Don't Bug Me

Greetings, Evil Yankee Capitalist Lackey:
This is Comrade Mischka from the Regulatory Office To Transform Environment & Nature, or ROTTEN, at the Kremlin in the glorious homeland of Mother Russia. So you think it is funny to laugh at us when our Clima-Tron 100 gives you weather that you don't like, nyet? This is bad. You should not laugh at Mother Russia. We know where you live, thanks to our spy satellite, the Flying Cossack 2. (It is a hideous bourgeois lie that the Flying Cossack 1 was lost in a card game to a circus elephant. We are still dragging the Volga for it and expect to locate it any day now.) You will not be finding it so funny, I think, when we send a blizzard, tornado and typhoon just to your house and not anywhere else around you. Ha-ha! Then the joke will be on you, and it will be Mother Russia who is laughing, da? Now if you want to make more jokes, remember that the Clima-Tron 100 also has raining frogs, locusts and boils. Please to enjoy the ROTTEN weather that we are sending you right now!
April Fools! Okay, I admit that for some people, it's a little bit early for April Fool's Day jokes, but I bet I really had you going with that one. (Oh admit it, you looked out the window to see if it was really snowing outside, courtesy of our friends with the Kremlin's infernal weather machine.) Actually, our weather here is much improved from what it was, although it would be hard NOT to be an improvement, the way things were going there for a while. But now it seems that the tide has finally turned, and our yard is awash in perky purple crocus, jolly yellow jonquils, and even a rare early pink hyacinth, which I've never seen in March. So there is reason for optimism, and for many of us, life has regained its meaning.
Not all of us, perhaps. I had an irate co-worker storm into my office this week, asking permission to kill the Accounting staff. (Her own boss had waved her away with a weary, "Oh, the line for that would just be out of this world.") For my part, I told her she would have to wait until after Easter, because after all, this is Lent, and right on the doorstep of Holy Week besides, so it wouldn't do to be killing anyone at this point. She accepted the logic of my argument with bad grace, and said that she was just about ready to scream and pull her hair out. I reminded her that she was building character, and pretty soon, she'd have so much character that she wouldn't be able to bend. She laughed and said that she was sure that I was going to Heaven, so I said I would save her a spot. She didn't think she would need it, she admitted, because she thought that she was going the other way, and I said that many times, I was also convinced of that eventuality for me as well, and I would save her a spot there too. That might have just been my Evil Twin speaking.
Speaking of going in the wrong direction, what the heck has happened to gasoline prices lately? I drive past a Sunoco station on my way home from work, and I started noticing a few weeks ago that every time I went past, the price had gone up another few cents a gallon. At first, I thought this was just some strange isolated occurrence, and it would soon come back down again, but apparently not. The price of regular has gone from $2.50/gal the last time I got it, to over $2.90/gal in just about a month. And the odd thing is that I haven't heard any frenzied news reports of national or international (or even inter-galactic) catastrophes recently that could account for this whopping increase. (And really, as Edwin Newman once ruminated, at what point does an increase begin to “whop” anyway?) Frankly, I don't mind saying that I'm disgusted with the whole bunch of them, and I am unanimous in that. I've been telling Fabio, my Escort, that if the prices don't come down soon, he'll be staying at home and I'll be walking to work, because I'm certainly not shelling out more than $2.90/gal just to drive to my job halfway across town. I may be a lot of things, but I'm nobody's fool. On the other hand, it seems to me that the gas prices around here invariably go down as soon as I've filled up the tank, so I should probably do everyone in the area a big favor and just go and get gas, so that everybody else can benefit from the lower prices afterwards. 'Tis a far, far better thing I do .....
Speaking of Fabio, one thing I discovered with the recent nasty snowstorms and ugly conditions, is that the Escort handles fairly well in snow, but there’s no point in trying to drive it through drifts. I've gotten used to cars that are a little heavier in the front, and once you got some momentum on their side, the Tempo or the Gremlin would muscle through piles of snow to a clearing on the other side, and eliminate some shoveling by sheer force of mass. I found out too late that the Escort and I were of two minds about this prospect, when I attempted this maneuver in front of the house, and found myself high and dry and stranded precariously atop the plow tailings in my way. According to the owners manual, the Escort is not really much lighter weight than the Tempo or the Gremlin, so I have the feeling that the problem is more a ground clearance issue than anything else. The Escort rides so close to the road, on its teensy lawnmower tires, that it can't possibly drive through anything deep without running aground on it under the chassis. It wouldn't do to call Fabio a "fair weather friend," but you can be certain that I'll always be carrying a snow shovel with me, that's for sure.
Alert readers might be wondering what's going on in the wonderful world of firewood. Well, wonder no more. Everyone knows that if February has come and gone, I must have already started chopping firewood for camping, and they'd be right on the mark. We have branches falling into our yard all year long, and I usually saw them up in the winter, to avoid the twin problems of insects and over-heating. I've made some good progress already, and have a sizable collection of cut logs drying nicely in the garage, which I would expect to be in perfect condition just in time for my vacation. I can't think of anything that could be better, and all of that hard work will be well worth it. Not so fast! I know this seems like just another April Fool's Day joke, but I actually got this message last week:
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Dear New York Park & Campground Visitor,
Please read the important information below from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation concerning important information for your next visit to a Park or Campground in New York State.
Don't Move Firewood!
Bringing your firewood with you? Most people don't realize they move bugs along with their firewood. You could be spreading diseases from insect invaders that can quickly kill large numbers of trees. Our forests are at risk from the transport of firewood infested with tree killers. Help STOP THE SPREAD of these pests:
Leave firewood at home, do not transport it to campgrounds or parks.
Use only firewood from local sources.
If you bring firewood, burn ALL of it before leaving your campsite.
For more information go to: www.dec.ny.gov (search word: firewood).
==============================
Now, my only question about this is, are they hallucinating, or am I? I don't know how many millions of people go camping in this country every year, but apart from me, have you ever in your entire life, heard of one single, solitary individual who brings firewood camping with them, ever? Who thinks that this is such a huge national problem that they have to send out mass warnings against it? I already know that it's not true, because whenever I mention to anyone that I carry firewood with me, they invariably look at me like I'm a three-headed polka-dot space alien who just landed from another planet. There is absolutely not one person in their right mind that brings firewood camping with them, and I ought to know, because every year I'm the only camper out of 250 campsites with my own wood. This message may as well have said: "Dear Louisa at Wildwood campsite C-35" for all the relevance it has to anyone else in the world at large.
Saving the best for last, we are coming up hard and fast on Opening Day for baseball, which is no April Fool's Day joke, but a welcome harbinger of Spring and better days ahead. There is nothing like the sight of young men in pinstripes to chase away those winter doldrums once and for all. A home run, a couple of stolen bases and a double play should be all it takes to wipe those grim reminders of sleet and slush right out of our memories, and not a moment too soon. That is, unless Comrade Mischka lets loose with his infernal weather machine again, and we all have to head for the hills. Just don't bring any firewood with you.

How Low Can You Go?

Hello World,

Happy March Madness! We find ourselves inexorably in that time of year when normally sane people all over the country go berserk over college basketball, and strong men weep at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I hope that you are not suffering from busted brackets, or Cinderella-itis, or whatever other maladies can befall the unlucky or unwary in these perfidious circumstances. Of course, anyone can tell you that March Madness is not a matter of life and death. It's much more important than that.
Speaking of March Madness, we're having our own brand of that at work, because we're expecting a visit by the inspectors from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations any time now, and the place has gone totally insane. An alien landing from a far distant solar system would think that this calamity had never befallen us before in the entire realm of our earthly existence, not that this happens regularly every three years like clockwork. Somehow, the idea of the inspectors coming for their triennial survey always seems to take the administrative staff here completely by surprise, and generally ushers in a frenzied rash of deficiency-corrective measures, ranging from safety and patient care, through housekeeping and proper documentation, and all the way to the decorative and purely ornamental. Last time around, they painted the hallways a shocking glacial white and put up bright white lights where they wanted the inspectors to go, while the hallways they were trying to keep them out of were murky caverns of dim lights and lost wandering employees trying to find their way out of the gloom. This time, they decided instead to install rubber matting on the stairwell landings and treads, and between the material and the adhesive they use to install it, the smell is so excruciatingly awful that the stairways are littered with staff on every level who came in from the hallway, only to be overcome by fumes and collapse on the spot. This is what we call The Stairway Motel, where people go in, but they don't come out.
In what may be considered a cruel twist of fate, while crazed people here are waiting for the JCAHO inspectors to arrive, we also had an infestation of the auditors back in Finance, and about as welcome as your average plague of locusts. I found out about it when the Accounting Manager came into my office with an invoice and said that the auditors asked her to pick a few random invoices, and pull the accompanying paperwork (purchase order, purchase requisition and approval form) that went with it, so that they could see that everything was in order and had all the necessary approvals. What a fine idea, I'm thinking, and when it comes to doing things by the book, I'm all for it. But before she even got into my office, I told her that I could see from across the room that the invoice that she happened to pick randomly was not a good candidate for this test, owing to a variety of factors, and most likely would not have the proper credentials to go along with it. She fled in haste, calling “nuff said!” over her shoulder, and went back to Accounting to try her luck with a better random invoice. Unfortunately, the two that she came back with turned out to be no better, and once again, she turned to go back down the hall for another try. I could see where this kind of thing could go on all day, with me in the files and her walking back and forth down the hall ad infinitum. Now, this is where all of us good Christians should be prepared to take the high road, and especially during Lent, but I admit that instead, I conceived a somewhat devious idea that had a better chance for success and would certainly save a lot of time. I said that the solution would be to pull a few completed purchase orders that already had all of their proper documentation and approvals, and give her those, and she could go back to her office and then pull the invoices that went with them and give them to the auditors, already knowing that they were beyond reproach. Of course, this was exactly the opposite of what the auditors requested, and about as far removed from “random” as it would be possible to be, but sometimes you've just got to go with any port in a storm, and let the chips fall where they may. And we may have been the only two on that low road (although I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of Dick Cheney skulking along the other side) but, by golly, we were sure making good time.
This seemed to be a time for fun with numbers at work, because earlier in the week I took a call from our new sales representative at Becton-Dickinson, who asked me to write down her name and number to have one of the buyers call her back. Everyone knows I'm nothing if not helpful, although not everyone might have agreed with that later, when I noticed that what I had written down for her phone number said: 888-237-276. Well, I guess you could say that it stops just short of being helpful there. On the other side of the coin, and taking their numbers just a little bit too far, I noticed a purchase order that had been printed for our friends in Medical Records who wanted printer cartridges, and owing to a bit of over-enthusiasm on the part of whoever typed it, it appeared that each cartridge was $16,900.00, and the total order for six of them was $140,000.00 which would be outlandish even by our standards. Of course, heaven knows, there's no standards any more, and don't forget I'm on the low road, so I ought to know.
Of course, setting the pace for having no standards any more, there's always St. Patrick's Day to kick around, although this year the parade seems to have gone off without the usual controversy and media sensationalism that is ordinarily as much a part of the event as green beer. Perhaps now that the saint's festival day has apparently become a movable feast, no one knows when they're supposed to protest nowadays, much less have their parades and other celebrations. Following along with this time-traveling tradition, here is a little tidbit from last week that we get courtesy of Bill, with thanks --
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I heard a news item on CBS last night when I was making dinner and had to laugh. It was one of your favorite "St. Patrick's DAY" things that happened on Thursday the 15th. It was so blatant and so highly placed (in fact, a "high White Horse souse," as Harry von Zell once blooped) that I had to go online and verify that this was the Official Position before even mentioning it to you. If you go to www.whitehouse.gov (NOT whitehouse.com, which we all know is a porn site) you will see a nice picture with the caption: "President George W. Bush joins Ireland's Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, center, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, Thursday, March 15, 2007, during the annual St. Patrick's Day luncheon at the U.S. Capitol."
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I realize that they have a lot of scheduling issues to take into account when they arrange events like this one at the White House, but I can't help but feel that once you start playing fast and loose with the facts, you're on that slippery slope to the low road, along with me and the Accounting Manager, and no good can come of it, believe you me.
I may be the only person in the world who finds this funny, but I was behind a white van yesterday coming home from work, and stopped in traffic to the extent that my mind wandered and I found myself just staring blankly at the back of the van and wondering what company it represented, because its lettering was hard to read. Fortunately, the traffic light was long, and I was able to creep up closer to it, and was finally able to make out the problem with the words. It started out plain as day, in crisp black letters that said "Touch Of" and after that, it trailed off into a faint, messy splotch that appeared indecipherable. This seemed to me to fail the first test of truck lettering, which is to make sure people can understand what business your truck belongs to, and act as a mobile advertisement for your company wherever it goes. For that purpose, this truck managed to fail both tests at the same time, because the company name turned out to be "Touch of Color" and the last word had each letter painted in a different color (get it?) and over the course of time, all of the colors had faded so that you couldn't read them any more, only the Touch Of in black. Here's where I'm thinking, you may as well just take that truck right off the road, because it's certainly not doing you any good as an advertisement, and in fact, it's more likely serving as a significant sales deterrent if anything. At least, that's how it looks from out here on the low road, and if you happen to see me along the way, please pretend that you don't know me.

Hitting The Bottle

Hello World,

Beware the Ides of March! Whoever said that to Julius Caesar two thousand years ago wasn't kidding then, and they're still not kidding now. This is what we call "Welcome to March in New York," where in the very self-same week, it's 70 degrees so I can open the windows for the cats to enjoy watching the world go by, and the next thing you know, it's 25 degrees with six inches of sleet, slush, snow and freezing rain. No thank you very much not! It's a good thing that weather is not a popularity contest, because this week would have been voted right off the island, and on the shark-infested side of it besides. In fact, if I was the weather, I wouldn't be turning my back on anyone, and I'd be especially wary of any suspicious looking parcels, Candy-Grams or gift horses that arrived in mysterious fashion. And if I was thinking of setting off on a different career path, I certainly wouldn't waste my time trying to get references from any of my current dissatisfied customers. Especially not with that 6-inches of sleet on my resume, that's for sure.

One sure thing about spring, that never fails to charm our senses and refresh our spirits, is the sight of young men tossing around the old horsehide in Florida, and luckily, both New York teams have their own cable channels, so local fans can get their fill of this therapeutic delight. Of course, the best part is that the games don't count, so there's no stress or frustration to mar the bucolic experience, which is a significant advantage that the regular season can't match. So even when the Mets are stinking up the joint, as they are now, it's still fun to watch and everyone is in good spirits, while enjoying the beautiful weather that the announcers have been raving about all along. Ah, the Boys of Summer in Spring Training, if only you could bottle that, it would truly be the stuff that dreams are made of.

On the other side of the coin, and dashing the hopes of bright-eyed youth, we get this note from a colleague at a hospital in West Virginia --

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My baby girl turned 21 today, so needless to say, I feel "mature".
I told her that it was all down hill from here.
At 15, you can get a Learner's Permit to drive,
at 18 you are considered an adult,
at 21, you can legally buy booze...
but after 21 you only look forward to turning 25
so you get lower rates on your car insurance,
and after that, your next big birthday is when
you are eligible for AARP!!
I don't think she appreciated my little speech....teehee
====================================

Speaking of birthdays, everyone knows that if our anniversary has come and gone, then my birthday could not possibly be far behind, although with this new-fangled early switch-over to Daylight Saving Time, I was concerned that like the glorious October Revolution or George Washington, my birthday might end up getting pushed back by two weeks, four hundred years and every other millennium without a Leap Day. It may have been a near thing, but Providence smiled upon me, and my birthday showed up at the usual time and with all the usual fanfare, and not a Bolshevik in sight. They might have made a wrong turn at the International Date Line and ended up with Gregor Mendel instead of the Gregorian Calendar, and if that's the case, they're probably still trying to get their chromosomes back. Of course, I'm just as happy for them to take a pass, because you know what I always say, more cake for me! First we went to Mom's on Saturday, which was technically early for my birthday, but we had a nice lunch out and enjoyed ourselves anyway. There was even ice cream and cake (with candles!) which anyone can tell you, that after the age of 10, this is certainly something that you can't count on as a routine part of your birthday any longer. But the Birthday Elves were in fine form, and I certainly appreciated their efforts and attention to detail. What with one thing and another, though, the Elves didn't quite get as far as presents, so I still have that part of my birthday to look forward to, as well as other presents coming later from other sources, so we can expect the birthday caravan to keep on rolling along at least until the end of the month before packing up its wagons for another year.

Sunday was actually my birthday, and it started with breakfast in bed, followed by presents, and by golly, if you could bottle that, it would put the drug companies and the drug dealers out of business in one fell swoop. I was happy to unwrap gifts of apparel (including footwear and accessories), household gadgets and technology, some high and others of the more medium variety. The centerpiece of the technology offerings was a new SanDisk Sansa e250 MP3 player, in a 2GB size that holds 500 songs, along with its companion Altec Lansing inMotion mobile speaker system, so you can stand it up and play it without headphones. Well, if this is dragging me into the 21st century, kicking and screaming, I have to say that I'm all for it, and the dinosaurs can like it or lump it. Of course, all modern technology comes at a price, which is not that it doesn't do what you want it to, but that it takes you all day (and sometimes the next day as well) to figure out how to get it to do what you want. Luckily, Bill is infinitely patient, as well as knowledgeable, and got everything together, as well as up and running, so all I had to do was turn it on and enjoy my favorite music. This is certainly a boon to mankind, and it's easy to see what all the excitement is about, because it puts a whole new spin on boring chores like making the bed or putting away clothes. And what it does for my mood, when I'm getting ready to go to work, is positively awesome. I tell you, if they could bottle that .....
well, it's like a theme park inside your own head, so who needs Disneyland?

Meanwhile at work, it was during the previous week that we were all at our posts and working diligently as usual, when the fire alarms went off, as they often do, and we ignored them, as we always do, in spite of years of mandatory educational training to the contrary. For some reason, the Payroll Manager took pity on us, and came down the hall to say, "Those are our fire bells, we have to leave," or we'd still be sitting there now, probably burned to a crisp right at our desks. So we grabbed our coats and locked our doors and went to stand outside in the cold, while the Fire Department tramped through the building, on the lookout for anything that we needed to be protected from. While we were huddled outdoors in the cold, the Assistant Director of Engineering asked us to fill out some fire safety questionnaires, which led the more cynical among us to the conclusion that this supposed fire alarm was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to see what we would do if the fire bells went off for our location. (Obviously, Purchasing would have failed that test and gone down with the building, no thanks to those of us who should have known better.) I make no excuses, because the fire bells ring in different numbered sequences for different locations throughout the campus, and everybody should know their own fire bell sequence, so they can recognize it and take appropriate action if they hear it. In a short building like ours, I say jumping out the window is the best bet, and from my office, I would land handily right in front of the Emergency Room entrance. How fortuitous is that! My problem with the bells is that they've moved Purchasing three times, and I still remember the fire bells from our first location, and everything since then has resisted all efforts to stick in my memory. So thanks to the Payroll Manager who put aside personal safety to rescue us from our apathy, and no thanks to the Engineering department, if this was all a put-up job and making us all go out in the cold to fill out questionnaires. And I am unanimous in that.

Also at work, I recently got a frantic phone call from one of the Executive Secretaries at our sister facility in Mount Vernon, who said she needed a verbal purchase order immediately to stave off a disaster of epic proportions. Everyone knows that I'm nothing if not helpful, so I assured her that I would be happy to assist her if she would just tell me the name of the vendor and what it was needed for. She was quick to oblige, and I would be less than candid if I didn't admit to being embarrassed by issuing a purchase order that now says in the Comments: "Emergency order for party supplies." Honestly, is it any wonder that healthcare is in the crisis situation that it is?

Every month, I have a report that I compile and make ten copies of it to hand out at a meeting. The report has two pages, and being such a friend of the environment, I copy them back-to-back and save paper. This is the first time I tried that with our replacement copier in Purchasing, and I wasn't about to trust my luck with the duplex feature, which I find woefully inconsistent on most copiers. So I copied the first page and then loaded the pages in the by-pass feeder to copy on the back manually, as I always did with our previous copier. It will come as a surprise to no one that the second page printed right on top of the first page, and upside-down to boot, so it looked really bizarre. I tried it again, and put the copies in the by-pass feeder going the other way, but then copied the first page on the front AND the back, forgetting to switch the original to the second page in between. In fact, it took me three tries to get the reports to come out right, so for you environmentalists out there counting, I wasted 20 pieces of paper to save 10 pieces of paper. It's no wonder the dinosaurs are extinct.

In other animal adventures, I was working on my computer late at night in the living room, when I started to become aware of a strange low wheezing or rumbling noise behind me. It sounded to me like the sort of menacing growl that signals a territorial dispute among the local wildlife, and since it seemed pretty close at hand, I thought it best to try and break it up. So I walked over to the patio doors that open onto our side porch, where it sounded like the noise was coming from, and I knocked loudly on the glass, trying to startle the antagonists into going their separate ways. I didn't hear the noise after I knocked, so I figured that it was a successful gambit on my part. Then I was surprised to hear the same noise, from the same place, about 15 minutes later, and I got up to take another whack at it, thinking that I could knock harder and also yell at them at the same time. This proved unnecessary once I got to the patio doors and noticed the Invisible Matriarch of our invisible kittens, Muffin, who was fast asleep on the radiator next to the doors, and soundly snoring in that unmistakable low wheezing and rumbling way that I heard across the room and thought was outside. And I realized that my knocking on the door next to her had awakened Muffin so she stopped snoring the first time, while I assumed instead that it had dispersed the combatants on our porch, which accounted for the ensuing silence from that quarter. It struck me as so comical that I couldn't help but laugh, and the look that Muffin gave me, when she woke up to find me standing right next to her with my hand poised to knock on the glass at the imaginary battling interlopers on our porch, well, if you could bottle that ..... I don't know what you would come up with, but I sure wouldn't want the terrorists to get their hands on it.

Garden Party

Hello World,

Of course, everybody knows how I hate to be an alarmist around here, but I feel it's only fair to warn everyone that the rogue Daylight Saving Time has snuck up on us all, and is already set to foul everything up this weekend, a good three weeks ahead of schedule. Just when you think you've got the range on this evil creation, it somehow manages to throw us another curve, and out of the blue besides. Mind you, this is with keeping a pretty close watch on this slippery devil, imagine what it would get up to if we were just blithely ignoring it, and going nonchalantly about our daily business. The mind reels. So be sure to "Spring Ahead" one hour this weekend, and reset your clocks so that what is now, say, 10:00 PM on Friday, next week will be the glorious October Revolution, 14 days and 45 degrees longitude later, according to the Gregorian Calendar. Or something like that anyway, I'm pretty sure. If you can't figure it out, please don't bother to ask me, because the dinosaurs and I will be hanging around in the primordial ooze until the dust settles, and we're not coming back out until everyone knows what time it is.

Speaking of people who don't seem to know what time it is, we have the usual spate of "preenies," which is a term that describes things that have gone prematurely green, as so often happens this time of year. Last weekend, the newspaper was already awash in pictures of leprechauns, bagpipe bands and shamrocks, as the local municipalities from Yonkers to Wappingers Falls and everywhere in between, got a jump on the spirit of "Erin Go Bragh," which is Gaelic for "Full Speed Ahead." These eager beavers launched what they insist on referring to as their St. Patrick's DAY parade, even though anyone can tell that it's weeks ahead of the actual St. Patrick's DAY by any reckoning, except perhaps the switch-over from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. (Of course, you lose an hour when you divide the longitude by the International Date Line, and then you have to carry over the hypotenuse from the circumference of Pi and conjugate the square root of the equilateral dodecahedron, but I'm sure you knew that.) In any event, now that St. Patrick's DAY has joined the ranks of movable feasts in the hearts of party animals everywhere, we can count on seeing a steady green stream of marching bands, folk dancers and tinted foods from now until the actual St. Patrick's DAY parade on the 17th. Of course, the real parade will seem old hat by then. Old green hat, that is.

While we're on the topic of special days, Bill and I had one recently, as we celebrated our anniversary last Saturday. For the occasion, we did something that at least one of us had never done before, and that is that we went to Madison Square Garden to see the New York Rangers play an afternoon game against the St. Louis Blues. While the Garden may be, as they claim, The World's Most Famous Arena, I had never set foot in the place, and in fact, had never set eyes on it in actual person, and never realized that it's right on top of Penn Station, where I had been many times on the train. (In fact, in my mind, it was supposed to be on top of Grand Central Station, the other train station in midtown Manhattan, which is some place else that I had never been until recently, and this is probably why people should not ask me for directions.) Bill had been to hockey games at MSG when he was younger, and was content to leave it at that, but I wanted a chance to see what all the excitement was about, at least once in my life. So, for Christmas last year, Santa had brought Bill some Rangers tickets, which had the advantage of being inexpensive, although they were terrible seats. Faster than you can say, "NHL, the NHL Shield, the word mark and image of the Stanley Cup, and NHL Conference logos are registered trademarks of the National Hockey League. All NHL logos and marks and NHL team logos and marks as well as all other proprietary materials depicted herein are the property of the NHL and the respective NHL teams and may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of NHL Enterprises, L.P. (c)," Bill had used his super powers to replace them with better seats at a different game, and we were on our way.

We left home early Saturday morning for the train station, where we were impressed with the improved amenities and cleanliness, as if a "sprucing up project" had taken place since the last time we were there. To boost the local economy, we took a cab from Grand Central to the Garden, although it would have been faster to walk than to fight through all that traffic in a car. We were at the Garden good and early, and took some pictures outside, because all over the visitor advisories it said to leave extra time for their stringent security measures, and also that cameras were strictly forbidden in the arena. You can imagine our surprise then, when we found ourselves being waved in by bored staffers at the front entrance, without so much as a first or second glance. This is in stark contrast to our usual experience with security gauntlets, where I go empty-handed for fear of having my belongings confiscated, and Bill continues to set off the metal detectors until he has pretty much removed everything from his pockets and most of his clothing besides.

So there we were inside, and way ahead of time, so we took the opportunity to do a little exploring, as well as shopping for souvenirs. The Garden boasts a wide array of food options, and you can eat on the spot, or carry your meal back to your seat with you. Since we had spent way too much time (and money!) shopping, we didn't want to miss any more of the pre-game activities, and we opted to bring the food to our seats, although this can be a tricky proposition for any food choices more complicated than a pretzel, for instance. We elected to have the pizza, and to be kind, it did have a few pizza-like qualities, although its chief advantage was that it was warm and we were hungry. We settled in to enjoy the rest of the pre-game activities, and were glad we did.

The new General Manager of the St. Louis Blues is John Davidson, former all-star goalie with the Rangers, and for 20 years after his playing career, a beloved broadcast announcer for their games. On his return to New York with the Blues, MSG threw him a nice ceremony with his former partners from the team, as well as the broadcast booth, and presented him with some very thoughtful mementos. It was a wonderful gesture, and the Garden faithful were out in force, stamping and screaming to hail the returning hero. It was a Kodak moment to be sure, and everyone else must have thought so too, because everywhere you looked, there was the unmistakable blaze of flash bulbs going off all over the place. This really made us wonder about all those advisories that said cameras were prohibited from the arena, and since mine hadn't been confiscated at the gate, we figured we might as well take pictures along with everybody else. After that, we hunkered down to cheer on the home team, and although we did our best, they were still losing 2-0 in the third period.

With under 9 minutes left to play, the Rangers finally scored, and the diehard regulars, who had grown impatient with the lackluster play, came alive to rouse their Blueshirts to even greater heights. In improbable fashion, they tied it up with less than 3 minutes in the game, and the place went wild, as if it was the last game of the Stanley Cup finals or something. (It wasn't.) The 5-minute overtime period resulted in no goals for either team, and under the new rules, the next step is a "shoot-out" which is an innovative tie-breaker mechanism that was introduced to the NHL last season, and has proven to be a fan favorite. This was a favorite with us as well, because the Rangers ended up winning, and the way things had been going, it seemed way more than we could have hoped to expect. The Broadway Blues pulled it off, in exciting fashion, and made the home-town fans happy, us included. Going through the whole game, plus overtime, plus the shoot-out, we figured that we really got our money's worth out of this adventure, and we had no complaints about the way things turned out.

They do a lot of things during the game that you don't see on television, like contests, fan recognition and youth activities. They even had a nice ceremony for one of the referees, who was officiating in his 1,500th game and received a plaque for the occasion. My favorite part was at the beginning of the second period, when there was a penalty and apparently (we found this out later when we watched a replay of the game that we had recorded) the penalty clock was not working, so in the middle of the power play, the rink's public address announcer informed us, "There's one minute left in the period." This startled the crowd, since there was still more than 17 minutes left in the period, and you could hear a collective "Huh?" rise up out of 20,000 people. The announcer quickly corrected himself to say, "There's one minute left in the PENALTY," and at this admitted gaffe, the arena erupted in boos. Admittedly, these may have been good-natured boos, but they were boos nonetheless, and a very telling indication of just how seriously local fans take their sports around here. You've got to be on top of your game, or expect to get booed in a New York minute.

After the game, we went outside and took some more pictures of nearby sights, and enjoyed the lovely weather, which was unseasonable for the time of year. We thought about finding some place to eat, but decided instead to walk back to the train station, where we caught the next train back home, and had a nice meal at a diner in our area. Anyone would think that this must be all the wonderfulness that any two people could stand in one day, but no! Don't forget, this was our anniversary, so when we got home, there were presents! (And people say there is no God!) By the time we turned in much later, we were tired but happy, and had a memorable anniversary full of special moments. And now even I can say that I've been to The World's Most Famous Arena, and didn't even jinx the Rangers in the process, so I think we can pretty much lay those rumors of a curse to rest now.

Smoke Signals

Hello World,

Happy March! It's hard to believe that two months of 2007 are already in the books, and here we are, embarking on a new month and no end in sight. The weather around here has moderated to the point that it is no longer the extreme record-breaking frigid temperatures of sensational news stories everywhere, and with some drenching rains yesterday, a lot of the left-over snow has melted, even out of where it had been piled up in the shady areas. After the recent deep freeze, this was a welcome change. In fact, I think it was Wednesday when the AOL Welcome screen said it was 47 degrees, and because I had the window open in my office, I was the first to notice the unmistakable sounds of the ice cream truck making its rounds in the neighborhood around the hospital. Mind you, this was still February, and not even 50 degrees yet, so many of us might have considered this not only wishful thinking, but woefully premature to boot. I will admit that when it came to the Emergency Room entrance, there was a line of hospital employees buying ice cream, but I wasn't one of them. Some of us still have our standards.

Speaking of standards, I don't mind saying that I've just about had it with computers that can't keep the right time, and I'm just disgusted with them. It's not like keeping accurate time or making high-powered computers can be considered innovative or novel anymore, and you would think that getting a computer to keep the right time would be no more challenging than, say, re-arranging all of the icons on my desktop, which it seems to do with annoying regularity. But no, this very routine and seemingly mundane task is beyond the capabilities of the greatest computing wizards of our age, and at work, I'm left with a Dell that consistently gains time every day in a relentless race against the clock. So then I would have to wonder, if the stupid computer itself can't figure out how to keep the right time, why can't it check in regularly with some reputable source that has the right time, and reset itself to mend its errant ways? Apparently in Windows XP, you can do just that, using the Internet Time tab in the Date and Time folder of Control Panel. Unfortunately, my computer at work is running Windows 2000NT, and it requires a whole different set of instructions to keep it in step with the rest of the world. Bill was kind enough to send me the directions, but try as I might, the time continued to be wrong. He said the time was probably wrong on the hospital server, and displayed that same incorrect time on all of the facility's computers linked to the network. That sounded logical, in fact, a little TOO logical for the way things go at work, so I decided to check it out. I have a Nextel phone that verifies the time with its satellite, so it always has the right time. Yesterday, when it said the time in the real world was 4:14, my computer said 4:25, the clerk's insisted it was 4:04, the buyers showed up as 4:38 and 4:47, while the PC in the spare office was at 4:27, and the display on the desk phones all said 4:20, courtesy of the switchboard, which is supposed to be manually set to the same time as the Nextel satellite information. Honestly, people in the Middle Ages had more accurate time-keeping, thanks to the church bells of the local cathedral, than we have now with rooms full of electronic gadgets at our disposal.

In other electronic news, I honestly don't know what has happened to technology these days, and if anyone thinks this is progress, I'll eat my proverbial primordial hat. Apparently, we've finally gotten out of the Age of Steam at church, where it was decided that a new copier would be just the thing to move us away from the tired and old-fashioned days of yesteryear, and thrust us into the forward-thinking vanguard of modern times. Of course, we couldn't have just any copier, oh no, no, no, not by any means. We're the proud new owners of a fancy new Xerox PE220, which is a multi-function device that handily serves as a copier, printer and scanner all in one. What could be better than that, you may be wondering, and when it comes to the miracles of modern technology, you may indeed wonder. Now, I admit that along with the dinosaurs, I have a well-deserved reputation as a Luddite, but although I may not whole-heartedly embrace the new technology, I still make use of it at home and at work, if grudgingly. So I didn't quail before this small plastic alien when I found it in the church office, and was in fact, perfectly willing to make peace with it, or at the very least, make copies. I happened to be at church by myself during the week, and needing to make a copy of a bill that I was paying, and I approached the new copier with no trepidation. I placed the bill on the document glass, and then felt along the sides of the equipment for the power switch, which is where it is usually found on these types of machines. When I didn't find it there, I was surprised but not alarmed, and poked around further, on the front and back, and various other places. When all was said and done, it literally took me ten minutes of crawling all over this thing to finally find the power switch, just so I could turn it on and make a copy, and after that, I further discovered that you first have to select the right mode before it even understands that you want to make a copy. Honestly, it would have taken me less time to walk the invoice all the way back to my office up the block and copy it there and walk all the way back to church, than to waste my time dancing around with this darned Xerox and its inscrutable methodology. Seriously, if it wasn't Lent, that thing would have been hearing some language that would have made its paper curl.

At the end of last year, we had taken in a neighborhood stray that had been hanging around in our yard for the better part of two years. This was no brutish and moth-eaten tomcat from the School of Hard Knocks, but rather, a small and silky solid black kitty with neat habits and even temper, and we called it Smokey Joe for no particular reason. MoJo has had the run of the attic for a while now, and pretty friendly for a stray, so we figured that the time had come to go to the animal hospital for a check-up and all, so the new addition could be introduced to the rest of the family downstairs. One thing I wanted to get done, as long as we were there, was to get a collar put on MoJo (who turned out to be a little girl) because it would be the only way we'd ever be able to differentiate her from her identical cousin, His High Holy Invisibleness, Captain Midnight. However, MoJo managed to frighten the vet in her inaugural visit, and he refused to get near her with a collar, so she came home as pitch dark and naked as she went. The plan was to let her out into the library and keep her closed in there, until we could very carefully open the doors little by little and let everyone become more familiarized. In fact, in preparation for this eventuality, we had whisked everyone out of the room the day before, and closed the doors to keep it pristine and empty for our new little princess to have the place to herself. I said to Bill that someday I'm going to look back on this and laugh, although at the time it was anything but funny, when I tramped back from the animal hospital and opened the door to the library to put MoJo in there, only to find the elusively invisible Captain Midnight, of all things, already in there on the plate rail! He took one look at me and dived under the furniture, so I had to chase around after him for 15 minutes, just to get him out of the room and close the door behind him. After that, I opened the cat carrier and went back to work, and we didn't set eyes on MoJo for two days. And all I could do was shake my head over the weird coincidence that practically had us closing up the library with both of our solid black cats inside, and neither of them with a collar on to tell them apart. Not to mention, the implications of Captain Midnight letting himself into a closed room, and closing himself in there, would be frankly too frightful to contemplate.

Two years ago, my cousin's daughter had her bat mitzvah, and the entire family braved the uncharted wilderness of upstate New York, including Mom, for the occasion. This time around, it was her younger brother having his bar mitzvah, and once again the family responded by packing up its belongings and heading north for the festivities. Because there had recently been snow, it rendered the venue not as accessible as it needed to be for the mobility-challenged among our party, and even the young and able-bodied found the footing uncertain, particularly in fancy dress shoes. But for those of us determined to be there, or know the reason why, it was considered to be worth the trip and the treacherous conditions underfoot. My favorite part was at the conclusion of the service, when the teacher praised his student for learning the lessons so well and quickly, and added that he wouldn't be surprised if the young man decided to became a rabbi. Here is where I'm thinking that the idea of a Rabbi Tango would certainly open up some eyes, even in the most lackadaisical Jewish communities, where religious traditions have spanned the centuries, probably without a single Tango in sight. Of course, everyone knows it takes two to Tango.

There was a reception later at a nearby hotel, and because members of our clan were staying overnight there, the mobility issues were handily dispatched, and everyone was able to attend and party till the cows came home. As usual, Mom was the belle of the ball in her sparkling finery, and graciously accepting the adulation of her adoring public, who flocked to her side and basked in her reflected glory. While I can understand that everyone wanted to have their picture taken with the center of attention, I thought the autograph-seekers were just too much. In any case, the party was a huge success, and every bit as raucous and irrepressible as young people like them nowadays, and while I think that the snow might have kept the cows from coming home, I did notice the hotel staff vacuuming the carpet and piling chairs on top of the tables while the youngsters were still dancing. It was one heck of a shindig, and I'll bet the cows were sorry they missed it. Most likely, their computers are running Windows 2000NT, and they simply have no idea what time it is.