Friday Musings

(Admin note: Yes, he realizes it’s a Saturday, but he’s not willing to break a streak, nor fiddle with the time/datestamp code. Because he respects you too damn much!)

Short version: Woke up hung over from a blog party, cast a despairing eye about the wreckage and pondered in the ineffable meaning of modern life in this ephemeral digital context. Had breakfast. Really had intended on going for a medium length run (the PFA being right around the corner) before going to work college school (Friday’s now being my opportunity to better myself in the distance learning environment) but became entirely engrossed in one of the short stories in Mark Helprin’s compendium, “The Pacific,” Helprin being a writer whose gift leaves mere mortals in appreciative despair and the short story format being almost perfectly suited to modern-day attention spans not to mention the combination of a pleasant moment’s reading with, em… certain other routine tasks of a morning. Missed the opportunity. To run, that is.

I did get a chance, school starting a bit later than the usual task of pushing my own boulder up the hill, to say farewell to each of my daughters on their way to school. A mixed blessing, this leaving later, in that I was subsequently forewarned by the Hobbit that our own personal capillary leading to the main southbound artery, the one which would take me to my place of academic endeavor, was in an advanced sclerotic state due to the neediness of all those horrible east county people, who also had to commute to work and would use the newly opened east/west interchange which not so very long ago was ours alone. The bastards.

But: Not to worry – I pooted down road on the BMW R1150GS moto, weaving fearlessly (well, almost fearlessly) in between the lines of snaking traffic and filtering in between the swearing, fuming, dashboard-pounding commuters, each working hard at the daily chore of perfecting their own personal apoplexy, with scarcely a care in the world, arriving with almost 5 minutes to spare and a full hour before one of the poor souls in our work group who had to commute in a cage from further north.

Spent the better part of the day in concept generation, concept screening and concept scoring for a little lego robot, a task that was actually more fun than the describing or reading of that description probably permits. As contrasted to that dreadful on-line statistics course, written as it has been in prose so wooden that open flames or static electricity-producing items are prohibited from within 50 feet of the screen, and which has often, in the preceding week, caused me to cast despairing glances around the room for loaded firearms, sharp knives and/or rat poison. All to no avail, which is probably for the best, the data still being insufficient for greater certainty.

Got home in time to run three miles at a pace probably harder than I ought to have at this advanced stage of decrepitude, and pushing the stacks around for another half hour or so before heading home to pick up the Hobbit up for our re-transit of the southbound 5 en route to a soiree hosted way-the-hell-down-there by my boss, a 3-star admiral whom, up until last evening, I had not yet met. The Hobbit, having been anticipated at home for the last hour or so, was instead found to be still in conversation at the local pizzeria/watering hole that her work group had met at, and invited me to join her with her “special friend,” a phrasing that gave me cause for a few moments of introspection en route to the establishment itself. I was somewhat relieved to find that her friend was a lady school bus driver, a woman of “a certain age” whom, being a gentlemen or at least presenting a reasonable simulacrum of one, I will not go so far as to call wizened, but who was evidently as crazy as an outhouse rat. Among other things calculated to amaze the senses, this worthy told me that she had spent 20 years in the Navy (including three tours in Alaska, where apparently the temperatures were frequently 125 degrees below – Celsius or Fahrenheit seemed but a quibbling distinction at this mark and so I didn’t ask) before working 30 years for the state government, prior to spending the last six years driving the short bus. Now, even our shared service (by which she apparently set a good bit of store) couldn’t stop me from totting these sums up in my head and arriving at a rather stunning calculation of her age, given an original enlistment at 18. But then she offered up that she was 64 years old. Meaning of course, that she had entered the Navy at the tender age of eight. Or perhaps, being generous, she was wrong in some other particular. Couldn’t say.

Now – my enthusiasm for churning up the highway one more time en route to a stuffy naval how’re-you-doin’ was less perhaps than you can imagine in the comfort of your own home: Squadron parties in one’s youth are the stuff of legends (if one can remember them) but sadly, once one becomes a captain, going to admiral parties with all the other captains, no one ever seems to get thrown in the pool anymore. Still, the traditions of our service do not speak approvingly to the idea of RSVPing a three-star’s wife in the affirmative and then deciding two weeks later that it really doesn’t work for us, anymore. Even if the alternative was spending more time with a school bus driver who was quite possibly insane. So we said our reluctant goodbyes and headed out the door, my one concession to the melancholia I felt at having such a poverty of choices on a Friday night being that I would not, by-gum, khaki back up. That’d show ‘em.

Of the soiree itself, perhaps the less said the better, but I did get out of there without disgracing either myself or the naval service, which I will chalk in the “success” category. The lampshades were all in their expected places, and no one, to our knowledge, felt compelled to count the spoons.

Came home to find that the Biscuit, proscribed, on this particular evening anyway, from wandering the murkier corners and alleyways of Del Mar with the more pierced, less well-known and parentally-vetted teenaged Del Martians had profited from the time alone in the house to hit the hay by 2030. Fully rested today, she is no doubt prepared to redouble her efforts of lovingly turning the last remaining strands of my black hair gray. One. By. One.

The Kat had intended to spend the night elsewhere, in the company of her friends, but closing in on 2200 decided that she missed us, and asked if she could come home. We gratefully acceded, knowing as we now do that the clock is ticking on such things.

And we? Proud rascals that we are, fought a brief but bloodless battle over the TiVo controller. When it turned out that “Monk” was not on I commiserated with the Hobbit (inwardly exultant) and said that, well, perhaps we could watch that rerun of Battlestar Galactica.

Of such things are a blogless Friday made.