Vergil’s Coffee

I’ve come to grips that the eeePC is not my primary computer and really wasn’t designed to be. So, after the 3rd time restoring the machine to factory settings using the Recover CD, I’ve vowed not to keep loading on a bunch of apps that I really didn’t need. (You know, that urge to load up a new computer with as many things as possible before actually using the thing?)

One thing that has annoyed me though is the inability for Flash-heavy sites to run on the default OS of the eeePC. I exclusively use Vimeo for all my video work (via the FlipVideo) and the site always hangs during the upload process and the crashes the browser. I’ve Googled for an answer, but couldn’t seem to find one until I jumped on the #eeePC IRC channel and zer0her0 clued me in on the basic uploaders:

http://vimeo.com/upload/video/basic

And also a more minimalist version:

http://vimeo.com/upload/video/babyface

Both work fine from my 4g (701); I’m liking, though, the basic over the babyface one: Still like to see my upload progress.

And now, I can upload my vids while I’m on vacation and not rely on Lori’s laptop to do what I should be able to do on this basic machine.

Wee-Haw!

P.S. Apparently there’s some hostility toward Flash-based websites in the Linux world (and other OS universes) <g>.

The boys find talking about farting as being pretty funny. And they’ve just spent the trip from South Third Street to piano lessons in the 1993 Ford Escort Wagon while it was snowing trying to come up the substitute words for fart. Lori laid down the law in her frustration with the boys starting the fart-talk riff before dinner and by the time we were almost done, she’d had enough.

“Chris, you deal with the ‘f-word’ thing,” she said.

“Sure thing,” I replied. “Boys: no more saying the ‘f-word’ in public.”

“Uh, dad,” Evan asked. “That isn’t the real ‘f-word’ you know.”

“Well, Evan,” I said. “In our house, that is the ‘f-word.”

“Sure thing Dad,” Evan said.

But Colin hadn’t heard a word I said as he was high with the thrill of saying “fart” and then rehearsing several different situations where the word could be said. And the problem was that Colin had already eaten his food, so we couldn’t tell him to eat the rest of his dinner. (Colin’s our reluctant eater sometimes and many a “1-2-3” magic has resulted a trip upstairs and perhaps, a physical reminder to listen and obey; this, along with the thing he really hates: the timer. We set the timer and suddenly he’s full of anxiety that he might not finish within time).

Instead, he was happy-drunk with the countless possibilities and humor with the ‘f-word.’

This, in short, was not a fun trip to the piano lesson, but not as ‘un-fun’ as making a gingerbread cottage from scratch last weekend.

The story begins with Lori commenting on how fun it would be to make our own gingerbread house. Instead of paying $22.50 for pre-built G-Houses and assembling the exteriors with icing and a variety of candies, she suggested that we do the whole thing a home.

“Why don’t we just buy a kit like we did that one year?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Those were gross.”

And she was right as I remembered some tense words being exchanged between parents while the kids ask to help and the adults snapped “On, no!” and then trying to concentrate as the cheap icing lacked any practical value in holding the walls together. So, like the glue in those assemble-yourself-book shelves: white doesn’t necessarily mean that its main purpose is to stick two things together.

“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t our prettiest moments…but I remember the house tasting good in coffee.

“I think we should make out own,” Lori said. “The kids will think it’s fun and it’ll be a nice memory.”

“Fine,” I said (secretly hoping that she would forget the conversation).

But she didn’t and so she found a suitable design and I decided to put a smile on my face.

And so that lasted until the adding of ingredients began. Lori is so much better at this sort of thing. If I have some task to do around the house, I’ll usually go off and do it myself. Lori, instead, will have the boys help her out. So, Evan and Colin worked on breaking eggs into bowls and then having the boys mix the recipe by hand. A too-much-broken egg shell in the batter, giggling during the mixing and soon the tones from the parents grew increasingly firm to terse to almost the “snippy.”

Then the walls came out a bit irregular and so was the roof and floor. So that brought us back to two parents trying to hold the walls together while Evan asked “What do we get to do? though we were supposed to help out.” And I was about to get snippy, but Lori beat me to the response and said “Sure thing…why don’t you hold this in place here.”

After the walls settled (or sagged to the side), we then set the roof in place using the homemade icing. One of the roof pieces broke earlier and so we were careful to make sure it would break when we glued it to … and Colin accidentally pressed down on the roof and the roof sagged into two.

Just as a note: icing, like chalking, can cover a multitude of sins.

I think I first recognized this realization of sub-par completion when I put together various plastic models. We had a family friend named Don Garret who had quite an impressive set up to assemble plastic models and I wanted to have model planes that looked like Don’s but I soon found out that by the time I had overglued the fuselage that the wings would be slightly off and by the time I had glued down the now glue-fingerprinted canopy, I really didn’t want to face the decals. And I’m sure the gray pilot was saddened (if he could even see out the glue-cloudy canopy) by the sad, sad state of his plane with half torn decals because no one has successfully been able to transfer those things off the backing onto the desired placement on the plane.

I hated the plane by the end of the fun of building my own version of a famous plane and so I think it’s no wonder that many a boy looked forward to blowing the thing up with firecrackers or just dousing the thing in lighter fluid, taking a match to a wing and launching the ball of flame down the cliff of the creek behind your house.

I would experience the same feeling of building anxiety and disappointment when I would put together those “assemble yourself an entertainment center” from pressed sawdust or really any plumbing task. You hope it’ll take 30 minutes, but usually the task is completed 2 ½ hours later and several versions of the ‘f-word’ have been uttered or at least considered.

On the trip to CVS to get the candy for the landscaping and exterior decoration for our Gingerbread Cottage, I felt I should explain all of the candy. (We’d been calling it a “cottage” because we felt that the structure resembled more shack than a shelter to protect its inhabitants from the elements. Our structure should collapse anytime: something you should avoid in looking for a house, by the way).

“Oh, somebody’s got a sweet tooth,” the CVS cashier says.

“Well, we’re building a gingerbread house from scratch and we just need the candy to decorate it.” I explain.

“Oh, well isn’t that fun,” she offered.

“Maybe, “ I said and took my stuff to the car and drove home.

And as I’ve told people that we made a gingerbread cottage from scratch, the most common response “That sounds fun,” they say. And I want to say “No, it was not fun.”

Even though Lori accused me of being “Scroogey” on her Facebook status this weekend, I do think I like to have fun. But fun isn’t so much defined as making a gingerbread cottage whose walls and floor and roof is so uneven that it seems that only by luck does the thing say together. Fun isn’t having to liter the entire structure with so many pieces of candy only to cover up how sad the thing thing looks (as if candy, now, covers a multiple of sins). Fun isn’t getting testy when the kids are trying to help out in the building of thing that will eventually become a family memory of the time we built that really ugly gingerbread thing full of candy and Dad was cranky.

Perhaps that’s what Lori meant when she said she was tired after finishing the thing, but it is something we’ll remember. Sure we’ll laugh as we’re eating the thing after dinner and drinking coffee, but I still contend that the act of putting the thing together was not fun.

Colin asking me if I had ever heard “Cut the cheese”–now that’s fun.

My mom missed my birthday this year and she didn’t call until Friday. My birthday was Tuesday and so she missed my birthday by three days. Don’t worry, I’m not crying about it, I’m just making note of it.

Good thing she doesn’t make note of the many times I called the next day after her birthday or a major holiday. Still, isn’t family—especially your mom—supposed to call you on your birthday of all things? In fact, when she did call, I let her know that my brother had actually emailed the day after my birthday (which would mean a lot, since he and I didn’t talk much over the past 30 or so years). “Michael called,” I told her. “Oh,” she said. “Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “I’m so thankful that you two are talking again.”

True: Michael and I have talked more in the past year and a half than for the first 40 or so years that I’ve know him.

“And,” I said. “He emailed me the day after my birthday.”

“Yes he did,” she said.

I think I’ve always felt bad for Ishmael (the first born of Abraham…before the name change). You remember the story: Abraham and Sarah have been promised a lot of kids and Sarah is getting impatient because she’s barren so she instructs Abraham to sleep with her maidservant: Hagar. Nine or so months later, Ishmael is born. But later Sarah gets pregnant and has Isaac, so Sarah sends Hagar and Ishmael away so Isaac can carry on the line.

I think I feel bad for Ishmael because he was born into an ideal situation (promise of a pretty good inheritance) and yet, his step brother is born and gets to take all of Ishmael’s rights and position. Ishmael, for no fault of his own, is now cast out of the house and into another land.

And it’s this thought of disconnect that I have felt for my brother and my father for the past 30 or so years; for my father, for the divorce when I was 4 years old (after being adopted into the family 3 years earlier); for my brother because I really never got a chance to talk with my brother until the night I got the news that he just had traumatic brain surgery and we weren’t sure if he’d make it through the next few days.

Traumatic situations have a tendency to be the thing that forces us to confront our families.

Perhaps I did hear my brother a few times growing up on Washoe Court though. We used to share a room until he moved out when my asthma got so bad that he couldn’t stand waiting to see if I would breath through the wheezing. So, he moved out onto the couch in the living room and then later, as a teenager, would move into the garage. Aside from the time he almost shot my eye out with a b-b gun, I still blame Michael for making me (or tricking me) into pulling the fire alarm at Yulupa Elementary School one summer.

But all of these events are in the void of our father and I think since our father and mother divorced, I contend that my brother and my sister felt that separation each day of their lives.

I think the time I felt closest to my brother was the time the boys from down the street came into our backyard and slaughtered our rats. Michael has always had an odd taste in pets; from the iguana to the snake to the two rats that multiplied into well over a hundred strong family. Michael and I think the neighbor boy built an A-frame shed to keep all of the rats and we moved the large Plexiglas aquarium full of sawdust and white and black rats to the new abode.

Sometime later, perhaps weeks, I was interrupted from riding my red dirt bike by my sister yelling or screaming something about “They’re dead!” And I remember getting off my bike and running toward Stephany who really couldn’t answer my question “What happened?” Michael was in a daze and said “The rats, someone’s killed the rats.” And I stopped at a scene by the A-frame shed of blood and half-severed heads and bulging eyes and mouths agape and stiff claws. There was a hacksaw and more blood and I think even an ax and I ran back to Michael and Stephany and we didn’t really say much until my mom found out later.

These were our pets, but technically, the rats were Michael’s, we adopted them as family and treated the rats as our own. And now most were slaughtered, for no apparent reason, and we all—with Michael—felt bad about the deaths.

Our last night in our house at the end of Washoe Court, Michael and his current band put on a “farewell concert” with lights and pyrotechnics. I used my Pentax K1000 to take some experimental pictures playing upon the low lighting environment. The concert ended early when the small explosions smoked everyone out of the house and that was probably a good thing as some were talking about the cops showing up later.

And it’s here where my brother and I have the most connection: through music. I remember when I brought home my ethics book from the private school I was attending and Michael laughing at the section of the text that talked about music. He was quite amused by the Devil caricature playing the electric guitar. “There’s no way that rock is the Devil’s music,” he said. I was a bit perplexed: since going to the religious school, I had started to think that my brother’s playing in a rock band and hanging out with folks who spent more of their time stoned or high on cocaine was maybe playing for the Devil’s side. We hadn’t hadn’t talked much and so I was a bit surprised that he was talking to me.

“People who look like they’re playing for the Devil,” he explained, “are really doing it for the money…it’s a show, it has little to do with the Devil.”

And I think I knew he was right and I think at that point I got knocked off my high horse of judging Michael for playing non-religious music and started to listen to what he was playing.

And I feel bad that I missed out on over 20 years of his original compositions and have missed out on many gigs that he and his bands played in Santa Rosa and Healdsburg and Windsor. One tape, from his Positive Energy days, I played constantly. There was some song about “Time” and I remember playing it in my cassette player on a beach on the Russian River and some girl asking about it and asking about my brother and telling me that I had a cute brother and to be sure I would tell him that. Another more recent tape, had terrific tones and atmosphere and I would play it in my Ford Festiva’s cassette player. I think I even imagined a story structure that would encompass Michael’s music with my story line.

A month or go, Michael called, out of the blue, and we talked. I usually bring up the fire alarm incident because I think it’s kind of funny. Michael told me a lot about his recovery and how a small group of people have gathered together on the internet to create a site (the “Angioma Alliance” I think it’s called) where people could learn more about the rare condition (cavernous angiomas) that he and others have. He told me about how deep the scars carve into his head and about the sharp, dull headaches. He also told me about his job and a boss who kept Michael on the company’s insurance even though the boss was probably encouraged to drop Michael as the medical costs piled up. We talked about mom and her cancer and acknowledging with a pause, that “she is getting older, you know?”

And then he caught me off guard when he said that felt that I got the bum end of the stick growing up. He felt bad about the circumstances that were given to me. And I said “Actually, I always felt that you and Stephany had the bad deal; that the divorce affected you guys more because you were older.”

“Maybe,” he said.

I think we often make ourselves the protagonists when we tell our stories and of our families. We see ourselves as the dynamic character who learns something in the end and the rest of the characters of our families being a smattering of stock characters who change little. And yet, all the while we’re retelling our stories from our point of view, our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers are retelling the same events with as much reflection.

And as I write this on my brother Michael’s 47^th birthday, I think I’m ready to revise my stories to include more than one central character.

Happy birthday Michael; talk to you Sunday.

For wintertime it’s all about comfort food and something warm and hearty. Here’s two recipes that are fast and easy to throw in the crockpot and yield some good main courses:

Harvest Ham

• 3 sweet potatoes (sliced in half lengthwise)
• 1.5 pounds of boneless ham
• 1 cup of maple syrup

Place potatoes in bottom of slow cooker to form a rack; put ham on top of potatoes and pour syrup over ham and potatoes. Cover and cook on low 6-8 hours. (option: add 6 carrots and place them with the potatoes…we usually skip the carrots).

(ref: FitItQuick, 2004)

Cranberry-Orange Turkey Breast

• 1/2 cup of orange marmalade
• 16-oz can whole cranberries in sauce
• 2 tsp. orange zest, grated
• 3-lb. turkey breast

Combine first three ingredients in a bowl and place the turkey in slow cooker. Pour half the orange-cranberry mixture over turkey and cover. Cook low 7-8 hour, high 3.5-4 hours (until turkey juices run clear). Add remaining mixture for the last 1/2 hour of cooking. Remove turkey and allow of 15 minutes before slicing.

(ref: Fix-it and Forget-it, 2008 Calendar).

We had this plan to invite our friends over for a joint-birthday party. We were going to send out “Save the Date” postcards or e-cards with something like “The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.” But as we got out of September and then on to the week of Thanksgiving, Lori asked me “So, are we going to do this or not.” I hedged and then said something like “Let’s decide later on.” And later on became no.

This month, Lori and I are turning 42 and we thought it would be fun to have a little get-together with people we liked in celebration of our birthdays with a Douglas Adams theme (he’s the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the answer to the Ultimate Question is simply 42). Instead, by ignoring the planning and all, we had a small family gathering last night with food and a few gifts.

It was a nice evening.

Apparently as you get older you are supposed to get wiser (or at least talk more like you know more with more contemplative pauses and slight starring off to the side pondering stuff…or perhaps trying to remember what you were talking about in the first place). I think Lori thought I wanted a party to celebrate this getting “wiser” thing, but I really meant it when I said “No really.”

Perhaps it’s just thinking about the planning that goes into such an affair and I wonder if that’s the reason why I didn’t have many birthday parties growing up.
I can only remember two times when my Mom planned a birthday affair for me: once in 3rd grade–the same year when I almost got my eye shot out with a BB gun that my brother was shooting in the house at a green-glassed wine jug filled with spare coins; the other, when I had to un-invite Jeff Graves from my party in 6th grade.

The one in third grade was supposed to be a surprise party in which I walked in on (apparently there wasn’t a “look out” and I waltzed in on the “setting up” portion of the surprise party). And I think the point of a surprise birthday party is that the birthday boy (me) is supposed to be surprised by the “Surprise” because, well, he’s not to know what’s going to happen when he opens the door to a celebration of his birth.

Instead, I opened the door of the atrium, saw my brother and sister setting up the streamers and the bear-themed place settings, figured out that they were doing something that I shouldn’t be seeing and quickly closed the door, tiptoed down the concrete steps and walked down to the end of Washoe Court where it met Neotomas Avenue. (I think I felt bad that I had interrupted their fun that was going to be my fun). I then, somehow, got very loud as I approached the door (for the second time that afternoon), and was told to “Wait a moment” by my mother. Eight minutes later, I was invited in and “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” to which I was just happy to eat some Safeway store-bought cake (I wasn’t really a fan of the bear theme). But the balloons and bear-themed place settings (yes, we even wore the bear-themed hats and the bear-themed party favor noise makers) were all planned by my Mom and as I think back on it, that took a lot of energy to pull off.

So I guess I was surprised in 6th grade when she said I could have some people over from school for a birthday party (aka the “friend party”). I had changed schools that year and my new school was a small private school and my class only had 23 people in it. When my Mom said I could have a friend party, I thought it best to spread the news by word of mouth. So at recess and lunch by the monkey bars and swings and during games of kick ball, I personally invited every one of the boys in my sixth grade class to my house for a birthday party for me.

These were my new friends and I was happy to hear that most of the boys said “Yeah, sure” to my invitation. And then one night, let’s say the Tuesday before the Thursday-scheduled friend party, my mom started to get the details of my birthday ( and I want to say that I didn’t have to remind my Mom that I was having a friend party in two days; I’m sure she knew about it). And now we get to the one detail of the story that Jeff Graves will remind me of every 2 or 3 years…and with good reason: My mom asked how many she should plan for and I said “15, I think,” and she said that would be too many and perhaps I should only invite 10 boys to my party. I could un-invite Brad Frost, my neighbor friend, and just tell him that it was going to be a school friend party (I think our relationship took a turn downward after I started at the new school). I then counted up how many boys were in our class and I came up with the number of 11 boys that said “Yeah, sure” to my verbal invite.

So, as I went down the list and was making my hand-drawn Snoopy invitations, I decided on keeping Paul Connors D’Arcy and axed Jeff Graves from the list. And as I handed out the hand-drawn Snoopy cards the next day, every boy in Mrs. Addis’ 6th grade class got the official document…that is, except Jeff Graves.

The party was, fine. Everyone who was officially invited came, and we ate cake and it really wasn’t very exciting (I don’t think we—me or my mom—had a plan for the evening and so there was a lot of standing around and a few “What should we do now?” comments). But, as the boys in my class were at my house for my party, one boy, Jeff Graves, stayed home.

Jeff Graves went on to be my best friend through high school and I’m really not sure whatever happened to Paul Connors D’Arcy (I think he was from a foreign county…Canada, perhaps?)

We have “friend” parties for our boys and those parties have become quite the ordeal. In short, there is actual planning of the two or so hours of friend time measured out on an agenda that accounts for each moment from friend arrival to friend departure. We’re not that uptight; we’ve just learned that too much unstructured time can turn into chaos and more clean up later. So, it’s no wonder that when the “Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything” party for Lori and me never made it’s way out of the discussion stage. I think I would have enjoyed the design of the invitations, but the rest of the planning and the actual inviting and RSVPing and wondering if anyone would show up wouldn’t be that fun.

Instead, we ate lasagna and bread and salad and had Ghiradelli chocolate brownies for dessert along with some coffee.

Sometimes I wonder what today would have been like if we had the party and how we would have been relieved when people actually showed up and we would have actually enjoyed having friends over to the house and the boys getting to see a birthday party for Mom and Dad and remember some reference to a Douglas Adams’ book. And, I wonder if Jeff Graves would have reminded me of the time I didn’t invite him to my 6th grade party when all of the other boys in our class got to go.

Instead, I’m sitting at my sons’ piano lessons and I’m listening to Evan sightread “Greensleeves” while Colin watches “Fiddler on the Roof” on the portable DVD player in a corner in the hallway to the front door.

Maybe 42 isn’t the only answer.