Under the weather

I've been a bit sick the last few days. I chalk it up to stress at work and lots of hours working. On Tuesday, I just had to sleep and missed a conference for my job. There will be hell to pay for this, but I couldn't get myself going physically or emotionally to that event. I needed a rest before I have my 16-17 hour days on Thursday and Friday.

Funny. No one blinks an eye about pulling me in to work on my days off, but if we were to hold a conference on a Saturday or Sunday, the howls of disapproval would be hard to ignore.

The weather here has finally become typical for January. With arctic air coming over Lake Michigan, we are getting socked with lake effect snow. We had about 17 inches of snow Tuesday. Now, this is what winter is supposed to be like.

Thought: I'm still too tired to think.

Fuzzy farewell

We lost of member of our animal family yesterday. Hermione the Hamster died.

I found her lifeless body Tuesday night in her cage. After a quick discussion with Jayne about whether or not we should tell the girls right away (it was just before bedtime), we agreed we should. Jayne broke the news and the tears flowed.

Elspeth did go to sleep pretty quickly, but I had to stay in bed and comfort Alyssa. She has been sick and home from school, so she's a little fragile. And Alyssa is very compassionate and emotional. So, I laid with her until I could divert her attention to Pokemon and finally to sleep.

We had Hermione for a couple of years. She was a large white hamster who loved carrots and tooling around the room in her hamster ball.

Elspeth gave the hamster her name, and not just because of her interest in Harry Potter. Here's Elspeth's logic on the name:

-- She's a she, so it's "Her-"

-- I picked her our, so she's "-miney."

--Thus, Hermione.

Thought: No, we're not getting another hamster.

Dis, dat and the udder tings

One of my favorite "Gilligan's Island" episodes is when the deposed Latin American dictator arrives on the island and tries to set up Gilligan as his puppet. Gilligan makes a speech to the other castaways and promises them, "Dis, dat and the udder ting." That is, "This, that and the other thing."

Well, I haven't had a chance to write and have felt a bit of a castaway the last week or so.

Last Monday was a snow day for the kids because of a mini ice storm. We didn't lose power, but everything was slippery. So, I had the kids for the day with nowhere to go.

Tuesday and Wednesday, I was at a conference for the newspaper. It started at 8:30 a.m. and lasted until 4:30 p.m. Notice companies never hold conferences on the night shift's schedule? We didn't start at 3 p.m. and end at midnight.

The conference took a lot out of me. Unlike the last one, this time I had a hard time cutting through the jargon and crap. I just felt disattached from most of the discussion about making money, making more money and, if you don't get it, making even more money.

I suppose if making money is what I am about, I would not be working 50-60 hour weeks and getting paid for 40. I would be working for a college or university that doesn't bleed me dry on "benefits" and tries to match my personal goals with their goals. But I digress ...

I work to make money, of course. I have bills to pay and must maintain my luxurious standard of living in my lakefront mansion, but I got into journalism for the love of crafting sentences and words, and coupling that with the need to give people information so they can make intelligent, day-to-day decisions.

Sucker!

So, I'm not the person driven by the sale, though I know that's important to my survival at the newspaper. This conference did not address that.

So, back to work Thursday through Saturday, and I find myself up to my eyeballs with work and problems (they go hand in hand).

Sunday was a nice time to spend at the aquatic center with the kids and catch some football (great games!).

Today, the kids have off again for teacher development, but they're still asleep. The real reason I took them to the pool -- to exhaust them so they don't get up before 8 a.m.

Thought: It could be worse. It could be raining. Oh, wait. ...

Signal of the times

I read the news today (oh, boy) that the Michigan Department of Transportation has OK'd a traffic light for the intersection of 64th Street and Blue Star Highway in Saugatuck Township.

Although the news was rather sad, I just had to laugh. ...

To you big city folk, another traffic light is not news. To me, this is huge. If this red, yellow, green light is erected, it will be the first one outside a city in the western part of Allegan County (I think, anyway).

Oh, the humanity!

There are traffic lights all over Holland (I go through about a dozen on my normal route home), but only one in Saugatuck (and it's set on blinking mode in the winter) and one in Douglas. There are no traffic lights in Fennville. The lights don't appear again until the city of Allegan to the east and the city of South Haven to the south.

I dislike traffic lights. They stop the flow of traffic, like putting a dam in a river, and waste gas and energy. They are symbols of poor planning and our embarrassing dependence on the automobile. We need them, I'm sorry to say, for our style of living in America, but that's like saying the drug addict needs clean needles to survive.

What is to be done

The popular alternative is the traffic circle. I dislike these also, but mainly from bad past experiences dealing with them in Buffalo. I've softened my hatred of these recently, but the case is still open on whether I'd rather have one of these than a stop light.

My idea to reduce the number of traffic lights is simple: Reduce the number of automobiles. If we only allow vehicles on certain roads, for example, and rely on mass transit, such as light rail systems, and neighborhood retail (that is, a local hardware store instead of a box Lowe's, a local grocery instead of Wal-Mart), we could make the whole nation a better place.

But for now, I'll just lament another place I'll be forced to stop, another example of the state regulating my life instead of accommodating it.

Thought: What would Caligula the rubber chicken do?

Rubber chicken

I was discussing my last blog with a coworker the other day and it came up that I had a mini rubber chicken on my night stand.

He asked why I had such stretchy poultry in the house.

I responded by saying because my regular sized one had fallen apart and I haven't replaced it.

Also, I think rubber chickens are funny. Hilarious, really. Put one in someone's underwear drawer and you have chuckles all around.

Diary of a mad chicken

Once, long ago, I was creative.

I wrote poetry, short stories. I drew pictures. I let my mind imagine what it would be like to travel through time and space. I laid in fields and watched clouds. I rolled down hills and went skinny dipping in Lake Erie. I wore unmatching socks, put bells on my shoes and wore 12-foot long scarves. Not all at the same time, mind you, though the 12-foot long scarf would have helped in the cold Lake Erie waves. I had dreams of driving a government-surplus U.S. Postal Service mail truck across country.

Then I grew up.

Before I decided to toss away whimsy, my friend Bob and I went to a joke shop in downtown Buffalo, each with his own goal. Bob bought plastic vomit. That's the kind of guy Bob was. I bought a rubber chicken and named it Caligula. That's the kind of guy I was.

After carrying around Caligula and doing all the jokes I could with my emperor's namesake, I decided to make a movie about Caligula. The endeavor focused on a rubber chicken that went mad with power in his crazy, stuffed-animal-populated kingdom. I called it "Caligula: Diary of a Mad Chicken." Of course.

I used my grandfather's 35mm manual camera and some color film to create my multi-media slide presentation in my parents' basement.

When I completed my masterpiece, I invited over friends, requesting that they dress up. A few wore suits and ties, but most wore attire befitting "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." And I served refreshments -- cheese balls on toothpicks. I was a glorious host.

The soundtrack is lost to the ages. I know I used The Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)" and a track off Rick Wakeman's "No Earthly Connection." I think I used a song called "Rape, Burn and Clap" off "Liztomania," but I could be wrong here.

The depraved chicken was a star, but the ravages of time and heavy drug use all celebrities experience had eaten away at the very chicken itself. By the end, Caligula was torn, tattered, barely a shell of the rubber shell it once was. Caligula was no more.

The tiny chicken I now have came from my wife. She knows how to cheer me up. It reminds of when I was creative.

Thought: Symbolism here. Weird symbolism, but symbolism nonetheless.

Priorities?

My wife and I were in bed the other night. She was watching the movie "A Few Good Men" and I was drifting off to sleep. See, we're married.

During a commercial, she flipped through the stations.

"Oh," she says. "Here's a naked woman watching something on TV and she's about to masturbate."

I don't move. My eyes are shut and I'm drifting off to sleep.

The channels flip.

"Oh," she says. "Here's Meat Loaf and he's singing. ..."

I bolt up in bed, but can't see the TV because I don't have my glasses on. I reach for my glasses in a hurry and knock over everything on my night stand. My glasses fall to the floor along with a a flashlight, my alarm clock and whatever else was piled on the table. I can't see what's going on (duh!) so I'm running my hand over the carpet in a desperate attempt not to break my glasses (I was making a spectacle of myself!).

I finally stumble on my specs, get them righted on my face and turn to the TV. Was Meat Loaf singing "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights"?

No. It was over. I missed it.

I laid back down, questioning my priorities.

Thought: Maybe he was singing "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"?

He saved the nation?

OK. I'm not that much of an iconoclast that I can't appreciate the significance of Gerald R. Ford's presidency. I understand he was generally a nice guy, he probably meant well in all that he did, and I can excuse the mess he helped continue in Southeast Asia and his inability to rein in inflation and job stagnation. I also understand the inflated ego of Grand Rapids (Ford was congressman there for a million years) and the West Michigan fish bowl that makes the RCA and CRC seem more powerful than a locomotive and Hope College a top school for dance.

But I won't stand for idolatry or hero worship.

When Ford died, The Grand Rapids Press announced in its front page headline that Ford, "Saved the nation."

What?

Ford did no such thing. He followed a consitutionally chosen path to the presidency. Everything in the nation, constitutionally, worked great. Nixon resigned, the vice president stepped in. No riots. No revolution. No counter revolution. Wow. The system worked. That is impressive.

Now, the Constitution also worked when Ford pardoned Nixon. Despite all the flowery talk now of how that "healed" a nation, I say CRAP. Nixon got away with some major crimes, the worst being using the powers of government to attack individuals he didn't like. That is the greatest abuse of government.

All Ford did is what his politcal party asked of him (I say it was implicit, that there was no quid pro quo between Ford and Nixon).

And I say that was not brave. It's not cowardly either. It's what was expected. A brave man who cared about his country would have made sure Nixon was fairly charged, fairly tried and, if needed, fairly punished.

If I used my power to order crimes, erase evidence and harass people outside the limits of the law, and I was caught, you're damn right I'd be in jail where I should be. Unless I had a friend in a high place. ...

George Washington "saved" the nation. Abraham Lincoln "saved" the nation. FDR "saved" the nation. Gerald Ford just cruised through a pot hole on the road to going golfing.

Thought: Oh, Ford also helped the current VP and Rumsfeld get into top government. For that, well, some things can't be forgiven.