In the winter we will go see Rain Man

It's 60 degrees Fahrenheit in Miami, at this moment.

That's also the official temperature a bit further down the Overseas Highway, in Key West, where I used to flip-flop around outside. At this moment, here in Seattle, the temperature is 56.

And it's only January 19th.

It's been a particularly good winter here, at least as far as I'm concerned. Oh, it did get a bit cold for a week or two, and I saw a lot of Seattle folks bundled up, heard them complaining.

But for someone who grew up in northeast Ohio, right at the edge of something that is called the snow belt, I think this is glorious; makes me think about packing a picnic and heading for the beach (which is just around the corner and down Fauntleroy a ways at Lincoln Park).

But the thin-blooded whiners who were upset about the brief cold snap aren't the only ones complaining about the weather, here in the Pacific Northwest.

The people in Vancouver, British Columbia, who are organizing the 2010 Winter Olympics are bitching, too, but for another reason.

They're wondering if they're going to have enough snow.

As my grandfather Warwick used to say, it's raining pitchforks and ponytails up there and not a flake of snow in sight on Cypress Mountain, thirty minutes north of downtown Vancouver, where three ski events and three snowboard events are scheduled.

And it seems the Olympics staff can't make artificial snow, either, because the water in their snow cannons won't freeze in the warm air.

Of course, they do have snow stockpiled for such an occasion, both artificial and nature versions of the stuff. And they're keeping the stockpiles covered, so all the rain won't melt it. But they're still worried.

I would be, too, if I were in the Olympics business. But I'm not, so I'm loving all the shirt-sleeves weather here in Washington State.

And I'm wondering if the folks running the Olympics have considered installing in-line wheels on the bottoms of the skis and snowboards. Just a thought, you know?

The meme takes it on the road

There's an interesting meme making the rounds just now.

It calls for a list of every city in which you've spent at least one night (other than home) during 2009. You're supposed to mark each one with an asterisk in which you spent more than one non-consecutive night.

Here's mine:

Vancouver, BC
Lawrence, Ks
Kansas City, Mo
Atlanta, GA
Columbus, OH
Portland, OR

Too many nights away from home, and I hardly ever travel.

How about you?

Gobble, gobble, gobble

Happy Thanksgiving!

Snoqualmie

Rachael and I took advantage of the great weather this past Sunday to play tourist, something we haven't had a lot of time to do since our arrival in Seattle almost two years ago (Halloween 2007).

We headed east on Interstate 90, jumped off at exit 25 and visited Snoqualmie Falls. It was worth the trip. Sheer natural beauty.

The Snoqualmie River flows over a 268-feet drop, one hundred feet higher than Niagra Falls, just north of the town of Snoqualmie. The little community is surrounded by the Cascade Mountains, with breath-taking vistas in every direction.

Scoping out the place, we couldn't help but wonder if the residents ever reach a time when the sights become ordinary.

We also stopped by Snoqualmie Casino on the way home. There may be a recession in the works, but it wasn't readily apparent on the gaming floor. Lots of noise. Lots of people. Lots of money changing hands.

I dropped $100 after a couple of hours at the blackjack tables. I prefer to think of it as paying the price for entertainment.

Anyway, it was a lovely afternoon.

Word play

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat considers political hyperbole today in These Are the Worst of Times?

Reading it, I was reminded of what Inigo Montoya said to Vizzini the Dwarf in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

There and back again

Talk about your whirlwind tours.

My daughter's wedding was this past Saturday. You may recall that she lives in Ohio and so I had to take wing to get there. Oh, sure, I could have taken the bus or rented a car for a 5,000-mile round trip, but either would have meant days on the road and for financial reasons I couldn't leave until Thursday and had to be back Monday, so . . .

The wedding was lovely, my daughter gorgeous, I cried my eyes out during the ceremony and the reception party was a hoot. Daughter and new hubby are off on a cruise, somewhere in the sunny Caribbean, God bless them.

But that's not what this blog is about.

This is the second trip I have taken by airplane in eight weeks (the first was to Kansas in mid-July for Jim Gunn's Sf Writers Workshop) and both trips were a nightmare. It's been years since I've flown and I couldn't help but wonder where the friendly skies have gone.

I have mentioned here before that I am a woman of considerable size, both in height and weight. There is nothing average about me, so the fact that I am wedged into coach-class airline seats is a given. And I never expect decent food on a flight. Airplanes are not restaurants. Just as long as I can get a couple of glasses of Diet Coke, I am content.

But what happened to courtesy and polite service?

I flew to Kansas and returned via United and never got as much as a smile from a single airline employee. And the return flight was a horror. I arrived in Denver for a connecting flight to Seattle, only to discover that my connector had been canceled, as had the next and final flight for the day.

After standing in line for an hour at a service counter, I was told that they could book me on a late morning flight the next day. There was no explanation for why the flights were canceled (despite my questions) and no offer of compensation for meals or overnight accommodation. I did manage to get a refund on my ticket to pay for a flight aboard Alaska Air (the last of the day) and arrived home six hours late.

And so, I was hesitant about flying to Ohio for the wedding, but chose to travel via Delta, figuring United and Denver had been a bad turn of luck.

Oops.

My flight left Seattle fifteen minutes late, headed for Atlanta, where I had thirty-five minutes to catch the connector. We landed in Atlanta ten minutes late and then sat on the apron another ten minutes, waiting for traffic to clear, leaving me fifteen minutes to reach the connector gate -- in another terminal.

I arrived just as the agent was closing the bridge door and he refused to open it again, even though the plane sat at the gate for another ten minutes. I don't know. It was almost ten p.m. and he probably had had a long day. Maybe I scared him. I can loom when I am anxious and I was gasping my words, after my mad dash between gates.

At least Delta did pay for my hotel room in Atlanta Thursday night and I made it into Columbus by nine a.m. Friday morning.

Even so, I have had my fill of standing in lines, undressing for airport security, squeezing into tiny seats aboard noisy airplanes and having to deal with rude airline employees who don't seem to like their jobs. I don't travel very much, so I suppose my miniscule contribution to the airline economy won't be missed.

But the big silver birds have seen the last of me.

And then we're going to the baseball game

On a more upbeat note ...

Remember Bill Cosby's Special Class routine from his album, Wonderfulness? It's the one about being jealous of the kids in special class because they were always going on field trips. You know:

We're going to the zoo today! And then we're going to the baseball game and then to Hong Kong and Tokyo, and we're going to a lot of places. Yep, yep, yep.

I was thinking about that this morning because Rachael and I are going to a Mariners game Monday night at Safeco Field. It's our first time in the two years we've been in Seattle, actually our first time to any major sporting event in the ten years we've been together.

Neither of us are big sports fans.

But we're going to the baseball game because it's a new experience and because we have free tickets. Yay, Kirk!

We're making it an all-day activity, too. Lunch someplace downtown. A few beers at Pike Place Brewery, where we haven't been in months. Some poking around at Pike Place Market. Maybe an hour or two at Seattle Art Museum and then a leisurely stroll down First Avenue to the game.

Dinner will be beer and hot dogs. Maybe we'll get lucky and catch a foul ball.

Baseball is the game with foul balls, isn't it? Nine players to a team, nine innings, three strikes and the batter is out. Or is it three bats and the striker is out?

Whatever it is, we're going to the baseball game. And then maybe we'll go to Hong Kong or Toyko. One thing is certain. We're going to go lots of places and we're going to have a good time. Yep, yep, yep.

Service with a shrug of indifference

Ride the bus often enough on a more or less regular basis and you begin to recognize faces. See them often enough and you start to talk to them.

At least I do.

I call them Bus Buddies. I have three or four and it's become a pleasure to see them. They smile when they see me climb aboard, too, but one of my buddies wasn't smiling Thursday.

I'll call him Diego. He's a lovely man with a courtly manner, living in the United States on a visa. I see him on the bus on Thursdays because he is returning home, at the time I board the bus, from one of his twice-weekly workouts. He usually is quick with a smile, but a bad thing happened to him Thursday.

"What's the problem?" I asked, when I saw his sour face.

"Someone broke into my locker and took my wallet," he said. "I'm not that concerned about the money but it had all my identification. My driver's license, my green card. Everything. And they took my cell phone, too. It had all my contacts on it."

"Did you report it?" I asked.

"I talked to the guy at the fitness center," he said. "He said there was nothing he could do, said it happened all the time."

'Did you call the cops?"

"I will when I get home. The guy wouldn't even let me use the phone to call the police."

I won't even ask why someone would steal his things because that sort of thing has been going on since there have been people. We all covet things and some of us can't be bothered to acquire those things honestly.

And I won't tell you the name of the fitness center. It's part of a chain and I'm certain they have more money to pay attorneys' fees than I do.

But the fact that this sort of thing happens "all the time" at this business and nothing has been done to curtail it makes me angry and the thought that this sort of response may be becoming an accepted way to do business fills me with despair.

And I wonder what sort of world are we leaving to our children.

Overheard on the bus

The woman didn't look too out-of-the-ordinary when she climbed onto the King County Metro Transit bus at a stop in downtown Seattle. Middle height. Middle weight. Middle years.

Not at all stark, raving bonkers.

She was cradling something in her arms; a bit of gray fur jutted above her elbow.

"Is that a dead squirrel?" the driver asked.

"It was," the woman said. "But I brought it back to life."

Everyone on board was watching and listening now.

"Uh huh," the driver said. "You know, you can't bring a dead animal onto the bus."

"But I brought it back to life!"

The woman stepped toward the driver, offering proof of the miracle. The squirrel never moved and the driver held her ground; it was enough to make you wonder what else she had seen, operating public transit.

"You can't bring it on board."

The woman took a step back, but before she turned and stomped down the steps, she held the squirrel out for all to see and laid a curse upon the bus, explaining in detail the fiendish nature of all on board and stating her wishes for the vehicle's ultimate destination, once she had made her exit.

The live entertainment is the reason I keep riding the bus.

Thoughts on growing older

It's been almost six weeks since I posted last, but it has been a busy time.

On the writing front, my son and I have been hammering out a rewrite of our screenplay, Black Rock, which we hope to see filmed next summer (2010) in West Virginia. If all goes well, he will be directing it, too.

We're both excited, the production company that optioned it are saying money is looking good, but we are ready to move on to a new project.

I've been writing on my own, as well (for reports on that, check out my writing blog, A Moving Line). And I am flying to Lawrence, Kansas next Saturday for a two-week-long writers' workshop conducted by a science fiction great, James Gunn. Teaching fiction was his "day job" while he wrote and he still is involved in the operation of The Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

I dug around in my book storage boxes last week and found a copy of Future Imperfect, Gunn's collection of short stories published in 1964. I bought it new and it's still in pretty good shape, although the pages have yellowed. The price, printed on the cover for all to see was forty cents.

And that brings me to something I have been mulling upon.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons that it has been six weeks since I have posted is that the days go by so quickly. Does it seem that way to you? That the older you get, the faster times goes by.

My son was thirty-one June 11th.

Rachael and I have been in Seattle for eighteen months now and it seems like just yesterday that we made that non-stop trip here.

She just had another birthday Wednesday and when we went out for pizza to celebrate, she told me that she felt as if the years were picking up speed, as well.

We've been together ten years now.

I can't help but wonder where does the time go?

Shakespeare had MacBeth say:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I don't want to get all maudlin here, but I'm feeling a bit like that idiot tonight.

A rose by any other name

What ever happened to Dick and Jane?

If you grew up in the United States and are over forty, as I am, you should remember them.

Dick and Jane were brother and sister, main characters in a series of primary readers written by William S. Gray and used within the American public school system from the mid 1930s through the early 1970s to teach reading skills.

The books relied on whole language theories (or "whole word reading") and repetition, using phrases like, "Oh, see. Oh, see Jane. Funny, funny Jane.”

The one most remembered is Fun with Dick and Jane. If you aren’t American or aren’t over forty, you may remember that as the title of two American movies – one in 1997 with George Segal and Jane Fonda and the other in 2005 with Jim Carrey and Tea Leone.

Gray first used the names Dick and Jane because they were, at the time, two of the most popular names parents selected for their children.

Dick is a diminutive of Richard, a name with Norman roots; that means brave ruler or brave power. Jane is a feminization of John, perhaps the most common name, in all its manifestations, in the world. John has roots in Hebrew, Yochanan, and translates as God is gracious.

You don’t see either name on too many birth certificates these days.

According to the Social Security Administration, the most popular names in Washington state in 2008 were Ethan and Olivia.

Ethan means "solid, enduring" in Hebrew. Olivia was first used in this spelling by Shakespeare for a character in Twelfth Night. He probably based it on Oliver, which has its roots in Latin, oliva, which means "olive".

For me, they just don’t have the same feel, particularly with today’s pressures for gender equality.

See Ethan run. Run, Ethan, run. See Olivia run. Run, Olivia, run! You can run faster than Ethan.

And what about Spot, Dick and Jane’s dog?

Last year, the favorite name for male dogs was Max. The favorite name for female dogs was Bella. Both names have Latin roots and mean Great and Beautiful, respectively.

I culled information on name meanings from the Behind the Names web site. Shakespeare, of course, had a bit to say about Spot, too, but it was not found in the Behind the Names database.

Hear me out

I am an eavesdropper; always have been.

My earliest memories include listening to adult conversation, trying to piece together what it was they were talking about. I listen to nearby conversations in airports, at the doctor's office, in convenience stores and while riding the bus.

I have even been known to listen to a single side of a conversation when I catch someone else on the telephone, and with the wide-spread use of cellular telephones, that is becoming easier and easier to do, whether I want to or not.

This week, Rachael and I had a late lunch in the swell neighborhood restaurant in our building -- it's Mexican and serves great chicken flautas -- and we both got hooked on the cell phone conversation in the next booth.

A fellow in his twenties took a call from his grandmother, at least he referred to the caller as Grandma, and they gabbed for almost fifteen minutes. Have you ever heard Abbott and Costello do Who's On First? This was funnier.

He apparently did some sort of sales work; what he sells never came up, but he was telling Granny about an upcoming business trip. She wasn't talking loud enough for us to hear her side of the conversation. He was talking loud enough for both of them.

"I'm leaving Friday for ten days, Grandma."

"I don't know. Paraguay or Uruguay, one of those two."

"I don't know. In South America, I think; maybe Central America. I'm not sure. They speak Spanish."

"A little bit, and the company is paying for an interpreter."

"Yeah, I'm flying. Uh huh. It's too far to drive."

"No. My boss said my commissions are lower than anyone else's and so I have to be the one to go."

"I'm not going to get fired, Grandma! But I may quit; I'm twenty-seven years old and I'm not even making five thousand a week!"

I thought Rachael was going to choke on her refried beans on that last one; it was the funniest thing he said during the entire conversation. The saddest, too. I suspect the fellow is not the only twenty-seven-year-old who expects to make five thousand dollars a week.

Nor the only one uncertain where Uruguay is.

Where is justice?

Now we know what a human life is worth in Seattle.

Three teen-age Seattle boys have pleaded guilty to the unprovoked beating of 53-year-old Edward McMichael last October 25th. McMichael died nine days later of injuries sustained in the beating.

He was something of a local celebrity, a shy fellow known as The Tuba Man, who regularly provided impromptu tuba performances at local sporting events. And he is dead for no other reason that he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and caught someone's attention.

The boys were each fifteen years old the night of the attack. They pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree manslaughter, but because they are juveniles, the most any of the three can receive as punishment for the senseless crime is 72 weeks in the King County Juvenile Detention Center.

County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg called such sentences "inadequate", when he announced Friday that the county had agreed to accept the guilty pleas, adding that Washington State law does not allow stiffer sentences for juveniles defendants in such cases.

Their confessions allowed them to escape the possibility that they could be arrested on more serious charges at some later time. According to Satterberg, the trio of teens could not be charged now, without the confessions, because none of the witnesses to the beating would come forward and identify the attackers.

Seventy-two weeks. Maximum. That is not even ten days for each of McMichael's 53 years on earth. And his three attackers will still be juveniles when they walk away from their cells sometime next year.

Tell me; where is the justice in that?

A farewell -- of sorts

A funny thing, the internet.

Last week, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a fixture in this city for 146 years, printed its last newspaper. There were a ton of people who bemoaned the loss but I wasn't one of them.

Not that I didn't care for the newspaper, usually referred to as the P-I. In fact, I much preferred it to its competition, The Seattle Times. It's just that for me and tens of thousands other readers, the P-I hasn't gone away.

As a former newspaper reporter, I probably shouldn't admit this; in fact, some of my former co-workers at The Times-Reporter, in New Philadelphia, Ohio, and The Canton Repository, in Canton, Ohio, might just harbor notions of stringing me up by my thumbs. But here it is; I haven't read a print newspaper in almost ten years.

I get my daily dose of news via the internet, have read seattlepi.com since April 2007, when we first began to consider a move to the West Coast, and while the P-I may be dead and gone, seattlepi.com is still very much alive.

There are some differences, of course.

Some of the old standbys of print newspapers are gone, as are a few smaller items of local note, and a couple of the columnists have departed. But coverage of major news, international, national and local, is still available, as is movie and book coverage, the want ads, David Horsey's editorial cartoons and the one comic strip I still read -- Funky Winkerbean.

The Hearst Company, owners of the now defunct P-I, also own its online version and it's still available at no cost to readers.

All of that may change, of course. The Hearst people may decide to initiate a subscription to read seattlepi.com. That has happened for the online versions of a number of national newspapers; if it happens here, I probably will pay it. They may decide the online news site isn't paying for itself and scrap it, too.

But I'm not going into mourning yet.

The london eye

Gay Degani’s flash, The London Eye, is the featured story today at Every Day Fiction and it is a perfect example of flash fiction.

It is a horror story of the best type; no unkillable murderers, no boogeymen, no zombies or vampires. Just a man being driven insane by the monstrous guilt he carries within his mind.

Check it out here. It’s special.

Watch for this

Have you been watching The United States of Tara?

I don't watch much television, don't often recommend programs, but if you have access to Showtime, and you're not watching this show, you are missing something dark and delicious.

Toni Collette stars as Tara Gregson, wife of Max, mother of Kate and Marshall and a gifted painter of murals. She also shares her body with Alice, T and Buck.

Tara suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), a mental condition in which a single person displays multiple distinct personalities, known as alters. It used to be called multiple personality disorder.

Something happened to Tara when she was a teen-ager, something awful, and the presence of the alters is in response to that event. Tara can't remember what it was, and no one else, not even her parents, seem to know what occurred.

There's a lot of controversy about whether or not the condition is real, but that's not the point of the show. Rather, it is a tour de force for Collette.

She is best known for her roles in the films, Muriel's Wedding and The Sixth Sense (she was the mother of the kid who saw dead people), and she shines in this role. Each of the four personalities are distinct characterizations; even her face looks different. Not just differently made up; different.

Alice is my favorite. She is the perfect housewife, always dressed and coifed just so, able to keep an ordered house and whip up multi-layer cakes for school bake sales.

But there is a layer of evil to Alice that shows itself now and then and it is chilling. Imagine June Cleaver with raging PMS. Or Carol Brady with a butcher knife and a real mad on. It is so much fun to watch Alice smile as she slashed those who oppose her into ribbons with her sharp tongue.

John Corbett (remember Chris on Northern Exposure?) is fantastic, too, as Max. The man has his faults but he has made a commitment to Tara that is poured in concrete. Max tolerates Alice and T but is not above a bit of male bonding with Buck, Tara's male alter.

Buck: I would have nailed her if my dick hadn't been shoot off in Nam.

Max: Buck, you were never in Viet Nam.

The supporting cast is strong, as well. Episode six, last week, featured Fred Ward and Pamela Reed as Tara's father and mother. Watching these two chip away at Tara's edges made it easy to understand why the poor lady has problems.

The United States of Tara is an antidote for those of us who watched Leave It to Beaver or The Brady Bunch and felt cheated because our families weren't like that.

United States of Tara. Sunday nights on Showtime. Watch for it.

At every day poets

My poem, Late Night Considerations, is the featured piece at Every Day Poets today.

It’s my fourth appearance and it has to do with a subject near to my heart and mind.

LNC considers ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. And don’t tell me you’ve never lay in bed at night, wide awake, heart skiddering, thinking, “What is that noise in the closet?”

If you would like to check it out, it’s here.

At every day fiction

My flash, Sidney, Down Under, is the featured story at Every Day Fiction today.

It’s a tale of cats and cash and murder, and has nothing to do with Australia (the title, don’t you see?) and everything to do with positioning.

Check it out, if you get a chance.

Dumb as a rock

The cat attacked the television this morning.

The cat's name is Sam. He's part of a set; Sally and Sammy, sister and brother from the same litter, Miss Chatterbox and Doofus.

They are eight years old. We call her Miss Chatterbox because she back-talks to us all the time. If the litter box is not clean enough for her, she complains. If food is not forthcoming, she complains. If she hasn't been scratched long enough, she complains. She will sit before us and meow in aggrieved tones.

And she is smart. We had to put lockable latches on the cabinet where the cat food is stored because she figured out how to open it.

Her brother, however, is dumb as a rock and that is why he attacked the television.

We bought the new set at Christmas; a 42-inch, 1080i high-definition flat screen. I was happy with the 24-inch set we had, but Rachael wanted the bigger, sharper model for gaming.

"Wait until you see how clear the picture is," she said. "It's like you're looking through an open window."

I was writing this morning and had the television tuned to Sunrise Earth. They were showing scenes from a South American rain forest. The twitter of birds began and Sam went crazy.

In an instant, he was up on the table's edge before the set, yowling and doing his best to reach through the screen with one paw and bat the birdie he was certain was only inches away.

I yelled; he didn't stop.

And then the image blinked to an extreme close-up of a soldier ant. The ant appeared to be larger than Sam and was head right at him. Sam stopped swatting, arched away from the screen and toppled from his perch. He hid on the stairs, peeking over the top lip and hissing, until I turned to another channel.

I guess Rachael is right.

Greetings from the motherland

When you are as large as I am (six feet, two inches and well over two hundred pounds) you get used to folks looking.

There are days, though, that I feel like a normal-sized person, living in a land overrun by little people.

I know there are other women out there who are my size; the clothing manufacturers don't make all those blouses and slacks and sweaters just for me. But I don't often see those other women.

I saw one yesterday.

She strolled toward me from around a corner in downtown Seattle; taller than me by a couple of inches but not carrying the weight I do. Not carrying my sixty-two years, either. Even so, she had some heft to her.

She was wearing a police uniform. That didn't surprise me; a lot of large women are drawn to law enforcement. I learned that while working as a corrections officer in Florida.

I caught her eye as we passed. If I had had a sword, I would have rattled it upon my shield in greeting. Instead, I smiled and dipped my chin. She cocked one eyebrow and returned the smile.

Two Amazons, in passing; silently saying, "I see you."