Foolish Questions

What’s for lunch?

Ooh, congratulations are in order – I’ve created a new word – nonprocrastination. Ah, damn it, I didn’t – there’s a Wiktionary listing for it. Sheesh, what do I have to do to create a original word around here?

This past couple of weeks, I’ve really been working outside my comfort zone. Ever since I was a wee tike in diapers, I’ve been known for (and here I’ll be tootling on my own horn) a quite exceptional proclivity for procrastination. One might even say it’s like my superpower, though as with many superheroes, it’s one of those superpowers that’s pretty lame. Like, well, Ant Man. Now I’ve never read any comics with Ant Man in it, but let’s face it, you can shrink down to the size of an ant – really, how useful is that? Like you’re in a battle with a super villain, because that’s what you do, you’re a superhero, right? And you miniaturize down to the size of an ant, and then you need to walk across that desk to get to the wall outlet so you can sneak into the evil arch-villains lair. Some time, a couple of weeks from now, you finally get there. Cause you’re the size of a freaking ant, for gods sake! By then the super villain has used the secret plans he stole to construct the nuclear powered tunneller and dug underneath Fort Knox and stolen all the bullion, and while he was at it, since he had lots of time, he kidnapped the Ant Man’s girlfriend and his Mom, and his dog. So yeah, if there’s a place you can sign up for superpowers, I don’t see people lining up for that one.

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Two years after I set out, my quest for vengeance is now complete. The mighty mountain has fallen beneath my dusty boots. Well, actually, it’s still there, pretty much none the worse for wear, which is not something that can be said about yours truly. But, the important thing is I made it to the top of Pikes Peak, and thus another Fourteener is now ticked off the list. That makes four Fourteeners now. I get to count Mt. Whitney, even though it is in California and not Colorado, since it does exceed the required fourteen thousand feet height. And I climbed it, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all that counts.

What with one thing or another, such as roaring forest fires, evacuations, road trips and Mary’s peach pie, I had a hell of a time getting back in shape this year. I realize that this would not be necessary, if during the intervening winter, I made even a minimal effort to exercise, not to mention possibly rethinking that whole second-helping-of-potatoes-fried-in-duck-fat idea. So it took me right to the end of the summer before I felt minimally ready to attempt the ascent. At 6:00am on last Friday, Danny, a boon companion, and Jackson, faithful dog (whose faithfulness is assured as long as the Jerky Treats keep coming) assailed the mighty massif.

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I just ordered a pair of convertible pants, you know the pants where you can zip off the lower legs, and change them into shorts. They’re great! I mean sure, usually it’s too much trouble to stop, pull off your shoes, unzip the legs of the pants and drag them off, stow them somewhere, and put your shoes back on. So you usually just suffer through the heat. But, if you really, really wanted to, you could convert them into shorts. And that’s awesome, just ask any guy. All clothes ought to be convertible. Long sleeve shirts convertible into short sleeve shirts, regular ties convertible into bow ties, regular glasses convertible into a pair of welding goggles.

Mary, on the other hand, seems to have a pretty unreasonable dislike of the wonderfulness that is convertible pants. I can tell, because I’m pretty attuned to her moods. Like when she says, “Those pants are really awful, and people caught wearing them deserve to get beaten like a rabid rattlesnake.” Which I think everyone could agree seems like a viewpoint that’s veering a bit towards the extreme. Or maybe it’s the way she exclaims, “Oh, hell, no!” whenever I pick up a pair, just to look at, when we’re at Eddie Bauer, you know?

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The other night I engaged in what was described as Boys Night Out, which could mean it was a meeting of the He-Man Girl Haters Club, but probably wasn’t, as we all love our wives a lot. Lots and lots. Anyway, the ostensible reason for getting together was to drink a lot of wine. And because we’re big deal he-men, the only acceptable wine is red, since real manly men drink red wines. If you invite the ladies, they’ll insist on drinking white wine, and that’s hardly manly at all, unless you’re eating a really nice sea bass with a beurre blanc.

You know, some years ago, we men would get together, watch some football and whip out our manhoods, which at the time were in the form of cars, and do some serious comparing. With men, size is always important (no matter what we might say to the world at large), whether it was cubic inches of engine displacement, or elapsed time from zero to sixty. There might be style points too, based on whether or not you had a shifter with a knob on the end that looked like a fist, or a steering wheel made of chromed chain links that was small enough that it could pass right through your chest with virtually no resistance in a head on collision. But these were strictly secondary. I imagine that these types of things still go on somewhere, deep in that section of the country that still wears John Deere hats, but in a non-ironic way. Where I’m at, though, we’ve moved on.

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I have to confess that my fellow man doth perplex me, oftenly. Take the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Supreme. That’s it – just think about this for a minute – no, just thirty seconds. And ask yourself – why? Alright, now that you’ve wrapped your head around that brain tickler, let’s try this question on for size.  Why do people take photos of paintings in a museum?

We see this repeatedly, especially in galleries with large signs saying – NO PHOTOGRAPHY, AND, YES, THAT MEANS YOU, MR. AMERICAN TOURIST. People ignore this stuff all the time. And for that I have to fall back on the simple explanation that they assume that since they’re in a foreign country, the signs are going to be in some foreign language that they won’t understand, so ipso facto, the signs can be safely ignored. And this is in London! I, for one, think that if we’re ever going to elevate the opinion of the rest of the world about American tourists, we need to form a corps of nuns, and send them out to prowl around tourist attractions and whack people’s knuckles with long super-springy yardsticks. Even if the whackees haven’t done anything yet. Because, it’s nuns and they just know. It’s their superpower.

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Mary came across a Wall Street Journal (Note: Strictly For The Validation of the 1%, Not Intended For The Raising of Social Consciousness, Whatsoever) article about people using cruise ships like the Queen Mary 2 to travel across the Atlantic instead of flying. If it’s in the Wall Street Journal, from my observation, there is at least a fifteen percent chance that this represents a trend. It also means that there is at least a ninety seven percent chance that the editors at the Journal needed to fill some column inches for this edition. Remember kids, statistics are your friend, just before they go all rabid, and try to gnaw your face off.

Since we have the time, because we don’t have children, and a bit of money, because, again – no children, and you’d be amazed how that will add up over time, we decided we too would like to cruise across the Atlantic. That’s before the article above came out, since we’re no slavish slaves to trends, even fake trends made up by newspaper editors.

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We are just a few weeks away from moving to England for three months, and I like to think of it as moving there rather than going on an extended vacation. I mean, sure it looks like a vacation, but we’re going to be doing our day to day thing just like we were at home, except with a bit more British flavour. Like spelling flavor as flavour. Things like that. Anyway, we’ve been discussing what kind of luggage we’re going to take, and the first pass looks like it’ll be something on the order of eighteen bags.

Like many Americans I get most of my information from movies, since reading is time consuming, and there are considerably fewer CGI explosions to enliven things. Movies can be quite informationally dense, if approached with a certain credulous attitude. For instance, from movies one learns that cars will usually explode in a fiery blast when involved in a crash. The chance for automotive incineration approaches certainty if you go over a cliff, often while you’re still in mid-air. So stay away from cliffs. You can just show up at the best restaurant in town, and still get a table on a Saturday night if you slip the maître’d a sawbuck. Hitting someone with a frying pan is invariably hilarious because it always makes a boooonnngg sound.

Most importantly, and hard as it is to believe, germane to this discussion, because somewhere, up there in the first paragraph, I was talking about luggage, I have learned that in days of old, people could be broken down into two groups when it came to travel. The first group took a single, small suitcase, in which everything they needed for months circumnavigating the globe could be packed. The second group, took steamer trunks. Strangely, the number of changes of clothing and accessories never seemed to vary between the two groups.

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Yeah, it wasn’t this mountain, it was another much shorter mountain. A pygmy mountain. This mountain is Pike’s Peak, which someday I shall conquer!

Due to the fact that I am quite without the use of my favorite extremities because of an unfortunate encounter with a mountain, I will be unable to complete and post today’s undeniably witty scribblings. Well typings, anyway. I would however, like to assure everyone that the mountain is quite okay, though my own musculature will be a while recovering. By this evening, I believe that the application of a palliative consisting of enough ibuprofen to choke a horse, five parts gin, three parts wine and a dram of port should reduce brain activity to the point where I don’t care a damn for muscular aches and pains. That being the case, I hope to have a complete post on something or other on the morrow.

It’ll probably be something pithy about hangovers.

A tool that is not as useful for many problems as one might expect. Nails, yes, computer repairs, regrettably, no.

It’s time to come clean. Yes, I was once an engineer. Metallurgy was my specialty. Metallurgy is awesome, a field I recommend highly to those people who like chemistry and physics, and feel that whole interacting with your fellow man thing is overrated. Plus, as a metallurgist you get to destroy things, lots of stuff all the time, and they pay you for it. They call it destructive testing but we metallurgists really just call it Fun, with a capital F. One drawback with engineering in general, and metallurgy specifically, is that although people think, hey an engineer, he can build bridges and space shuttles and stuff, the truth is that we usually just stand there with a set of drawings and look at them and then tell the guy with the drill, “you’re off by 0.015 inches”. And then we go back to looking at the drawings some more. We hardly ever get a chance to use tools, or build stuff with our hands.

The bitter, bitter truth is that I’m not handy. Not even a little. But, I am, ostensibly, a man, and therefore it is in my nature, indeed, it is in the very core of my being that I must try and fix things. The way I see it, men were put on this planet to mend things. Usually things we broke in the first place. Even if you occasionally slice off body parts, smash appendages with blunt objects, or inhale potentially fatal quantities of paint vapor, well that’s okay. Wear your battle scars proudly. The important thing is that you were able to get that shelf put up, and it didn’t fall down in the middle of the night because you foolishly put something on it, like the Farberware dishes your wife collected since she was a little girl, because they reminded her of her grandmother.

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This is the last post in the series related to old time menus from the Golden Age of train travel. After this, I’ll have to find something else to write about, unless I can find some menus and then all bets are off. But, first, the bar menu. I found a copy of the bar menu from the Super Chief when we were staying at La Posada in Winslow, AZ. (Town motto: There’s No Place Like Home, As Long As Home Is Somewhere Else). Unfortunately, due to my quasi-legendary inability to take a decent photo, I can tell what’s on the menu only if I use the kind of photo interpretation tools that analysts at the NSA use to look at reconnaissance satellite imagery, and I still need to squint really hard. It’s best for all concerned, that I don’t paste a copy of one of my pictures into this post, since there is a possibility that gazing too long or too hard at one of my photos can cause the kind of delusional reactions that the protagonists in H.P. Lovecraft’s books always experienced just before they went incurably insane.

The liquor listings themselves aren’t all that interesting. The menu contains all the usual suspects, though with a little less emphasis on name brands. Actually, no emphasis on name brands, at all. Which is fine, I think the fact that you can have a martini while riding a train through the mountains of Colorado is pretty cool, in and of itself, and is probably not going to be measurably improved if you were drinking Ketel One vodka, regardless what the ads say.

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