For whatever reason, I have not been overwhelmed with this whole change in decade.  I vaguely remember the start of the 1980s, but I think that was mostly because I got the Death Star playset that Christmas.  (And when I got it, my dad joked that I should just leave it in the box because it would be worth more.  And if I would have, I could sell the damn thing now and pay off my mortgage.)  I also remember the 1989/1990 change, mostly because I was home for college, and this girlfriend I had back then came up from Bloomington to visit me, and we fought constantly for the entire week she visited.  And I guess we all remember the whole Y2K thing, mostly because we were all waiting for jets to fall from the sky at midnight, and nothing happened.

This decade change is pretty anticlimactic, though.  I think part of it is the addition of numbers behind that big 20 prefix doesn’t seem to have as much impact.  2012 and 2001 and 2112 and 2010 and 2020 all seem too similar to me.  Another possibility is that I’m so apathetic, I just don’t give a shit anymore.  I remember back when my first car hit 140,000 miles, and me and Tom Sample pulled over on the side of US33 and danced around the car like idiots because all of those zeroes came up at the same time.  My car just hit 30,000 miles, and I didn’t even notice it.  Maybe that’s because it’s just an LCD display now, and not actual dials of numbers.  Or, once again, apathy.

I also don’t make many new year’s resolutions, because all of the big things I do or plan never happen to land on even numbers like that.  But here are some vague ideas of resolutions I may or may not do this year:

1. Not gain back any weight.  I managed to stay below my goal weight for all of 2009, and I need to keep that up.  Actually, it wouldn’t hurt me to lose about five more pounds, but as long as I stay the same pant size so I don’t have to go out and buy more, I’m fine.
2. Publish Air in the Paragraph Line #13.
3. Try to write here more.
4. Try to write more, period.
5. Kill a dolphin with a spear gun from a helicopter.
6. Learn a dead language, and teach it to several of my coworkers, so we can talk about other people behind their backs.
7. Only eat hot dogs at baseball games.  I think I ruined this by eating a char dog at Midway airport, but come to think of it, that was still 2009, so who cares.
8. Memorize one page of a dictionary word-for-word, and then tell everyone I memorized the entire dictionary, and when they ask, I start reading off that one page and everyone thinks I’m a goddamn genius.
9. Be in an emergency situation where someone asks if there’s a doctor because someone collapsed or something, and say “yes, I’m a doctor”, and when they ask me to do CPR or something, tell them I actually have a Doctor of Divinity degree and tell that dead guy to suck it.
10. Keep hand-shaking to a minimum.

I should actually make one of those giant 101 goals lists and put it on here, but these guys are doing a much better job at that idea.

Happy New Year.  I have been home for a few days.  I’m still not 100% unpacked.  Maybe today.

I had to go to the dentist on Saturday morning for the next step in the latest dental trauma.  They are replacing the crown that came off while I was in Mexico.  The problem was getting the crown off again, since the Mexican dentist seems to have done a pretty good job gluing it on (probably with some adhesive that’s illegal to sell in the US because it’s also used to kill rats in science labs.)  To remove the crown, he first had to give me about ten injections of novocaine, because it’s on a live tooth.  Then he used a grinder to cut down a groove in the porcelain and metal of the crown and a sort of dentist’s prybar to then wedge apart the crown until the seal broke and he could pry it loose.

Two issues with this:  first, it’s a tooth at the very back of my mouth, which involves forcing open the jaw at an unnatural angle for a long period of time.  Second, the sounds and vibrations associated with the cutting and prying are far from ideal for a person with dental anxiety and unnatural fears of teeth being pulled or falling out.  Short of getting my wisdom teeth pulled while under a local (and then having the dimwit break a tooth off and send me across town to an emergency oral surgery to get the other half of the tooth removed), this is pretty far up the list of bad dental experiences.

They got a temp crown on there and sent me on my way, feeling like I’d just got out of a bad Guantanamo Bay talk session.  After a few hours, my jaw started chattering uncontrollably, as some weird side effect of the shots wearing off.  And then, my jaw started hurting horribly, mostly from trying to fight to keep it open.  It still hurts today, although it’s not as bad as yesterday.  The main problem is I have to now limit my diet a bit for the next week, avoiding anything that could pull loose the temp crown, or get stuck in between teeth back in that corner.  I didn’t eat all day yesterday, but eventually had a vegetarian pad thai that seemed to work okay.

Next up: a root canal in the tooth next to this one has to be redone; it has some kind of infection at the very tip of the root.  This was a root canal done back in Seattle, in 1997 or 1998.  There’s a bit of strange nostalgia about that.  The endodontist I went to back then had an office in Northgate, just a skip south of Silver Platters records, which was my second home when I lived there.  I have no idea how I afforded a root canal and a biweekly trip to buy new CDs at this place. A quick google shows me they are still open.  The bad news is it looks like they discontinued their certificate plan, where they gave you these fake money certificates when you bought stuff, and you could turn them in for free CDs.  There was a whole system to this madness, where you would get extra certificates on certain days, and for certain sale items, and so on, and I tried my best to exploit this system by only shopping on Tuesdays or whatever else was required.  Now, it’s all about iTunes.  End of an era, I guess.

It’s also the end of the 00s, although I have nothing interesting to say about it, other than wondering where the last ten years went.  Seems like yesterday we were all worrying about Y2K and I was trying to settle in my new and somewhat shitty apartment in Astoria.  That was ten years ago?

Hello from a veyr frigid Northern Indiana. I am sitting in a Bruno’s pizza just north of Notre Dame, waiting on a pizza and sort of passively glancing at the fourth quarter of the Colts-Jets game. It is cold as hell here, I think in the teens, and I’ve done more ice and snow driving in the last 24 hours than I have in the last several years.  I spent a week in Milwaukee, and yesterday, drove through Chicago (with a stop in Chicago to have lunch with John Sheppard and Helen) and then zipped down the Indiana toll road to our hotel.  We’re now seeing my side of the family, and I’m also visiting various ghosts of decades ago.

The level of nostalgia isn’t as high as it has in the past.  I mean, I’ve been out of Indiana longer than I actually lived here.  And so many things have changed since I left.  Like I drove by University Park mall last night, and was astonished how much it has changed since the early 90s.  But I still see bits and pieces of the Michiana I knew way back when.  Elkhart was never a big city to me, and Chicago was my main urban center, but South Bend held wisps of big city to me, the way the downtown grid creeps between the couple of tall buildings.  Back in high school, I’d drive around South Bend, driving up Michigan and down Main, wishing I was in a real big city, in New York or Los Angeles.  And now that I’ve lived in both, it’s odd for me to be back here.

I also drove to Scottsdale Mall last night, which is no longer there.  It has been “de-malled”, torn down and replaced with Erskine Plaza, a collection of big block stores.  I can kind of see where some parts of the old mall used to be, the McDonald’s on Miami; the Kroger across the street from the mall.  But it’s weird to see the mall gone.  I never shopped there as my main choice, but when I went to IUSB, it was the closest mall, and I always ended up there on paydays.  It’s weird to be driving through a parking lot full of strip mall, knowing a giant two-story mall used to be there.

Not much else to report.  I’m coming off a cold and need some sleep…

Hello from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I am here for the week, visiting Sarah’s family, and hoping we don’t get hit with a foot and a half of snow.  We flew in on Saturday, and took a relatively painless Southwest flight to Midway airport in Chicago, where we got a rental car and drove up.  Our plan is to spend the week here, and then drive to Indiana on the 26th and visit my side of the family for a few more days, then head back in time for work on the 31st.

The flight out proved to be the first test for the Kindle.  I sat in the airport in Oakland, browsed the store a bit, and picked up the e-version of George Carlin’s latest, which is an autobiography he had worked on for years, which was completed after his death.  No problems buying it at the last second in the airport, and I got about halfway through it on the plane.  Maybe I will save a future report for the actual end-to-end experience on the thing, but I find it pretty easy to get lost in the book.  You really do forget the interface and get lost in the writing, which I guess is one of the major concerns with any non-paper reading.  Probably the only major drawback with the Kindle is there is no old-fashioned way to give someone books for Christmas.  I guess you could give them a gift card, but I’m the kind of person who always ends up with many dead trees wrapped up and under the soon-to-be-dead tree during the holidays.  There’s no easy way to get around that.

I saw this funky documentary last night called Alone in the Wilderness, which was about this dude who went to Alaska and built a cabin, with the original plan being to stay there a year, but he ended up staying for about thirty years.  The whole time, he filmed himself cutting lumber and notching logs and building a fireplace and tracking the wildlife and surviving through a -45 degree winter.  Later, his son-in-law took all of this silent film footage, added sound effects and narration, and made it into a documentary. Its good stuff, and makes me wonder if I could ever do the same out on my land.  Of course, I don’t have a bunch of trees to cut down, and I’m not right off a lake where I could fish and haul my own water.  Still, very interesting stuff.

Time to get my act together and go off to a lunch.  Had a very good pizza for lunch yesterday, that ultra-thin crust type, from Balisteri’s.  I have no particular pizza religion between thin versus thick, but I always appreciate a good specimen of either, and this was good.

Look what Santa (i.e. Sarah) got me!

I’ve been on the fence about the eBook thing, not because I am so fiercely loyal to dead trees, or that I see it as some sort of threat to the publishing industry.  My main gripe about the Kindle is that it provides such a great reading experience, plus the ability to one-click a ton of books from Amazon’s catalog, which is essentially like locking a heroin junkie in a narcotics factory.  But now that one is in my hands, let the floodgates open.

First impressions: this thing is amazingly light.  I think it weighs about as much as my phone.  Also, the screen is shockingly clear, especially when I’m sitting in bed with a light over my shoulder.  It would not work in a no-light situation, as it is not backlit, but if you can read a book, you can read this screen.  It is so amazingly crisp though - it looks more like the fake display sticker they put on an LCD that you peel off to reveal the actual screen.

The first book I bought was On the Road.  It took me about 60 seconds end-to-end, and I was staring at the pages in my hand.  They also have a service where you can email yourself a PDF at a special address, and for 15 cents a meg, they will reformat it and zap it over the air to you.  I did this with Rumored to Exist and for three nickels, had a copy on my kindle, perfectly readable.

(Hint to other Kindle owners: you can download any of my books for free and zap them over to your kindle.  The complete Konrath library will cost maybe a buck and some change.  Or you can email it to another address (prepend .free to the domain name) and it will do the convert, but you get it next time you sync with your PC.  I have not tried this one yet.)

Anyway, I really like it.  It will be perfect when I’m stuck in airports this holiday season…