn is convinced we have to do it.

And then Marilyn told me we have to replace the bathroom faucets. Why? Because they are gold.

I wisely comment: "I don't understand. We like our faucets. We are happy with them. What's the problem?"

Marilyn responds: "On HGTV when they show houses to people, if they see gold faucets they react with 'Oh my God. Gold faucets. How horrid!'"

Foyer Light (with nowhere to go)

I'm here to proclaim that HGTV does not set the standard of acceptability. I am adamant that we leave the faucets as they are and if buyers don't like it, I don't want them to buy my house! As you can see, my forte is logic.  


Oh, and she says we have to replace the vintage foyer light which she got off Ebay because no one else will appreciate it. Do we have a place for it in the new house? No, but... Then there's the problem of the custom built fireplace mantle (also an Ebay acquisition). Do we take it with us or leave it in hopes that it will help sell this old place? And on and on and on.

Mantle (take or leave?)

There is so much more going on. It seems that we have to buy a new refrigerator to go in the new house because our current refrigerator is not stainless steel like the other appliances. That sucks, and I don't even like stainless steel appliances. I am buying the house in spite of stainless steel appliances, just like someone can buy our house in spite of gold faucets. Then my dear wife is insistent that we replace most of the light fixtures and put crown molding throughout the new house. I think HGTV and DIY suggested that. Then we have to buy shelving and cabinets because all of that stuff in this house is built in. Oh yeah, she figures we definitely need carpeting in some of the rooms because the dogs can't scramble around on hardwood floors. I think there is more. I can't remember.

Books - No Bookshelves to take them to

So planning to move is not an easy thing. The general plan is to move and then fix up the house we are moving from with fresh paint and a nail here and there and then put it on the market. Seems straight forward. But when we start getting into the specifics. I can't figure out the order of activities.

So the plan is....to plan and figure it will somehow fall together. Oh, and pack a couple of boxes today.

There. I've just written about Personal Stuff.

The Strange History of the Willie D

Now those of you that routinely read this blog know that I enjoy history, especially those little nuggets that no one ever hears about. How about this?

In World War II there was a Navy ship that: (1) Wrecked a companion ship as it pulled out of harbor; (2) Depth charged the President of the United States; (3) Torpedoed the President of the United States; and (4) Shelled the home of a Base Commander. No, this is not an episode from McHale's Navy, but it would make an interesting movie.

World War II. The Navy was frantic for manpower -- pulling kids just out of high school and off the farms, quickly training them, and shipping them off to war. This was the situation with the crew of the USS William D. Porter, (the Willie D) an escort destroyer built in Orange, Texas. Most of her 125 officers and crew had never been on a ship before.

After leaving the Orange shipyards the Willie D berthed in Norfolk, Va.

Yalta Summit

Now a few of us know of the famous Yalta Summit  in Tehran with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin. Our own Willie D helped make this happen, or almost not happen.

On November 12, 1943 Roosevelt, his Secretary of State, and his Joint Chiefs of Staff set sail on Roosevelt's yacht for a friendly cruise in the bay. This was actually a top secret ruse, because the yacht pulled up along side the battleship Iowa and all the dignitaries, 80 in total, were transferred to the Iowa.

Prior to this, the Willie D was ordered from Norfolk to meet the Iowa Task Force. No one knew what was going on, and the Willie D pulled out of port for what was seemingly a typical mission. But things didn't start off well. It seems that when they raised anchor, no one explained that they were supposed to raise the anchor all the way. Somehow the anchor snagged the ship next to them ripping off its railing, life rafts and a small boat. I can imagine the Willie D radioing an "Oops, sorry 'bout that" as they continued on their way. The anchor suffered only minor scratches.

The Willie D met up with the task force which included Battleship Iowa, two aircraft carriers and three destroyers. Orders were given for strict radio silence. This was a secret mission.

The task force traveled at high speed across the Atlantic. The trip would take eight days. During this time all the ships would continue training and exercises with their crews.

While traveling through U-Boat territory, anti-submarine drills were being conducted. Suddenly in the wake of the Iowa was a huge explosion. All ships immediately went into anti-submarine maneuvers with urgent signal lamp messages passing back and forth between ships...until there was a meek little message from the Willie D. The message explained that there was no submarine and it seems that a sailor had forgotten to set the depth charge trigger to 'safe', and it accidentally rolled off the deck into the water....and it exploded after the Iowa passed over it.

Soon afterward a freak wave hit the Willie D  and washed a sailor overboard and he was never found. Then the engine room lost power and fell behind the convoy. Admiral Ernest King was the Chief of Naval Operations on board the Iowa. He was embarrassed and a bit pissed. Here he was with the government on the United States on board staring over his shoulder. He made it known to the Captain of the Willie D that he was indeed fumbling a career opportunity on this very high profile mission. Willie D's skipper vowed to do better.

On November 14 off the coast of Bermuda the Admiral thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate to the President how well the Navy could protect him. The President and entourage went to the deck to witness this demonstration. Target balloons were released and the battleship and destroyers fired their weapons destroying the balloons. Some of the balloons drifted toward the Willie D. Eager to demonstrate the ships competence they fired at and destroyed the balloons. At the same time the captain ordered a torpedo launching drill.

You see where this is going, don't you?

As is common in such drills, you "fire" at local targets, and the Iowa was the biggest target around.

Now this was a drill which meant that the primers that actually launched torpedoes were removed which prevented a real launch. So the captain ordered, "Fire 1!", and there was a satisfying click signifying launch.

Then "Fire 2!" Click.

"Fire 3"......whoooosh! A torpedo launch right at the Iowa.

If there was ever an "Aw shit!" moment, this was it.

The captain screamed at the Signal Lamp signalman to signal Iowa that a torpedo was heading their way. The poor signalman in a moment of panic signaled that a torpedo was heading away from the Iowa. The signalman realized his error and resent the message this time really screwing the message up by stating, 'We are backing away from you'.  The captain saw that the Iowa was staying on course and realized the signals must have been screwed up. So, breaking radio silence, he screamed to his radioman to transmit:

"Lion, Lion, come right!" Lion was the code name for the Iowa.

The Lion radioman was a bit stunned to hear anything on the radio, and calmly responded with:

"Identify and say again. Where is submarine?"

Iowa's radioman screamed in reply:

"Torpedo in water! Lion! Come right! Emergency! Come right! Lion! Come right!"

Did I mention that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the Chiefs of Staff were all sitting comfortably on the deck? With a torpedo heading toward them? Fired by the U. S. Navy?

The General Quarters Alarm sounded and the Iowa picked up speed and turned sharply starboard. The sharp turn listed the ship dramatically and everyone had to grip the rails, and aides had to grab Roosevelt's wheelchair to keep it from rolling. Everyone could see the torpedo in the water heading toward them. The Iowa's guns began firing at the torpedo. Even the Secret Service had their pistols out intending to shoot that torpedo to protect the President.

The crew of the Willie D held their breath. The crew of the Iowa held their breath. But yes, the Iowa made the turn in time. President Roosevelt wrote in his diary, 'On Monday last a gun drill. Porter fired a torpedo at us by mistake. We saw it -- missed by 1,000 feet'.

Soon the convoy re-formed. When Willie D took up formation, they were dismayed to see that every gun in the convoy was trained on them. Admiral King got on the radio and asked, "What happened". The meek reply from Willie D was simply, "We did it". A few minutes later the contrite radioman of the Willie D radioed, "It was an accident".  

Was it accident? That was the question. Was this a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Executive Administration of the U.S. Government? Conspiracy theories were rampant.  Admiral King ordered the USS William D. Porter out of the convey and to pull into the Naval Base at Bermuda. The fleet continued on with its Yalta mission.

When the ship pulled into Bermuda it was greeted by the U. S. Marines with rifles trained on them. The entire crew of the Willie D was arrested. This was the only time an entire crew of a Navy ship has ever been arrested.

The crew was drilled in secret inquiry, the primary purpose was to find out if there was a saboteur on board the ship trying to kill the president. Finally a contrite and shaken Seaman Dawson admitted that he failed to pull the primer from Torpedo Three. When the torpedo fired unexpectedly he pulled the used primer and threw it overboard to hide evidence of his mistake.

Lieutenant William Poindexter, one of the ships officers, made an impassioned plea to the Inquiry Board. He said, "that the inexperience of the personnel of the William D. Porter, men as well as officers" had to be considered.

But the Willie D almost killed the President. Someone had to pay. Dawson was sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor. When Roosevelt heard about the sentence, he commuted it. He said that, it was just an accident. 

Word spread throughout the fleet. The Willie D  was a screw-up ship and watch out for her. In fact wherever she sailed she was greeted with, "Don't shoot. We're Republicans!"

What to do with the Willie D? They sent her to the Aleutians off in Alaska. She couldn't do any harm up there.

Wanna' bet.

Taking Aim at the Commandants Garden

During a break from exercises in a port in Alaska, when most of the crew was off the ship, a drunk sailor came back on board. He had an inspiration. He wanted to fire a big gun. He made his way to a 5-inch gun and figured out the firing mechanism and shot the damn thing.

Where did the shell hit? In the front yard of the Base Commandant where he just happened to be entertaining senior officers and their wives.

This just further eroded the ship's reputation.

The war was hitting a fever pitch in the Pacific. A more seasoned crew was put on the ship and it was sent to fight. It fought well. During the campaign near Okinawa it shot down a high speed kamikaze diving at them. The plane struck the water and continued forward in the sea and exploded under the Willie D. It took three hours for the ship to sink. The total crew was rescued.

Rescue of Crew from Willie D

Did I make this story up? I'm not that smart. Take a look at Article from Wikipedia, and An Article by Gregory Freeman, and Craziest War Stories.

 

Can't We Just Pitch a Tent Somewhere?

Why so glum?

Twelve years ago we bought this house.

Um hmm.

And I swore I would never buy another house again.

I can understand that sentiment.

Now we are buying another house.

Well, your income and lifestyle must have advanced over the years so now you are upgrading.

We are downgrading.

Oh?

Our house, our current house, is roughly 4,000 square feet, roughly the size of the Astrodome.

The Astrodome?

Stop repeating me.

My wife and I can hide from each other. If I need to talk with her I have to embark on a search for her. If she wants to find me, I can keep switching rooms until she finally gives up.

Why is your house so large?

My mother-in-law had to move in with us. She was old and couldn't manage by herself so we had to find a house large enough for her to have her own living/dining room, bedroom, bath, and kitchenette.

That was nice.

Not really, but I won't get into that. Anyway, she croaked.

That is not nice.

I mean she passed on.

I'm sorry to hear that.

For its size, we got it pretty cheap. That means we had to put a lot of effort into making it the riviera of the neighborhood.

It was hard at first. A month after we got the house I got in my car to drive to work and noticed that one of the front porch columns had fallen into the yard. That was kind of demoralizing. Then the oven had to be replaced which required converting to gas because there was no electric oven that would fit into the space. Oh yeah, the under-foundation drain lines had to be replaced. But we forged ahead and it took about three years of hard work and a lot of money to bring the place up to our exacting standards.

That is wonderful. A loving couple working hand-in-hand building their dream.

We yelled at each other a lot. Marilyn kept insisting that we needed a new roof immediately. I kept replying that we could use rain buckets until we get a hurricane so insurance could pay for it. And new carpets throughout. She wouldn't accept my idea of rearranging the furniture to cover the bald spots insisting that we didn't have enough furniture for that. Also there was something about the fact that the carpets were 35 years old. That was after the garage door kind of crashed halfway down all crookedy so we couldn't get a car in or out. Then Marilyn had an unreasonable prejudice against Formica and Linoleum. Then something about water dripping from the A/C vents. Ended up replacing the whole air conditioning system. Then...

Wow.

Marilyn has a three page list of improvements we made. It was tiring and depressing, but we are still married. I don't know how long we are going to stay married though.

What?

We are moving from our giant house -- did I mention Astrodome...into an itsy bitsy 2,000 square foot house -- think well, itsy bitsy. We are used to yelling at each other across the Carlsbad Cavern to be heard by the other one. Now we won't be able to whisper in private. No privacy at all.

"Did you fart? I heard that!"

"It was the dog."

And the dogs. They get exhausted walking around trying to find either of us. And our yard, they can run from horizon to horizon to get their exercise. Marilyn and I may wander around and not see each other for...

Okay, okay. You don't need to pile it on.

You don't believe me?

Astrodome

Itsy Bitsy

That looks like a really nice house. Why are you moving?


Yeah it is nice. But...

Do you know how much it costs to maintain the monster house? Landscaping expense. Pool cleaning expense. The unimaginable heating and cooling costs. Vacuum cleaner bags. Weekly changing out of a couple of the 14,000 light bulbs.

I have my heart set on retiring before I am ninety -- but cannot do so unless we find a place to retire on my miserably miniscule retirement income.

It sounds like a smart plan.

I hate it. We have to sign papers, and papers, and papers. Then there is something called negotiation. Thank goodness we have our Agent Extraordinaire Marie to do that for us -- but I think she hates us.

I'm sure that...

Marilyn and I each have a computer, which you can do when you have a decent sized house. So when Marie emails us a Plan of Action, Marilyn will fire back an alternate plan of action -- and at the same time I will reply, 'I don't know what you are talking about'. I mean, there are disclosure statements, loan applications, certifications, some kind of not-in-a flood plain document.... It's all very confusing. So Marie has double the work just to calm our nerves.

Not once has she said, "Look you idiot, I have already told you this three times!"

She sounds like a gem.

She is -- although I know secretly that she is sticking pins in Jerry and Marilyn dolls. 

So you are well on your way to getting a new house?

Explain to me how you get a cathedral crammed packed with furniture into a little country church? That is what we are scratching our head over. Estate sale? Call up the kids and say, "You are getting this sofa whether you want it or not?" Not only that. Which furniture goes and which doesn't go?

I think Marilyn is thinking about selling stuff on Craiglist. But when? You see,  there is something called 'staging'. You are supposed to have furniture and stuff in the house to make it look 'presentable' for people to see. Did I mention that we have to sell this house too? Let's see, we have already gone through Plans A through G, now we have to worry about more plans.

Step by step.

Then Marilyn wants to repaint and change the stuff in the new house before we move in. Then we need a moving company. And then...

Slow down. Step by step.


I have my own plan, but I am having a difficult time getting Marilyn to buy into it.

Yes?

It is about time for me to go hiking somewhere. Let Marilyn expertly take care of everything, and when I come back we are moved in and set up.

I don't think...

Or perhaps a medically induced coma. Or accept a job assignment overseas.

Working together hand in hand toward a worthwhile goal.

Hummrrph!

 

Now Is The Time

When I was a freshman in high school my mother insisted that I take typing class. This was pretty much an affront to my manly dignity because I knew, like everyone else knew, that typing was a girlie thing. And it was true. Most of the other students in the class were female with only three or four guys.

Back then we typed on something called a typewriter. The thing had a long horizontal roller, in what was called a carriage, that you could vertically insert paper behind and roll the paper so that it was facing you. On the left side of the carriage was a shaped metal rod sticking out. So when I typed each letter, the carriage would slowly move from right to left, and when it would go no further I could reach up and whack the metal rod which would move the carriage back to its starting position. The result was that I would type one line, whip the carriage back and begin another line.

One line doesn't necessarily mean one sentence -- it could be many sentences, or an incomplete sentence. It was simply a finite number of typing spaces. There is one sentence that could exactly fit into those finite spaces.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

You cannot imagine how fast I just now typed that sentence -- at least three times faster than normal. There is a reason for this. During that typing class so long ago, I was required to type that sentence over and over a thousand times. That sequence of keys is locked into my finger's memory.

In 1867 Mr. Charles Weller presented a variant of that sentence as a good typing exercise in his book Typing Test. The actual sentence was: Now is a good time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Somewhere along the way, country was substituted for party.

We used manual typewriters in that typing class. This meant that the power that made the thing work was the power of your fingers. When one pressed on a key, a little arm with the corresponding letter would whip up and whack a little carbon ribbon that stretched in front of the paper. The end of the arm would smack the ribbon against the paper, and magically the letter would be imprinted in the paper. We found that each key had a separate corresponding arm with a unique letter on the end of it.

That seems kind of stupid and clumsy when I think about it.

We all know what a QWERTY keyboard is -- the first six letters on the keyboard. Most assume that the keyboard is designed this way because it allows for some kind of natural positioning. Not true.

The original typewriter keyboard looked like this:


3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

If you investigate this a little you will discover there is no 1 or 0. Actually there is. The letter I would serve as the 1 and the letter O would serve as the 0. You will also notice that after the numbers in the bottom row we see the alphabet beginning as we know it and it is continued on the top row. It is pretty logical and makes sense that the keyboard would mimic the alphabet.

But those damn women screwed the notion up. I noticed in that typing class that the women flew past us hapless guys in typing speed. They would whiz along like lightning while I sat there trying to find the k key. This is a natural woman thing. Their brains are not only attuned to shaming men at every opportunity, but they have a natural affinity for keyboarding.

Well, this was true even way back in beginning typewriting times. When those women whipped along at breakneck speed on that alphabetic keyboard, the silly machine couldn't keep up. Remember, ever key had a corresponding arm with a letter on it that had to fly up and hit the ribbon and paper. Well, those fast women (are you a fast woman?) had those little arms flying so fast that they would jam up -- two or three arms trying to hit the ribbon at the same time.

So, and you see this all the time, they had to redesign the machine in a completely illogical way just to accommodate those damn women. We ended up with the keyboard as we know it today. The letters, and corresponding arms, were arranged in such a way that it would be harder to jam if typing fast.

When the typewriter came out it was greeted with skepticism. Anything typewritten was rude and impersonal. Actually it was viewed as an affront to receive a typewritten message. It sorta' implied that the recipient was incapable of reading handwritten text. Besides typewriters were mechanical devices and therefore could be manipulated by unscrupulous merchants. And to top it off, putting a mechanical machine between a customer and employees destroyed the personal touch. And then there was the conspiracy theory. It was a machine and suspected therefore that anything typed on it was somehow secreted away where others could read it. This was a privacy concern -- and we still have those concerns today.

The Remington Company first marketed the typewriter, always using images of beautiful women typing. This appealed to women because they wanted to be beautiful too. This also appealed to men, because men are just that way. And there was an underlying message: It is easy enough that a woman can do it.

In the 1880's, women worked in factories and mills. As the notion of truly legible data gain acceptance women snuck right in to the clerical arena. (Remember that natural affinity of women to type fast and shame men?) Oh, another minor point -- women were paid much less than men and might have had something to do with it too. In 1881 the YWCA offered the first typing school -- and this brought typing into the mainstream.

This is all about the evolution of the idea of typing. I learned to type in typing class on a QWERTY keyboard of a mechanical typewriter. It wasn't too many years later that electric typewriters evolved. To type, you didn't have to bang down on a key to type a letter -- you could just lightly touch it and electrons would flow every which way which somehow ended up with the letter ending up on the paper. Those little typing arms disappeared because they were too cumbersome and were replaced by the IBM typing ball. This little ball had all of the letters on them and would whip around at a dizzying speed as you typed. My favorite invention was correction tape. If you made a mistake you could retype your error holding the little correction tape against the paper and your errors would disappear, then you would retype the whole thing correctly. I used a lot of that correction tape. Then someone got smart and embedded correction tape into the typewriter which made error correction a whole lot simpler.

Then computers came along and made everything a lot less fun. First it was dedicated Word Processing Machines. They were stand along computers that didn't talk to any other computers -- and you would whip out documents and save and print them in no time at all. Now we have -- well, what we have.

I was driving to work the other day and out of the blue that sentence came to mind. As I thought about Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, my fingers would sort of automatically tap it out on the steering wheel. I thought about the sentence and acknowledged that it was kind of sexist -- but also a bit universal. Why? Where did it come from? Now you know.

Artic Blast

I’m pretty sure…I think I am. I think I saw four snowflakes blowing across the tundra – uh, the pavement in downtown Houston. Doubt me? I have independent verification.

“This is stupid…but I think I saw a snowflake.” That’s what he said.

But then here comes science to put a damper on faith and belief in the goodness of things. “Bullshit!” the pseudo-scientist said. “It is nowhere cold enough to snow!” We need to work on his grammar.

I kept looking if for no other reason than to prove him wrong.

I’ve was looking forward to yesterday – the day of the Artic Cold Front. Actually this forecast was upgraded by the forecasters yesterday on Channel 11. “The Artic Blast will hit around 9:00 a.m. causing temperatures to plummet.” Artic Blast. I like that better than Artic Cold Front. The term ‘blast’ was apropos. At 9:00 a.m. yesterday temperatures did indeed plummet, accompanied by high winds. In Canada those winds would probably be classified as a delicate breeze. In Kansas they would have been called a ‘wind’. Down here they were called a “friggin’ force-5 hurricane’. Downtown people were nudging themselves around light poles to keep from being blown around.

This windy stuff contributed to something – and I don’t want to get to technical here – called ‘wind chill’. It was thirty-eight degrees at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, and with the wind it felt like approximately minus 762-degrees. For my Canadian friends, this is below 0-degrees Celsius. Today is better. The wind has died down. My car thermometer kept bouncing back and forth between 32 and 33-degrees. I could imagine my car whispering to itself, “I’m freezing. I’m not. I’m freezing.  I’m not.”

And as I drove in to my half-day work this morning, I considered those football players that wear short-sleeved jerseys while playing in frigid weather. Part of it is to show how tough they are. I once heard a player say that it was invigorating. As I thought about this during my drive, I figured that I needed some invigoration. So I rolled down my window and let the 32/33-degree weather whip across me. I wanted to experience what those football players felt. It only took 90-seconds for me to become Really Invigorated. But I think that I now have bonded with them.

Speaking of bonding, I’ve written my congressman. I think that we need to become closer to our Canadian friends – share experiences a little. So I suggested that we pass a law to adopt the really-weird Celsius temperature thing in the summer, but keep our old fashioned Fahrenheit in the winter. Think about it. If it is 85-degree Fahrenheit, to a Canadian it is only 29-degrees. If we realized that it was only 29, we wouldn’t feel damn hot. I haven’t heard back from him.

But being Artic Blasted provided me with the perfect excuse to have a bowl of chili for lunch. Someone told me that the chili at Jason’s Deli was pretty good – so I tried it and it was pretty good.

Actually I wrote this a while back during one of our cold fronts, but never got around to publishing it. Today, February 18th, it is 60-degrees and it has been raining a lot. I just needed to remind myself that sometimes in winter it actually does gets cold here.

Stieg's Girl

When I went to Canada a couple of weeks ago, I made sure to bring a book with me. For some reason, and it has always been completely accidental, it seems that I have always ended up with a fiction book about plane crashes when I flew.So this time I grabbed a non-plane crash book from the library to keep me company.

I enjoy the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. Reacher is a fascinating character that refuses to be tied down with 'ownership and documentation'. So he owns nothing and doesn't even have a drivers license -- but somehow gets around, solving the woes of the world. They are entertaining reads.

So I carried my book onto the plane and settled back for a comfortable read -- and discovered within three pages that I had read the book before. This was awful. A trip without a book to read was an unthinkable situation. So I had to be content for the four hour trip with watching Moneyball on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of me.

We -- I was traveling with a business associate -- landed in Calgary, fought our way through customs, rented a car, and headed west toward Banff National Park. Within an hour or so we were greeted with beautiful snow covered mountains and made many attempts to take pictures from our moving car which is really kind of a dumb thing to do. In the midst of all of the awe and wonder my internal nagging voice was beginning to grate at me. 'I need to get a book!'

The notion of staying a few nights in hotels without a book was simply unthinkable.

Finally we spotted a bookstore -- one of those place with publications about the wonder of the area. I was disheartened, because I wanted a novel to read. If I am traveling I want something entertaining, not something full of non-fictional facts. The bookstore was pretty good size and had tons of books. I wandered around until I found a small table of fiction. Prominently displayed on the table were two small stacks of books. One featured The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other was The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, both by Stieg Larsson. I asked the proprietor if he had read either book. He said he hadn't, but he had a hard time keeping them on the shelves. He went on to say that those stacks of books would be sold out today.

I had heard of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I was pretty sure there was a movie out about it. This threw me into a bit of a quandary. Many times, actually most of the time, I don't care for what seems to be popular with everyone else. It is not that I am so particular, it is just that -- well, maybe I am little particular. No one has ever heard of the movie Spitfire Grill or Picnic at Hanging Rock. I really liked them but no one else seemed to. Some will rave about the latest Sherlock Holmes movies. I saw about an hour of the first one, and didn't like it at all. This wasn't the Sherlock Holmes I appreciated. It is the same with books. Many times, with a few exceptions, I simply didn't appreciate what was on the bestseller list.

I looked at the two novels on the table. Both books were softcover but the size of a hardcover. And each was thick, which interested me. Thicker books imply that the author was serious about the whole thing. But my choice was limited, and I definitely had to buy something to read. So I grabbed The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest simply because I liked the cover better.

I didn't get a lot of reading done during the trip. It seemed that my evening hotel hours were spent with work-related stuff in preparation for the next days meetings. But I did get in a few pages of reading.

Right from the start I realized that I was going to have to concentrate a little. With characters like Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander and Karl Axel Boden and locations like Sahlgrenska and Stallarholmen, I could see I was going to have to really pay attention. And I could see that for the first 100 pages great effort was spent in setting the stage for the rest of the book. There was also a lot of time spent on delving into recent history -- and I was quick to figure out that this book was the third in the series of 'The Girl' books.

I am now on page 301 and a little over halfway through. I am now staying up way too late at night reading for it has become truly intriguing. I started off mildly interested. Now I am really interested.

Interestingly it is the story of a sequence of events revolving around The Girl, Lisbeth -- but she is only playing a background part so far in the book. I am not even going to try to tell the story for it is complicated and full of twists which start building the reader's hopes, then suddenly twists, which fire up a new set of hopes.

I can only leave you with a strong recommendation for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. Will I read the two preceding books in the series? Reluctantly I think, and that is a tribute to the authors writing talent.  Will I see the Dragon Tattoo movie? Probably not. I now understand that the movie would probably be a fairly dark one with a lot of incest and violence that I would rather read about than see in a movie.

I am saddened to understand that these books were published after the author died of a heart attack in 2004. Mr. Larrson lived with Eva Gabrielsson for many years, and she says that she had collaborated with him on the books. Because Stieg Larsson and Eva were not married, his estate went to his parents who, if I understand correctly, had the books published. Eva is suing for the rights to the publications and has said that she has a fourth book, God's Revenge, which she has completed since his death. The book continues with the story of Lisbeth Salandar in Canada. The estate has offered two million kroner for her to drop the suit and give them the book. She has refused.

Mr. Larsson never saw his books published.

The BlogDotCom Murders

It is hard to begin a story at a time like this, especially if it is somewhat autobiographical. It is difficult to tell the truth and not glorify certain events as one is prone to do when talking about oneself, but there is the underlying unbelievable fact: How can a gentle kind soul who would never hurt no one – that would be me – become a fugitive from justice?

It all started with a series of silly and innocuous events that cascaded….well, let me start at the beginning.

The Crime

One weekend day, I guess a couple of weeks ago, I decided to change things. My intent was to make a minor improvement.  It was a cool and cloudy day, a boring day and my mood was adventuresome. A perfect day for tinkering. I sat at my desk, booted up my computer, and clicked on my ‘Gently Said’ icon to bring forth my blog. I thought it would be interesting to change things. I was especially interested in changing the font of the list of blogs that I enjoy reading. The list was bold and a little too glaring for me, so I simply wanted to make the list ‘not bold’ and reduce the size of the font a notch. That’s all.

America's Most Wanted?

The advantage would be that I could then increase the width of my narrative area. I had been successful at changing the presentation of my blog before, so I felt relatively confident. There is an area in my little blog universe to make these sort of changes, so I confidently started work.

I couldn’t do it. No matter what I tried, that list of blogs that I routinely read remained bold and glaring.

I thought about it. I knew there had to be some way, because I had seen it on other blogs. Obviously I had to approach the whole problem from a different angle. Why do I need that list of blogs that I read anyway? Well obviously so I could get to them. But I knew that there was some place on the Dashboard that identified other blogs. Just to be sure, I checked. Yep, the first blog that I saw was one of my favorites. So now I had a new approach.

I deleted the offending list and expanded my narrative area and was pleased with the results.

I saved everything and shut my blog down.

An hour or so later I reentered my blog to spend some enjoyable moments reading other blogs. I confidently tapped my way into my dashboard and started clicking through blogs and it started dawning on me. Some of my favorite blogs were there, but there were many that weren’t. And on top of that, I didn’t even recognize some of those dashboard displayed blogs.

Panic began to sit in. I went back into my blog and tried to undo everything in the vain hope that my friends list would somehow reappear.  No luck.

My friends had disappeared. Through my ineptness, I killed them.

Becoming a Fugitive

I have never been a murderer before. The only thing I could think to do was run away.

So in desperation, I turned my attention to a far off land. I thought of Canada, which is even farther away than Oklahoma. So far that even the Texas Rangers couldn’t find me. So I hopped on a plane and fled. I knew I had to lose myself and needed to stay away from populated areas because that is where private detectives hung out.

I thought to hide at Vermillion Lake -- but it was too open. I know about drones, you know.

Then I thought to hide in the forest.

But then I got smart. I figured the best thing to do was to hide myself in the crowds at the International Ice Sculpturing Festival at Lake Louise.

But I figured the mountains would be safer. But which mountain?

Then my wife called and told me I had to stop playing like I was a criminal and come home.

The Punishment

While hiding in the crowds at the Ice Festival, I slipped on that pesky ice and fell forward catching myself with my two hands. Unbeknownst to me until the next day, I suffered a whiplash in that fall. Today I sit at my desk in five minute stretches with an agonizing pain in the back of my neck. The natural order of things. I am now being punished for....

....trying to reduce a font on my blog which resulted in the killing of my friends.

Maybe, just maybe, if you will leave your mark in my comments, I can find you and resurrect you from the dead.