"You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, Mountain, Central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"

Yes, Chuck, you can. You can wake up at John Wayne. You can wake up at John Wayne on a Monday night 2200 miles behind schedule, after two klonazepam and a Johnnie Walker chaser. You can wake up on a Monday night at John Wayne and wait in line for a bus to shuttle you to a management offsite where you wake up on a Tuesday a different person. And on a Wednesday and on a Thursday where you discuss workforce productivity and enterprise architecture until you wake up again at DFW and again at RDU on a Friday. Where you see your children and you see your wife and you remember who you are. And on a Saturday when it's back to early morning wake-ups with the Technivorm, early morning wake-ups with Lee, when it's back to diapers, back to bottles, and back to breakfasts in front of the television.

Random leaps:

The latest object of my material affection: The Rancilio Silva. Of course the bonus pool was much smaller this year, so it may be the no-frills Gaggia Espresso instead.

Just finished: Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Just starting: Nicholson Baker - The Mezzanine, Italo Calvino - The Watcher and Other Stories

Today's agenda: Isabel at soccer and Wisconsin at UNC.

Thank you: Robert Whyte

"I love your friends, they're all so arty." Junebug premiered locally here. Will this be the first movie we will see in a theater since the kids?

Order has been restored, certainly not to the world at large, but to our home at least. I was able to sleep until 6AM this morning and was subjected to only one episode of Hi-5. Lee and I spent the rest of the morning watching Videomaniac on Fuse. The Killers, White Stripes, Hot Hot Heat, Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, and Green Day ("Wake Me When September's Over").

Today's downsides? I've got the kids' cough. Maybe later I'll try to run it out. Realizing I should have blogged Isabel's morning moments or things she says like "She's a Famous!" or "Take a Poulah." Today's upsides? Sleeping until 6AM, catching up with old friends on gmail, working from home as part of SmartCommute, and Bluegrass. Yes, all of the above plus the offical start of football season. Yes, this is the best of all possible worlds.

Daft Punk is playing at my house, finally. Actually LCD Soundsystem is. After endless successive mornings of Hi-5 America, I conveniently forgot to save the Hi-5 DVRs. Fortunately, the video for dpip@mh seems to be a suitable, if uncompromising, substitute. My country for the 20 minute remix.

Isabel@CD Alley 

Yes. Slowly, but surely I can say "Yes!" Slowly but surely we are all recovering and at the same time we are getting the pictures online from our trip. It feels like it's been an age and yet at the same time it's only been one week. Mornings are all Hi-5, Cayou, and Ready Set Learn! We both avoid CNN, but Lee sneers at Green Day and White Stripes videos, while at the same time banging his head to Switchfoot. Down is up and up is down.

In all honesty, everything is bliss, all is bliss, except for the teething. AFAIK, there may well have been many sentences in history that started in that same sing-song manner. "If it weren't for the teething, dot dot dot." At any rate, thank God for Hyland's (and for the Berkeley Parents Network).

A minor grace note in the day: after a slice at IPIII, my daughter and I stumbled into CD Alley and found a used copy of Husker Du's "Eight Miles High" EP for $3.98. (We also snagged DJ Spooky and The Teardrop Explodes).



I haven't heard these tracks since high school when a) the only copy was my best friend's (vinyl, of course) and b) the tone arm on his turntable always pulled away early and cut the second songs short on each side of the 7-inch. It was two or three years later before I heard the whole thing in its entirety. God bless vinyl. And while we're at it, God bless The Maple Leaf.