Merry Go Round

Hello World,

To the untrained observer, it would appear to be some sort of competition afoot in the local area as to which week can produce the world's worst weather. I admit that I am biased, but my vote goes to the week I came back from vacation, when it was almost 100 degrees and we had no electricity for two days. Although since then, the weather has certainly not improved, in fact in some ways it has deteriorated considerably, but I find that anything is easier to take once you've got electricity going for you. And once you get it back, I can tell you that you certainly don't take it for granted, like you did beforehand, when it was just always there, like gravity, and you didn't even have to think about it. No indeed not, you treat it like the precious commodity that it is, and glad of it, especially in this horrible weather. As I said to Bill, while there's no good time to have a blackout, there's many ways that you can make heat, but there's only one way you can make cold, so without the juice, you're just plain out of luck. Then we found out that thousands of other households had been without electricity for a week or more, so I suppose we had reason to be grateful, although it certainly didn't seem like it at the time.

That same week on Friday, the thunder and lightning were so bad that I believe every car alarm went off in a six-block radius around the hospital, and to top it all off, the hospital got struck by lightning as well. (Meanwhile, the 40-story Trump Tower that's under construction around the corner, and along with its crane is the tallest structure for miles in any direction, remained untouched, so that should tell you something right there about who The Donald has in his pocket.) Obviously the hospital is protected against that and has plenty of emergency power, so we didn't lose our lights or computers during the storm. But the lightning proved too much for the telephone system, which keeled right over, taking the automated attendant, voice mail, overhead paging, and a variety of other features along with it. I heard later that the elevators also stopped working, so that must have been a long weekend at the employer of last resort, because I know that many of the problems weren't corrected until late on Sunday or even Monday. This may be the only time that we all thought it was a good thing that we work in one of the squatty little out-buildings of the campus, and not the main hospital, since our building is so old that it pre-dates the invention of elevators, and is constructed entirely of straw and mud, and couldn't attract lightning if it tried.

Here's another story from my vacation. Back when the dinosaurs roamed the unformed land masses, and my family first began camping at Wildwood Park (actually it was in 1958) there were four camping sections (A, B, C and D) in a sort of four-leaf clover pattern, with a traffic circle in the center. Inside the traffic circle was a dark wood building with the bathrooms, which the park maps referred to as the "comfort station," but which everyone else called "The Roundy" because although the building was square, it was on a round plot of land and had a stocky post-and-rail fence all the way around it that served to accentuate its roundness. Of course, it was good to have bathrooms, but as to comforts, that would have been an exaggeration of epic proportions that not even the loosest interpretation of the term could support. The building was small, dark and damp, all raw wood, cement and cinder block, with what was probably Army surplus latrine supplies, and a single bare light bulb in the rafters that did little to dispel the gloom. On one side were four wooden shower cubicles with rickety half-doors and silver pull-chains, and since the light bulb couldn't shine that far, this area had no roof, just bare rafters open to the sky, so you could use the natural light of the outdoors to see what you were washing. Of course, you couldn't take a shower if it was raining, but back then, the shower idea was reserved for the utmost necessity, and not the recreational experience it has since become. This was because the park piped in their shower water directly from the Antarctic, and pumped it into a special building where they froze it before sending it to the showers, so that when you pulled the chain, what actually came out were tiny slivers of ice, like sleet, and felt like hundreds of tiny frozen needles all over your body. These were not showers for the faint-hearted, and even among campers who prided themselves on their resilience, they would admit that they were taking the fastest showers of their lives.

As the park became more popular, and more people were camping in what was supposed to be the "overflow" area above Sections A and C, they turned it into E Section for regular camping, and decided that they needed another comfort station so people in the new section didn't have so far to walk for the bathrooms. This newer building was much nicer, cleaner and brighter with more amenities, and everyone called it the New Roundy, although it lacked personality and had no fence around it. Because it wasn't in a circle, but rather squeezed between three different sections on a triangle-shaped piece of land, we considered it the height of wit to refer to it as "The Triangulary" and fancied ourselves the camping equivalent of Noel Coward for coming up with this play on words. For many campsites in A and C, the New Roundy was actually closer than what was becoming known as the Old Roundy, and although the building and fixtures were newer, the water was just as cold, so the advantages were limited to distance only. Years later, when they added on the Trailer Section at the other side of the park, over the bitter protests of the purists and hide-bound traditionalists, and built their comfort station with WARM WATER, we thought it was the end of the world as we knew it.

When Bill and I went to Wildwood in the 1980's, we found that the Roundy had been renovated to include a real roof, actual overhead lighting, and wall outlets for people to use their hair dryers and electric razors, plus both the Old and New Roundy had warm water in the sinks and showers. This was camping for sissies, as far as I was concerned, but it was a welcome change after years of braving the icicle torture of those frigid showers. Suddenly, you found people in the showers at all hours of the day and night, or middle of the night, from little old ladies to infants in arms, that would never have set foot in the old showers. I thought they had gone as far as they could go with these enhanced comforts, until last year, when the New Roundy unexpectedly got a make-over, where they replaced all of the showers with lovely "motel-type" shower stalls in a sparkling finish and real hot and cold water controls instead of a pull chain. If this was my tax dollars at work, I considered it money well spent indeed!

But they didn't stop there. This year, when we first arrived and were on our way to the beach, we came up the hill from the campsite, and where the Old Roundy should have been, there was instead this miraculous new structure looming in the traffic circle, all blindingly new and shiny, with windows, skylights, doors, sidewalks and decorative landscape elements all over itself. I gasped. I couldn't believe that they actually tore down the Old Roundy and built a whole new building in its place. And what a building! It's like the public restrooms in a fancy hotel, all pretty tile and embellished surfaces, with the new-fangled automatic flush toilets, sinks and hand dryers that you find in highway rest stops. The showers have been expanded and couldn't be lovelier, with plenty of room and many other enhancements. I was really looking forward to trying the place on for size, and I got my chance on Monday when I came back from the beach. This was the first I discovered that the new shower controls, which Bill and I both couldn't figure out after seeing them on Saturday, consisted of a solitary push button (rather than a pull chain) which would give you a single 30-second burst of warm water. Anyone who's ever lived with me can tell you that I'm one of those people who can easily spend an hour in the shower, just letting the hot water pour over me while my mind wanders, so you can imagine what kind of a workout I was giving that darned push button when I was trying to wash off all of the sand and seaweed from the beach. As much as I was amazed and astounded by this new building, I realized these new push button showers were not for me, and I was relieved when I went back to the New Roundy the next day and found they still had their lovely motel showers from last year, where I could indulge myself in a bathing sensation that can only be described as camping for sissies in spades.

Of course, anyone could see what the biggest problem is here. What do you call the Old Roundy, now that it's newer than the New Roundy? The New Old Roundy? Does that make the New Roundy, the Old New Roundy? All week long, when I was trying to explain to Bill the differences between the buildings, I found myself saying things like, "Well, in the new Roundy, I don't mean the New Roundy, but the new building they built where the Old Roundy was ... " or "Of course, in the other Roundy, I mean, the New Roundy, not the "new" new one that they just built, but the ORIGINAL New Roundy ... " It was actually funny how confusing it was, especially after 40 years of making perfect sense, to see how the concept of "old" and "new" were just turned completely on their heads with one simple construction project. I was finally reduced to calling it "the rebuilt Old Roundy" just to save time and aggravation, because everything else just made a bad situation even worse.

So that was the biggest surprise of camping this year, where I don't mind saying, I don't expect a lot in the way of surprises after several decades of going to the same place, year in and year out. They've really moved right into the 21st Century at Wildwood, and I never thought I'd see the day, especially knocking down the Old Roundy and everything. I guess it just goes to prove that time marches on, and we simply have to march along with it, even out in the wilderness, where it seems that nothing ever changes until one day you realize that everything is different. Of course, I'm in favor of progress as much as the next fellow, although I noticed that Bill has had this funny look on his face since we got back, and keeps mumbling something about replacing our shower with one of those 30-second push button models, but I'm sure I must have misunderstood that part.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

Hello World,

Good morning, campers and other fans of the great outdoors. Here I am, back safe and sound from some unusual adventures in vacation-land, and none the worse for wear, although that last point might be up for debate. I will say that for a detail-oriented person such as myself, who takes pride in the ability to organize a camping excursion within an inch of its life, and with copious lists and plans, this vacation was certainly one for the record-books, in terms of glitches, monkey wrenches and sheer unprecedented calamities. It entirely removed the "routine" aspect from what should have been a routine romp in the woods, as it usually is when I spend a week camping at Wildwood Park.

Our adventures, or rather misadventures, began the week before my vacation, and innocently enough, as these things so often do, when we brought the Tempo to the mechanic to have it checked over before packing it up for the trip. Mind you, they've been servicing the car for many, many years, and in fact, we got the car from them originally, so you'd think pretty much that the element of surprise would have long since worn off, if there ever was one. I expected they would check the fluids, belts and hoses and give it a clean bill of health as they usually do, and we'd be off and running. What actually happened reminded me of an old cartoon where Hagar the Horrible sends Lucky Eddie out to see what the cows are doing, because when the weather is going to be nice, the cows are all standing around in the grass, but when it's going to rain, you find them all hunkered down and clumped together for protection. When Lucky Eddie returns and Hagar asks him if the cows are all standing up and happy, or hunkered down for a storm, Lucky Eddie says, "You don't want to know," because the last panel shows the cows have all climbed up into the trees and are holding on to the trunks for dear life in fear and trembling, so you can imagine what that tells you about the upcoming weather conditions, at least as far as the bovine forecast. When Bill went to check in with our mechanic about the Tempo, he had that same sort of "cows up a tree" look, as if the car would not only be too dangerous to take on vacation, but might actually present a hazard to humanity just standing still. In fact, if he could have held the Tempo away from himself with a pair of tongs, he would have done that, besides just giving it an emphatic "thumbs down" for going on vacation. This was discouraging news, and an unexpected complication in our plans, which already included reservations for two campsites, plus a hotel room for the first night.

We considered renting a car for the week, although it was late in the game for that, but we found the options limited and the restrictions unworkable. Then we thought we might go there together in the Buick, and I could stay for a week without a car, since I really don't drive anywhere once I get out there, and just use the car as a "pantry" for snacks and peanuts that I bring with me, plus going out to get pizza or sandwiches for dinner. We figured that I could forage in the woods for roots and berries (only kidding) although a bigger problem would be trying to fit everything into one car that we usually pack in two separate cars. With time running out, and faced with a paucity of unappealing alternatives, we actually came up with an idea that seemed ridiculous on the face of it, but turned out to have a lot of advantages. We decided to make two separate trips in the Buick, which would stay at the park with me during the week, while Bill could use the Tempo around town until I came back. It sounded like a crazy idea, but it saved my vacation, and just in the nick of time, to boot.

Needless to say, now that the Buick was going on vacation instead of the Tempo, it also needed to go to the mechanic's, who decided this was the perfect time to replace the brakes, at a cost for which we could have paid for an entire fleet of rental cars for a week, no thank you very much. A bigger problem was that the new and improved brakes were so far down on the floor that it was universally agreed that I would never be able to reach them if I was driving the car instead of a much taller individual with longer legs, such as Sasquatch, for example. But we plunged ahead, determined to make the best of what was turning out to be a very inauspicious start to a rather unorthodox vacation all around. We started out by packing just the essentials into the Buick, such as the tent and poles, cot and basic necessities to get set up, and we drove out together on Saturday in beautiful weather and not bad traffic. In fact, this may have been the first time we've ever gotten all the way out there without construction delays, which have been a mainstay of my camping experiences for as long as I can remember. We set up both campsites and spent the rest of the day at the beach with sunny skies and crisp clear water that was welcome and refreshing. We stayed overnight in a different motel outside of Riverhead, to avoid a repeat of last year, when we found ourselves trapped by the annual blues festival and couldn't get in or out of town if our lives depended on it. On Sunday, we went back to the beach and had another lovely day of it, and don't think that I don't have the pictures to prove it.

At this point, this is normally where Bill would drive home and go back to work during the week, while I would stay at the park by myself. But because we only had one car, and only half of my camping supplies, what we did on Sunday afternoon was drive back home together, have a nice dinner out, and relax among the comforts of home. Although this technically interrupted my vacation for a night, I still considered it an improvement over standing in line for a shower and sleeping on a cot, so I wasn't going to complain. In the morning, Bill took the Tempo to work, while I packed the rest of my gear in the Buick and drove back out to the park. I called Bill later to let him know that I had arrived safely, since everyone was concerned that I might have trouble driving an unfamiliar car. I was glad to assure him that the "new and improved" brakes turned out not to be an issue, since at the time I was on the highway, the traffic was moving at 25MPH over the Throgs Neck Bridge, it reached a high of 39MPH on the Clearview Expressway, and on the LIE through Queens, we were charging along at a whopping 6 miles per hour. I found at those speeds, not being able to reach the brakes was basically inconsequential. Bill said he hadn't heard about any traffic problems on the LIE, and I said I guess they figured that if you were going as fast as 6MPH on Monday morning in Queens, they didn't consider that a traffic problem worth mentioning, and you should be lucky you were moving at all. The rest of the trip was uneventful, and we even picked up some speed here and there along the way. Not a whole lot of speed, mind you, after all this is the Long Island Expressway we're talking about.

I tossed everything out of the car and hurried back to the beach, to resume my vacation after it was interrupted. This was another lovely day, and I had no complaints about dinner and a campfire, and even the cot was a welcome sight after a long and busy day. The park, which was surprisingly under-filled on Saturday and cleared out even further on Sunday, became positively deserted by Tuesday, when reports of severe weather ahead caused the faint-hearted to flee on all sides. I heard later that they had flooding, tornados and hail in Connecticut, but we didn't have anything like that, although there was a thunderstorm after midnight on Wednesday that made me glad to have a car to sleep in, instead of cowering in my tent with lightning crashing all around. After that, the weather settled down, and even the water stayed wonderfully clear and calm, in spite of the storm.

Late on Friday afternoon, I left the beach and re-packed half of my camping supplies in the car, and drove back home, finding remarkably little traffic all along the way. Bill, who had been working hard all week and holding down the fort at home, pitched in and helped me toss everything into the garage and then we went to Friendly's for dinner. Once again, this interruption in my vacation was offset by having a real shower and sleeping in a real bed, especially since by Friday night, the park usually gets pretty noisy and crowded anyway. Saturday morning, when Bill would normally be driving down early to help me pack up, we were able to go together, and we were more surprised than anybody to find the park filled to capacity and not a campsite to be had. That meant that all of those people had to arrive between late Friday afternoon when I left, and 8:30 Saturday morning when we got back, which made me even happier that I wasn't there on Friday night, when it must have been a madhouse. We packed up everything that was left, and headed back to the beach, for our last day of fun in the sun, and as luck would have it, it was another beautiful day. When the time came to bid our fond farewells to vacation-land and turn our faces toward home, our return trip was without incident or traffic. And considering that the Buick went back and forth four times in one week, rather than just twice as it normally would, we were delighted with its performance, and I didn't even need to bring Sasquatch along to work the brakes.

And so, even though I go to the same place on vacation every year, and in fact, stay at the same campsite each time, it's curious how unforeseen circumstances can crop up and change what should be a routine experience into something unexpected. I think we would all agree that this was not the most optimum arrangement for a quiet and relaxing week in the woods, especially having to pack and unpack the same car four different times, but it also wasn't the wholesale disaster we might have expected when we first got the bad news about the Tempo, and the whole vacation scenario was hanging in the balance. And as much as I wasn't all that impressed with the weather while I was out there, it certainly beat the pants off the weather in the week since I've been back, which if it had been a guest star on "The Sopranos," would not have made it past Monday or Tuesday before getting whacked, it was so disgusting and miserable. In fact, our mechanic threatened to send the Tempo after it, but the last time I looked, the Tempo had climbed up a tree and was holding on to the trunk for dear life.

Come On In, The Water's Fine

Hello World,

And so here we find ourselves, already past the Fourth of July, and what have we got to show for it, I ask you that? Of course, it was nice to have a day off on Tuesday for the holiday, and I was also off on Friday, so it turned out to be a really short week at work for me. Tuesday seemed like a nice enough day for flying the flags, as I usually do, but in a peculiar repeat of what happened on June 14th, around dinner-time I had to dash outside and bring them in all of a sudden and just before the rain came out of nowhere. Then there were fireworks at a nearby park, and although they do this every year, this time it seemed like the house was going to blow apart from the noise, and the cats certainly didn't think much of the idea either, I can tell you that. Fortunately, it wasn't a very long program, but it really got our attention, and then some. And although I've never seriously considered embarking on a life of crime, it always makes me wonder that more cars aren't stolen at times like that, because the noise of the fireworks makes all the car alarms go off at once, and no one pays any attention to them, so it would be a perfect opportunity to break into them with impunity, since the alarm function has already failed in its efforts to raise any alarms for the vehicle's protection. In fact, it happens so routinely and on a wide scale, that you could have your pick of whatever vehicle you like, out of the dozens that all have their alarms screaming at the same time, and none of the owners come running to defend their prized possessions from harm. Far from being a deterrent, I would refer to that as a fireworks-induced theft attractant device, and I can't say that would have much to recommend it, not by a long shot.

Anybody who knows me can tell you that I'm the soul of patience, and as easy-going as the next fellow. Oh, all right, I admit that no one would tell you that, they're more likely to say that I'm a big fat finicky fuss-pot face and obsessive compulsive control freak. But be that as it may, as much as I try to maintain a "live and let live" spirit of good will in our yard with the local wildlife and native habitat, there comes a time when I simply have to draw the line. I don't mind saying that I went to a lot of trouble to set up our decorative fountain parts, without the pump, to serve as a rather elaborate bird bath. Not to mention, spent a fortune over the years on bird bath heaters, some of which didn't even make it through one winter in working condition, much less living up to their claims of providing many years of trouble-free performance. In fact, I believe that it was as a direct result of the bird bath heaters not working reliably, that caused the center support bracket for the fountain to crack, from the pressure of the water freezing around it, which would not have happened if the heater had been functioning correctly. So you can imagine my chagrin, or perhaps outrage is not too strong a word, when I noticed last week that I now have invasive weeds actually growing in the bird bath, through the cracks in the support bracket, no thank you very much. I tried to pull them out, but they're stuck in there like a son of a gun, and by all indications, the bird bath life seems to agree with them to a wildly satisfactory degree. Well, satisfactory to them anyway, but as for me, I'm just plain disgusted with them and I have no patience with this sort of unprincipled, free-loading botanical interloper in our midst. Or, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "Of course, you realize this means war!"

Earlier in the week, when we were watching the Mets hosting the hapless Pirates (who turned out to be not quite as hapless as we would have preferred, in fact, they showed plenty of hap in that first game of the series) one of the announcers, Ron Darling, made the point that the coaches were teaching Jose Reyes those instincts that he would need to become a better shortstop for the team. I'm afraid I've got some bad news for Ron Darling, and that is that instincts, by their very definition, are innate and occur naturally without being taught. Having a "learned instinct" is an oxymoron along the lines of a new antique, square circle or honest politician. (Oh, hit that easy target!) So the Mets coaches can go ahead and teach Reyes whatever they please, but then you can't turn around and call it "instinctive" after that.

Meanwhile, Bill has this to share, from some people who ought to know better --

===================================
I just thought you'd like this. The Harris Polls people send me opportunities to take online surveys and I got one just now. The headers read:

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~

Subject:Give us your opinions on commercial contruction decisions! Date: 5/2/2006 3:19:52 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time From: HarrisPoll@hpolsurveys.com Reply To: To: WDDT@AOL.COM Well, obviously someone with a spellchecker must have seen that and made Tsk Tsk noises because the body copy has the revised spelling of "construction":

What's this survey about?In this survey, we're interested in getting your viewsand opinions on various topics related to commercial construciondecisions.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~

Good to know that a big place like Harris Polls prides itself on its accuracy!
===================================

It's times like this that I wonder if people haven't out-sourced their computer's spell-checking function, not just to some foreign country where the workers don't speak English, but instead to someone like Zorchan from the Planet Remulak in some far away galaxy. I mean, this really isn't rocket science, and we all know how I worry when things like this start to make perfect sense to me.

Everyone knows that if July 4th has come and gone, then my vacation can't be far behind, and they'd be right on the money. Tomorrow, Bill and I will be heading out to Vacation-Land, and anyone who has any pull in this area, I'd appreciate your using your influence to assure good weather during the week while I'm camping. No one will be hearing from me next week, as I will be blissfully in the low-tech environs of trees, sandy beaches and furry woodland creatures in abundance. And I happen to know, from watching other people who bring their technologically advanced gadgets and gizmos with them, that Wildwood Park is one of those places where you can't get a signal for anything that you want to use anyway, so trying to stay connected out there is more an exercise in futility than anything else. As for me, I'm really looking forward to some much needed down-time, and I plan to spend my days at the beach studying the inside of my eyelids, and at night, practicing the fine art of gazing into a well-crafted campfire. Of course, if all that gets to be too much work, I might just "veg out" instead, because after all, if the unprincipled free-loading botanical interlopers can do it, why not me?