Here’s some stuff. First Mark, my comically gifted amigo over at the sister site Fortune’s Ankle, notes the 7 Deadly Threats to our cushy little human lives as reported by ABC. (Dude, Asteroid! Duck!)
And then, someone’s “control freak” sister-in-law is not too happy right about now. This little bathroom chat is much more intriguing (thanks CNN!) than you-know-who’s blah, blah, blah.
Going whale-watching. Ciao.
You have to be completely inept to get a picture no better than this if you’re watching whales from the Depoe Bay sea wall this week, on the Oregon Coast. Completely. But I guess I am and I did. They were all over the place yesterday, shooting up like popcorn. Coming out of the water nice and slow, flick of the tail and back in. Gray and Blue ones, I think, I forget. They have volunteers posted all over to tell you stuff about whales but I wasn’t listening. There’s a big drop-off where we were so they came right in close. Beautiful. We watched for two hours then kids got bored. By the end there was a big group, and all cheering the good fluke shots like a football game.
I just finished playing Fishopoly with Jr. and G. Jr. made it up. He made the board, he made the little paper fish playing pieces, he made the great big square paper die.
The game board is a bunch of different-colored dots (they correspond to the colored faces of the die) and some chutes and ladders-type slides. There’s also an “L” — lose a turn — spot and a “Loos$ Change” square. If you land on “Loos$ Change” you get to “Catch the bus” and “Ride” (follow a squiggly line) back to one of the dots. You pretty much do this the whole game: land on some dots, lose a turn, catch the bus, etc. Though at some point, and I didn’t really figure out what it was, you get a chance to “swim through the mud.” If you can swim through the mud you catch the magenta-colored fish and win. The “mud” is a little stand-up tunnel that you have to push your paper fish through without touching the sides; if you touch the sides, you go to Lose a Turn. I touched the sides the first two shots I had, then sort of cheated on the third (moved my hand so Jr. wouldn’t see my fish touch). And then I won! It’s a fairly relaxing way to bide your time, watching four-and-a-half-year-old G. roll the dice, move her fish, happy as a clam. Watching Jr. roll the dice, yell “yeah!” When I look at what he rolled I have no idea why it’s good or bad.
Anyway, I won. I won Fishopoly! Life’s a beach 
(Fishopoly, The Game. Copywright, 2006; Anthony O. DiFalco)
.. So tall people are smarter, duh! They finally proved it. Did you see tonight, for instance, how much smarter Blythe Danner is than Charlie Sheen? And remember that brainiac Brigette Nielson, the genius of Wilt Chamberlin, the intellectual shortcomings of Tom Cruise? An exception, of course, lies in my house. A. is definitely not four inches smarter than me, no way.
We caught a crab today and we battled the winds and we watched big crazy waves and then came “home” (summer rental) and turned on the fireplace. A. drove inland two hours to Portland and started sweating, 90 degrees. I’m beginning to like it here.
Not getting a thing done, well maybe a thing. Might interview a guy this week, might. Or might just ride the free shuttle all around and let the toothless crazy person teach us magic tricks.
Ho hum, write in. Write in if you’re writing more than me, or if you’ve caught a big crab, or if you think Tori Spelling’s mom screwed her out of a billion dollars.
While you’re at it, write in if you’re reading Claire Messud’s new book, or if you’re tall. Write in if you’re Robert German or Kelly Van Blokland or Mark Button or Megan Fehrenbacher or Trace White and you’re bummed about Maynard Ferguson – didn’t we see him in Reno? Or wait, maybe not Reno but somewhere else where we were all together? Write in if we didn’t and I’m crazy.
Write in if you know why my tomato plants turned yellow and the tomatoes all died. Write if you know a place on the Oregon coast that isn’t cold in the summer, or if you’re sick of Horseshoe crabs. Write in; write in dammit!
First ten people get signed copies of my future best-selling outrageously successful novel, The Good Wife (September ‘07).
Good Night, then. And Good Luck.
So C. and I took a drive tonight to see Mona Lisa, the big local buzz. Two miles out of town there’s a “Wreck Ahead” sign and we’re all backed up. Yep, someone wiped out, flipped into the ditch right across the street from the 60-foot da Vinci. It’s going to be a serious hazard, I can see already. They’ve got the shoulder roped off so art lovers won’t stop and gawk on the skinny strip of gravel. Anyway … we got a picture of Mona, and a picture of the bedazzled and upended driver, from out the windows of a moving minivan. Wheeee!
… write me, I’m bored. (At left, anemones.)
A. goes off to grad school for two years, and here’s what comes of it. Email exchanges like this (names changed to protect the freaks):
Folks,
I am trying to understand how changes in center occupancy impacts center level EBITDA. I started by doing a regression of Occupancy rate (number of students divided by center capacity) and EBITDA rate (EBITDA as a percent of net revenue). The R squared is relatively strong. What I am looking for now is an understanding of what a change in occupancy equates to in EBITDA. For example, if Occupancy goes up 2 points, how many points should I expect EBITDA rate to go up? Isn’t there a value within Excel’s regression function that tells me that exact thing?
“Ned”
You kiss your wife with that mouth “Ned”? I can’t bring myself to print the response, this is a family site. [Editor's note: A. did not actually weigh in on this; that he was cc:d is bad enough.]
The fun of writing, the really fun part, of course, is making stuff up. There are two books batting around in this house by the sea — one, a treatise on dating, the other on marriage, both tragicomic farce. “Revolutionary Road with sight gags!” I said of mine … “Jane Austen with sight gags!” she said of hers.
Anyway, we have just tonight killed off an annoying character with a Giacometti to the head, and a fake at that. We dropped it from an upper floor of a bald billionaire’s townhouse. (Graham Greene did the same thing, not with a Giacometti, though, a pig.) Drop. Smash. Dead. Fun.
Gosford Park meets Erica Jong … or something. Not really. Not even close. Who’s checking?
What are you doing today?
.. So you know. Retreating. Writing and retreating and writing and glaring at the stupid Shilo across the street because I only get their wireless signal if I’m standing up, or on one foot, or patting my stomach and rubbing my head at the same time.
The thing about idylls (this). Well, I’m at the beach. Michele here to watch kids, big house, fruity candles, chocolate pudding, an ocean in the window. And yet. It’s writing maybe. That’s it. Sometimes writing’s no fun.
The paper comes on Wednesdays and Fridays so there’s that today.
It’s been colder than I’d like and the smoke alarm won’t stop beeping (two entirely unrelated things). I yanked it out of the ceiling, threw in the garbage and then fished it back out when the houseowner called to say someone was coming to look at it. So now it beeps on the front porch, from a plastic Adirondack chair. Beeping and beeping. It’s like that hair in the Simpson’s Halloween episode that no one could kill. Also, my Dell battery doesn’t blow up, but it only lasts 5 minutes. [Dumb sex joke here. Ba-da ching!]
In the credit column, we went for a long walk yesterday, all the way to the rocks that Willy (as in “Freeâ€) jumped over in the movie when the bad guys tried to trap him in the bay. We lost the yellow shovel, but it was warm out and the peace was stunning. Me, A. and G.
At the Thriftway here they send someone out with you to the car. Every time no matter what. They unload the bags, take the cart back. It bugs me. I like to do my own, I don’t want small talk. The first time I waved two guys off and the third got me. I’m on my way there now and already mad about it. Grant me the serenity to not care if people follow me to my car.
More later.
