Cold Weather Kills Brain Cells

Four degrees Fahrenheit this morning. Wind chill dropped the temperature well into the negative numbers. It's pointless to keep track of anything below twenty. Below twenty is like over a hundred in Texas. Degrees no longer matter. Outdoors is a world of pain.

We've made it halfway through Week Three of P90X. We have brought it. We have done our best and have forgotten the rest. We are ready for Week Four, the Recovery Week, which will occupy us with core exercises, yoga, and stretching. No jumping around doing plyometrics and no violating the laws of gravity with cast iron dumbells. I believe God created gravity to keep dumbells on the ground. Lifting them is near blasphemy, like heliocentrism or climate change.

Every morning at 5:30 when the alarm starts clanging, we get up. First, I feed the cat so as to avoid the wrath of her talons while exercising. Then, I prepare the living room by moving the couch and coffee table, pulling out our equipment for the day, and inserting the DVD into the hungry Blu Ray player. Nom nom nom.

Incidentally, and completely off topic, I just learned the difference between disc and disk. DVDs and CDs are disc with a C. Floppy disks and hard disks use a K. Disks with a K store information that is read magnetically (like VHS and Cassette tapes). Discs with a C are read optically with a laser. Now you know and knowing is half the battle. Go, Joe!

Where was I? The morning routine.

Then I dress in my headband, tank top, and Richard Simmons shorts. The last thing I do every morning: I take off my wedding ring and I put on my contacts. I put the ring and the contact case into my bathroom drawer. The bathroom sink came with three drawers. Aine lets me use one of them. I do the same things in the same order every morning. It has become routine. I can (and do, actually) do them in my sleep.

Remember that.

Last week, after I got out of the shower and toweled dry after having brought it and done my best and forgotten the rest, I opened my bathroom drawer. No ring. I pulled everything out of the drawer. Still no ring. You can imagine my alarm. Aine told me if I ever lost the ring she would take me back and get a refund. Or at least a store credit.

Of course, I didn't actually remember putting the ring in the drawer. I don't wake up until Tony Horton makes us jog in place for a few minutes. I assume I do the same thing every morning because I do the same thing every morning. I put my ring in the drawer because that is the safest place to put it. A place I know it won't get lost.

Over the course of the day, I searched the house twice. When Aine got home, she searched it once.

I pulled out all the drawers in the bathroom and all various accoutrements under the sink in case the ring spontaneously bounced out of the drawer. I looked on top of every piece of furniture. I looked under and around all the furniture in case I had place the ring somewhere and Pig juggled it onto the floor. I looked in every drawer in the house in case, in my drowsy stupor, I had been mistaken. I looked in the floor vents among the piles of cheddar flavored goldfish and board game pieces. I felt around inside the garbage disposal. I checked under the comforter on the bed. I looked inside the closets in case Pig had whapped it off a table and dribbled it over to a closet and slap-shotted under the door. I searched through the dog's poop in case he ate it. I prodded his stomach to see if there were any hard lumps or sensitive areas. He thought we were playing. I emptied the two trash cans and sifted through Orbit gum wrappers and Kleenex. I pointed a flashlight under the oven and fridge.

Nothing. I searched every inch of the house and Aine searched all the inches again. No ring. I accused Aine of playing a practical joke. She accused me of being an idiot. We both accused the dog of trying to eat cat poop while we were distracted.

We knew the ring could not have left the apartment, but we couldn't find it anywhere in the apartment. It was a mystery. A mystery and a tragedy.

Late that night, getting ready for bed, I opened the drawer in the bathroom. Now, we had both pulled the drawer out of the cabinet completely and emptied it multiple times. However, going to remove my contacts, I looked in the one place neither of us thought to look. Inside my contact lens case cap.

I found my ring again and only had to endure one day of terror and anguish. I showed it to Aine. She said maybe we could stay married after all.

That's all I have for you today. Aine opened a new jug of milk this morning, which means Pig has a new plastic ring to enjoy. She dropped it on the desk a few minutes ago and I ignored her. Now she's standing with her back paws on the table and her front paws on my chest, meowing in my face.

Piglet is the alpha male of this household.

Illinois Breakdown

Snow
So, we had a decent snow on New Year's Eve. Let me clarify. As a Central Texican, the precipitation proved satisfactory. A couple inches dropped on us from above, a couple inches that would disrupt life in Austin for a few days. Impassable roads, closed schools, government services deferred, days off from work. Here in Illinois, life finds a way. Businesses remain open, commuters commute, grocery stores don't even blink. If this much snow fell in Austin, citizens would crouch behind shuttered windows amid boxes of candles and batteries and canned food, praying to their liberal gods for respite. Here, people drive to Target and casually peruse Merona wear.

In Austin, the snow has melted after two days because the temperature leap frogs back into the 80s. Our New Year's snow remains. While it's been dry, the temperatures haven't crept above freezing. The mid-day sun melts as much as it can (snow reflects 90% of sunlight), but that snowmelt freezes again at night. The city keeps the roads clear and our apartment complex has its own mini snow plow and our faithful apartment staff keeps the sidewalks and stairs well sprinkled with sand or salt or whatever they use.

You get to see something they don't show you in the movies and you certainly don't see in Austin. Almost two weeks out from our snow storm, the sidewalks are covered with miniature sand dunes that you crunch across on your trek to your car or front steps. The grains cheerfully follow you inside and make new homes in your carpet. In corners of parking lots and along roadways, you see dirty snow, these frozen piles of gray-black sludge. I've heard I'm to avoid yellow snow, but the gray-black dirty snow looks far more nefarious.

My Icicle
Well, it wasn't my icicle, per se (Latin for "in itself"), but I developed a certain attachment to it. On the other side of my parking lot, the snow melting from a car refroze into an icicle hanging from the right rear bumper. It grew over the two weeks as more snow melted and developed into a thick ice pillar connecting the bumper to the pavement. I wondered how long the owner could go without leaving the complex. One must eat, after all. I wondered if he or she had frozen to death in his or her apartment and the swelling ice cylinder was the only evidence that something was terribly amiss. Mostly, though, I wondered how long the frozen shaft would last before it collapsed. I passed the car every time I went to the next building to run a load of laundry. For two weeks I passed it, marveling at its resilience. Until yesterday. I went to move a load of shirts from the washer to the dryer. The sky wasn't overcast, but it wasn't particularly sunny. It was a still day, very little wind. As I neared the ice pillar, it shattered and collapsed. Like the Wonderful One Hoss Shay, one moment it existed, robust and full of splendor, the next it fractured into hundreds of constituent parts. Vaporized. Defunct. Kaput.

iPhone
I succumbed. I became that which I have long loathed. An owner of an Apple product. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Apple products, only people who own Apple products. Also, I don't particularly approve of mock turtle necks. Like Malcolm McLaren before him, Steve Jobs found a world languishing in darkness and left it irrevocably changed. If you don't believe me, take a look at Windows 8. That said, while I appreciate the revolution, I don't particularly want to listen to the Sex Pistols or download apps. Yet, here I am. Like the trudge of our solar system around the galactic hub, like the green leaves of summer turning to autumn fire, like waiting for my wife to get ready in the morning, the change happened slowly.

Maybe I'm cheap, but I always opt for the free phone upgrade they offer when you sign a new contract. I don't believe I should have to pay a lot of money for a phone. The first rule of Technology Club is technology always gets cheaper. In 1980, you had to pay around $800 for a VCR (that's over $2K in Today Dollars). Today you can pay $80 for a decent Blu-Ray that can connect to the internet (that's 30 bucks in 1980 Dollars). Your average cell phone has a computer more powerful than the one that got Neil Armstrong to the moon. Which is black, by the way, it only looks white because, like snow, moon dust reflects almost all sunlight.

I want to stand on the shoulders of giants. I want a cheap phone.

My last flip phone gave up the ghost one day as I thumbed it open to make a call. It didn't evaporate like the One Hoss Shay. It cracked in half with a groan like the '72 McGovern campaign. I was left with two useless halves of a thing. Imagine the US Congress trying to negotiate a budget. Now imagine they are a phone. I replaced it with a non-smart touch-screen phone, the touch screen of which was poorly designed. Functionality slowly waned. I couldn't send texts. So I jumped into the Sarlacc feet first.

Activating this mini-computer proved a daunting task indeed. The QSG provided with my new product said to go to att.com to activate my new phone. Att.com said, no, no, silly, this is an Apple Product, you can only activate it by syncing to iTunes. Apple.com said we'll let you download iTunes, but first you must create an Apple ID and set up a profile. Also, we need your credit card number. Also, we want your first born. Aine and I planned to have a girl first, so that decision wasn't very difficult. I did everything they asked. I slew the Nemean Lion. I made bricks without straw. I cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring. Still, my phone refused to activate. My day ended with a long phone call to my friends at AT&T. After many automated messages, much pushing of buttons and entering information into my touch tone phone, I finally reached a kind lady who flipped a switch on her end and activated my phone. I love technology.

Now, when I'm stuck in a situation where I have to wait idly without a book or a magazine, for instance, when I'm sitting in one of those plush chairs they place outside women's dressing rooms, I can read the New York Times or the Economist or check the weather. Bully for me. Also, I can text again.

P90X
We officially started the program today with Chest & Back and Ab Ripper X.

Day 1. 89 to go.

I'm not going to belabor the P90X thing or give regular updates. You can find a few thousand blogs out there of folks describing their travails with the program, uploading videos of themselves doing the exercises, and showing pictures of their flab receding. If you want details, go to one of their blogs.

We spent a month acclimating to the workout routine and the diet plan. We became comfortable with each workout. With the exception of the Christmas holiday, we worked the diet into our schedules. Christmas was a caloric disaster. I blame my mother. Every year she insists on making Hello Dollies and I feel a deep throb of failure if I end the holiday without eating them all. Leave no Dolly behind. Hoo-ah.

It's true. We averaged about 3,000 calories a day over Christmas in marathon consumption binges that would have given John Candy pause. I'm not proud. But I'm not going to apologize either.

None of the workouts are that difficult (with the exception of plyometrics and yoga), they're just long, averaging from an hour to an hour and half. Needless to say, we have to get up early. So early, in fact, Crankles and Piglet refuse to get out of bed. Until the very end, when it suddenly seems a good idea to try to lick the sweat off the face of someone trying to stretch his or her hamstrings. Go figure.

I do have reservations about the diet plan, which looks like it was slapped together by a five year old on Benadryl, but I'll address that in a later post.

That's All
Aine just got out of the shower. Which means in around an hour, she'll be ready to leave the house and we'll drive to the mall where I plan to spend the rest of my day sitting in a plush chair reading the New York Times.

Reasons Not to Read about Lincoln

I just discovered yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In honor of this momentous occasion, I'm posting reviews from some popular Lincoln biographies. Hopefully, these literate and incisive reviewers will help you make an informed decision about the next Lincoln biography you read.

1. Lincoln by David Herbert Donald

2. With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates

3. Abraham Lincoln: A Biography by Benjamin P. Thomas

4. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

5. A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr.

6. Abraham Lincoln by James M. McPherson

Happy New Year's!

A Jabbo Allen Special Edition
Reporting to you from the bottom of the fiscal cliff we tumbled over last night because our elected legislators wanted to make it home for dinner. At 2 am this morning, the Senate passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 with a vote of 89-8. Two hours after the dreaded Fiscal Cliff. Which means we skittered over the edge. Life as we know it is over. It's now headed over to the House for a post-mortem examination.

Apparently, the resulting bill from these long months of negotation, resembles the sort of compromise for which we hired our esteemed representatives. Digging in like a sullen teenager is fun every once in a while, but I want to get my money's worth out of the US Legislature. I want to see Wheeling and Dealing. Give and Take. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke coined the term "fiscal cliff" in February 2012. It has taken them ten months not to pass a budget. It took our Founding Fathers only four months to invent our whole government from scratch. They were all Classics majors, by the way.

According to the venerable New York Times, this recent deal includes:

• An increase in the estate, dividends, and capital gains taxes
• A phase out of of the Bush era tax cuts
• A provision to protect the Middle Class from the AMT
• An extension of unemployment benefits

We didn't actually stay up until midnight. Really, a New Year's Eve without the Holmeses is like a Margarita without Cointreau. What's the point?

Haute Cuisine
Today, January 1st, 2013, all across the South, my friends and countrymen (and countrywomen) will be partaking of that New Year's staple, black-eyed peas. But why?

Black-eyed peas are the central dish eaten at Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Jews celebrate the Talmud as the second most important text in Judaism, the first being the Torah, also known as the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy - isn't it funny how our names for these books all come from Greek?). In two places (Horayot 12A and Kritot 5B), the Talmud prescribes black-eyed peas as the officially sanctioned Rosh Hashana meal. This tradition came to America with Sephardi Jews that migrated to Georgia in the 1730s. By the 1860s, this traditional meal had spread to the non-Jews of the Deep South. Many blame Sherman.

William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta in mid-November of 1864. I'm sure you've seen Gone with the Wind. You know what I'm talking about. From mid-November to late December, Sherman marched to Savannah on the coast, keeping or destroying all live stock and food crops in his path. According to legend, the Union troops didn't destroy Field Peas, a crop considered only fitting for livestock in the North. Since the Yankees took all the livestock anyway, the disgusting field peas didn't merit their effort. The survivors of Sherman's march had only field peas, known to us as black-eyed peas, to eat in the New Year.

A traditional New Year's meal includes black-eyed peas, greens (they could be mustard, collard, turnip, or, as my family always served, cabbage), pork (we always had sausage), and cornbread.

Peas symbolize prosperity because they swell when cooked. Greens symbolize money, obviously. Pork represents positive forward motion in life because pigs move forward when foraging. On the other hand, lobsters (which move backwards) and chickens (which scratch in reverse) are verboten for New Year's meals since they represent regression. Cornbread symbolizes gold.

Some people add a penny to the pot of black-eyed peas to make it extra lucky. Technically, you have to eat exactly 365 peas to extend your luck over the entire year.

Snow Again
Yesterday it snowed all day long.

This morning, the New Year greeted us with a muffled huzzah under layers of snow. So, I have some quick snow facts for you.

Nature makes four types of snow:

• Columns - tiny little cylindrical crystals with six sides
• Dendrites - your classic snowflake, it looks like a star with six points
• Needles - needle-shaped crystals, as you can probably tell from the name
• Rimed Snow - these dendrites are coated with frozen water droplets

In the movies, when the protagonist trudges through the snow and you hear that perfect crunching noise, you're actually hearing the cornstarch, salt, or cat litter used by the special effects department. Real snow doesn't sound like that. At low temperatures (in the teens), snow squeaks. Our snow made a sort of squeaky-poppy sound like a cross between bubble wrap and scooting forward on a leather sofa.

I took some time to observe and record tracks in the snow from indigenous wildlife. Here are my results:

Squirrel Tracks

Crankle Tracks

Jabbo Tracks

Lady Tracks

Drunken Elf on a Pogo Stick Tracks