And then there are days.

This year, I did the majority of my Christmas shopping online. No looking for a parking place, no hordes of foul-tempered shoppers, no dealing with sales staff who are too busy talking on their cell phones.

And, for the most part, it went pretty well. As I'm sure you know by the presents you received from me. (You didn't get yours yet? Well, I'm sure it's on its way.)

There were a couple of packages (a book, a DVD) that I was expecting to arrive on the Monday before Christmas, the day before I left for Florida for a week. But when I got back from work that Monday evening -- nothing there. Nothing on the front porch, nothing at the side door, nothing on the back deck. Oh, well. Guess I won't be taking those things to Florida, after all. And I'll alert Larry-the-Cat-Sitter that he should be on the lookout for those missing packages.

So Larry-the-Cat-Sitter conscientiously watched for the missing packages. But by the time I got home from Florida, they still hadn't been seen.

Okay, time to go into "So where are they?" mode. I checked the Amazon.com tracking page to see if I could find out when they might be delivered, although I thought I remembered they should have gotten to me before I left. And to my great surprise, I found out that not only should they have arrived by then, according to Amazon.com, they had been. That Monday afternoon before I left town.

Hmm.

Let me go look again. Nope, not on the front porch. Not in the bushes around the front porch. not under the leaves piled up behind the bushes around the front porch. Not by the side door. Not on the deck out back.

Okay. [sigh] Guess I'll have to get in touch with Amazon to let them know that the packages never arrived, and they'll need to resend them. Kind of annoying that they disappeared - I've never had this problem before in this neighborhood. Don't know whether it was swiped from the porch or was claimed as last-minute Christmas shopping by the carrier's temporary drivers.

Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow to contact Amazon. Maybe they were picked up by a well-meaning neighbor who saw I was away from home and that neighbor hasn't returned them yet.

Maybe I'll wait a couple of days, so I don't have to deal with the Amazon customer service people. "But it says here that they were delivered to your front porch." "Sure does. And yet - I never saw them." "But they were delivered to you." "But they weren't." Really not looking forward to that conversation.

After a couple of days, though, it was finally time. No, wait: let me put it off long enough to go to the grocery store for a big purchase: buying enough cat food to last me through long winter storms, should any appear. ("more cat food is good" the little voices near the floor seem to say.)

When I return home and carry the many bags of groceries up to the front door, I note that there's something a little bit odd about the welcome mat: it felt a bit, I don't know, lumpy when I stepped on it, and it's pushed off to the side about six inches - towards the hinge, so I hadn't been stepping on the mat when I went in the door. Okay, let me get the bags of cat food inside, and then I'll investigate.

Sure enough: both packages were there. And apparently had been there all along, underneath the welcome mat where the UPS driver had hidden them from view. Sure, they both were in packages a lot flatter than I expected - the bigger was no more than an inch high, and that's at least an inch shorter than I had anticipated - and they'd been well-covered by the mat. But I'd looked for the packages at least a half dozen times, and didn't see them where they'd been placed, and exactly where I would have expected them to be. The only saving grace is that Larry-the-Cat-Sitter had stepped over them every day for a week without spotting them, too.

Perhaps it's just as well I'm not a private investigator.

Inaugural quotes.

Today is certainly a day to quote prior inaugural addresses. Let me add this one, which I feel appropriate:

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.

You know, it's not that often that I get to quote Gerald Ford.

And in a galaxy far, far away.

Maybe it did happen a long time ago.

Bring out the kitsch!

Welcome to the new age. There is nothing celebrating Obama's electoral victory that is so tacky that it cannot be made by someone and offered for sale.

Okay, perhaps the only thing new is that these things now are made with Obama's image, instead of someone else's. But the folks who make them still want you to fork over your hard-earned dollars for them.


And yes, those are, respectively, the President-Elect's head made of soap ("Hope on a Rope") and The First Couple-Elect as a Christmas ornament.

Your tax dollars at work.

One of the fun things about having a counter on this website is that I get some limited information about where my site hits come from - time of day, city where the viewing computer is located, which posting brought them to the site, what search terms were used if the visit comes from a search engine, and the like.

And then there are visitors like this:

Domain Name: house.gov ?
(U.S. Government)

IP Address: 143.231.249.#
(Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives)

ISP: Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives

Location

Continent: North America
Country: United States
State: District of Columbia
City: Washington
Lat/Long: 38.9097, -77.0231 (Map)

Time of Visit: Nov 3 2008 10:50:03 am

Visit Entry Page: http://stonercellars.blogspot.com/2008/11/ya-gotta-have-hartke.html

Well, if I get audited, I'll know why.

Ya gotta have Hartke.

I was out driving around yesterday afternoon, minding my own business. I was passed by a campaign trolley, presumably with the candidate standing in the back of it, waving to passersby. Complete with a sign "Honk4Cantor". Gack. The evil Eric Cantor, representative from my district, although I can't imagine he actually represents it so much as he uses it for his base of operations, as a Mordor of his very own.

To my surprise, the trolley stopped for the red light. As I came up beside it, I rolled down my window and shouted "End Corruption! Vote for Hartke!"

Well, it made me feel better.

Why the republicans will lose Virginia

I got home last night to find my daily robocalls listed on my Caller ID. The usual suspects were there: some combination of "Anonymous" or "Name withheld" or no name at all, just an 800 number. Only one of them - the nameless 800 number, by the time stamp - left me a voicemail.

"Come to the Victory Rally tomorrow at 2 pm! Senator John Warner will be there! And [whatever his name is, the zealot], Virginia's Attorney General! And a Vietnam Prisoner of War! It'll be at the Victory Headquarters! Don't miss it! That's the Victory Rally! Tomorrow, October 30th, at 2 pm! See you there!"

The time-stamp on the phone call was Thursday, October 30th, around 3:45 pm.

Yes, they were inviting me to attend a rally that had already taken place. And the rest of their efforts seem to be equally disorganized.

Why I'm not a farmer.

Well, there's the hours, of course.

But there's also the results. Here is a photo of my harvest from this year's garden. Not a representative sample of the harvest. Almost the entire harvest. I actually got two bell peppers (the other one was smaller than this one) and four tiny stalks of swiss chard.

Thank goodness for supermarkets.

Obama rally, update.

Here's a video of the last five-plus minutes of Obama's speech at the rally in Richmond.

Obama rally.

I went to the Obama rally here in Richmond on Wednesday. Lots of fun. I wish that the sound system in the Richmond Colliseum were better: some of the speakers sounded exactly like the adults in Charlie Brown TV specials. Obama came through clearly about half the time, and when you get down to it, one doesn't go to this kind of rally to hear the specific policy details of the candidates. (People at my workplace watched it live online and had no trouble understanding what he said. Natch.) About 13,000 people got into the Colliseum for the rally, and another 7,000 watched in a nearby park where there were big screens wet up.

My favorite line was something to the effect of: "You don't even have to ask whether you're better off today than you were four years ago. Are you better off today than you were four weeks ago?"

Here's a nice little presentation on the event - photos and about 90 seconds of the Call to Action at the end of Obama's speech. What makes this slideshow and audio clip even more impressive is that it was put together by the local newspaper, which is of the "It's Okay If You're a Republican" variety. I'm guessing that even they can read the handwriting on the wall. (The alternative is that they occasionally act like responsible journalists, and from what I've seen of this paper over the years, we can safely conclude that's just not the case.)

My seat in the Colliseum was reasonably close to Obama, and he entered and exited the arena right below where I was sitting, so I was within maybe 30 or 40 feet of him at that point. It was absolutely amazing to see the level of security around him,

especially when he was shaking hands with the crowd on his way out: he was surrounded shoulder-to-shoulder by the security detail, with two or three rings of additional agents checking out the folks ahead of him.

I think that what impressed me the most was how excited so many of the people at the rally were. There was a black woman, about my age, sitting next to me who was calling all her friends, giddily telling them that she was about to see the next President. (I remember being that excited about candidates before; I remember becoming heartbroken as a result. So now I'm somewhat jaded. Or, at least, more cautious in commiting so wholeheartedly to a candidate.)

Certainly the rally had the desired effect of jazzing up the attendees, getting them to go out and work harder in the days remaining before the election. And that's especially exciting for those of us of a certain age - and you'd have to be - who remember the last time that Virginia voted for a Democratic candidate for president.

Someone I work with was at the rally as well, and was interviewed by The Daily Show. Don't think his interview ever made it on the air, but that's fun, too.

The feeling is mutual.

Courtesy of Sina English.

From one of my uncles.

Yeah, those darn "tax and spend" liberals. Ever so much better to borrow and spend.

A visit from Hanna.

Not much to report, thankfully.

About 4 inches of rain, mostly between midnight and 4 p.m. today; heaviest between about 6 and 11 a.m. Wind probably around 20 mph, gusts up to 35 or 40. No trees down in my neighborhood (that I know of), no giant branches down in my yard.

The biggest effect was to have large standing puddles in my front yard, and doubtless I'll need to mow my yard next week.

All in all, just the way I like my hurricanes.

Lest ye be judged.

I got to be a beer judge today.

A local homebrewing club had its annual brewing competition this weekend. They were expecting something on the order of 80 or 90 entries. They actually got over 150. The organizers kind of panicked, and sent the word out that they needed more judges for the competition, and it really didn't matter how much experience the new judges had.

So someone thought of me.

It was a lot of fun. Well, not the "show up at 9 a.m." part, because I'm not all that fond of beer as a breakfast beverage. Even when it's the middle of summer, and a weekend.

They break it up so that a table of three judges would deal with, say, eight to 12 beers. You get a two- or three-ounce pour of a beer, judge it against specific style (e.g., Vienna Lager) definitions, and come up with a numerical score. No, you don't have to drink all of the pour you're given, and you really don't want to drink it all, if you're going to get through ten 3-ounce pours in three hours. At 9 a.m.

A single beer from the group of 8 to 12 would advance to the "best of show" round, where it would be re-judged by a different group of judges.

As it turns out, the best beer from my table - a Munich Helles - eventually won the gold medal for Best in Show.

All in all, great fun.

Doom and gloom.

It's like I brought a little bit of Seattle back with me.

Yesterday, we had a high of 68 degrees, low gray clouds, drizzle and gentle rain off and on all day long. No thunder, no lightning. Really dark, low clouds rolled in around 7 pm, so you'd have needed headlights even if it weren't raining.

These photos really were taken at 7 pm - an hour and a half before sunset - in downtown Richmond, near where I work.

And today? A bit more traditional August rainstorms - rain so hard that you couldn't see beyond the windshield wipers, a lot more lightning and thunder, large ponds of water covering the road. Not quite up to the standard of hot summer afternoon thunderboomers, thankfully. (And, naturally, it stopped as soon as I got to the office.) Still, it was 3 inches of rain in 3 or 4 hours, so there's flash flooding around the area. These are the remnants of tropical storm Fay, so three inches of rain is a whole lot better than some areas around the country got.

West coast trip.

Okay, I'm back. Back from a one-week trip to the Seattle area. Somewhat rejuvenated (although a two- or three-week trip would have been better in that regard), although it's amazing how tired you become from sitting in a slightly-padded seat all day long on the return flights.

I can report that the Space Needle really does exist, something I could not honestly say after my previous visit to Seattle 12 years ago. Oh, sure, on that trip I was able to see the bottom 50 feet of it. But no more than that.

I ate a lot of salmon, which tastes a lot better when it's served fresh, near where it was caught, than when it's frozen and shipped across the continent. And I played a lot with my new camera, the results of which you're seeing here. (Well, a selective excerpt of the results: I took almost 600 photos on my trip.)

I got to see some spectacular sunsets. This has the Olympic National Park in the background, and the Hood Canal in the foreground.

I even got to see a sunrise, painful as that usually is for me to consider. I was watching a triathlon, and this is a pre-race photo, with the kayak volunteers getting into position to assist any swimmers needing aid. I can assure you: it's better to see a West Coast sunrise when your body is still on East Coast time.

I did a few touristy things in Seattle: I walked by the base of the Space Needle (going up it will have to wait for a later visit), I rode the monorail, I went on the Seattle Underground tour. The most fun thing I did, though, was going to a performance of the pre-Broadway tour of Shrek: The Musical. Great fun, and very well done; the actress cast as Princess Fiona has a wonderful voice. I'm not entirely sure that a musical needed to be done, but if so, this production fills the bill.

All in all, I had a great time. I'm ready to go back.

Between the covers.

Part of the reason I haven't been posting much lately is that I've been reading. (Well, okay - that's not the only reason. But it's a lot more satisifying to say that I've been doing something productive like reading than to admit I've been doing my impression of a sloth.)

One book I've liked is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, an examination of motivations that lead us to make the wrong choice when we know better, such as the power of "free" items. The author is a behavioral economist who teaches at Duke and MIT, and I heard him speak earlier this summer at a Richmond Fuqua alumni event. Pretty interesting material, although not entirely new to me.

In the area of wine, I enjoyed To Cork or Not To Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle, a very thorough discussion of the problems with corks and the limited success of various alternatives. I had thought I had a good understanding of the issue, but reading this made me realize that the various solutions aren't quite as good as I had thought.

And I've been reading some fiction lately, too. Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine is some of the best science fiction I've read lately, not that I've been reading all that much science fiction in the past ten years. Among fiction, I've probably read more mysteries than anything else. But Haldeman's latest doesn't disappoint.

I'm now in the middle of Sunshine - a delightful vampire tale. Pretty good escapist, summertime reading.

I happily recommend all of them.

O Henry, 1996 - 2008.

O Henry passed away last week. She had cancer, and passed peacefully.

She started out as a stray, and was adopted by my mother by the time she was one year old or so. She made the move from Florida to Virginia about two and a half years ago, when she and Sami came up here.

She was a very sweet cat, always sleeping on my bed at night. She was also the matriarch of the household, keeping all the other cats in line, usually by grabbing them and licking their heads until they submitted. What was great fun was when she'd approach me while I was sleeping and lick my head. Not sure I ever submitted to her authority, exactly, but I'm sure there are those who will tell you that I have been very thoroughly trained to do all of my cats' bidding, including hers.

Tarred, but not feathered.

Sometimes, you just don't need an alarm clock.

This morning, for instance. This thing was in front of my house at 7 o'clock. Sounding very much like a cross between a jet engine and the propane torch for a hot-air balloon. More than enough to stir me from my slumber.

And it wasn't alone: its twin brother was right behind it, even louder.

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much: they'll only resurface the street once every 15 years or so, and I guess I can give up some sleep for that. If only they hadn't appeared Tuesday morning before 6:45 to resurface the other streets around me....

Not around for long.

Joss Whedon strikes again. It's free until Sunday, which is when it gets taken off the web and you'll only be able to see it by paying for it - download or DVD or something.

Very funny.