Anticipation, it’s making me wait. . .

Ok, now that you've read this post's title, raise your hand if you are humming the Hienz ketchup commercial song from way back in your head right now. I can't help but hear that phrase and that tune is in my head.

The song, originally sung by Carley Simon was used in that commercial way back. Do you remember it? It showed people holding the bottle over their burger, hotdog, fries, whatever---mouth watering while the watched the ketchup slooooooooowly coming down out of the bottle. But by the end they were all digging in, and showing how it was worth every minute they had to wait.

There are saying that go along with this:

Good things come to those who wait.
Patience is a virtue.
Pleasure delayed is pleasure enhanced.

And in my experience it is true. I live kind of a bit of a paradox in that respect, I realize. I've often see people lamenting the drive thru/MTV instant gratification culture we live in today which doesn’t know the meaning of these phrases. They are decried for having abandoned the spirit of these ideals to their own peril. I count myself among the complainers. But I also like some of the instant things in our lives today, as well.

A microwave is essential to me. Sure I could live without it, but it sooo much nicer with it. I love being able to have the convenience of a 24 hour store---especially if I need diapers at 10:00 pm at night. The overnight “will it hold or won’t it” is a gamble I don’t want to take. I love that I have a huge selection of videos I can rent whenever the mood strikes. I’m all over the internet and it’s instant access to information and entertainment and you know about my love affair with iTunes and it’s contantly ready access to all that excellent music.

But I still won’t open my presents till Christmas morning. I wouldn’t even if I could. I like the wait. I love having things to anticipate. Trips, holidays, and special events are fun to look forward to. ButI also find excitement in the little things: movie releases (we're looking forward to Corpse Bride and the Narnia film), CD releases (Switchfoot's new effort comes out on 9-13 and looks to be excelent), concerts (that season starts for us in Oct and looks to be good), and even Apple computer product announcements. I want to find out as far in advance about some impending thing because it seems to charge life up a bit. You get up each day thinking that you’re one day closer to pay off. It makes things exciting.

Here's what I'm anticipating now:

We are right around the corner from the new season of “Lost”.

Yes, I'm following the show now too. I’ve been ambushed by it the same way the my wife was. For her it was because Wednesday nights are the nights that the kids would go to church youth group and so the only night she could catch a little T.V. in peace. And there it was. She got a taste and she was hooked.

It was the same for me. I had to be home early on Wednesdays when she was directing the play this summer so she could get to rehearsal. So it was just me and the boys (who got hooked as well). While we are enjoying the long summer nights together, we caught the re-runs of Lost.

The anticipation is working on multiple levels now for this show.

1. We have to wait each week for the next part of the story. It’s not episodic but serialized---the story doesn’t tie up nicely at the end of the week but carries forward and builds week to week. And there are strange mysterious things happening that we hope to get answers to---but we just keep getting more questions.

2. The end of the season last spring ended on a cliffhanger, so we're anxious to see where things go this season. We have also had the internet to report on rumors about what's going to happen and we're eager to see how things play out. They are going to open up new story vistas this season, it sounds like, and it will make the possibilities larger and more interesting. None of the stuff we read was enough to be considered a spoiler, but just enough to whet out eagerness.

3. The DVDs of season 1 come out in just a couple weeks. We are looking forward to being able to fill in the holes with anything we missed last season, as well as all that fun bonus and behind the scenes material that sure to be included.

In other news, Apple has announced that it will be making some big announcements on 09-09-05. Speculation says that it might be the iTunes phone from Motorola that we've been waiting for since about a year back now. Other say it may be the new Video iPod.

And can I just say a word about the Video iPod concept that everyone seems to be missing. I like the idea and it just seems natural. iTunes is already selling videos with music and a-la-cart. But they'll only play through iTunes on your computer. Not to mention that the podcast ability built into iTunes right now will except video files as well as audio to play in the same way that the music videos do.

But many people still are saying around the internet that video on the iPod's little screen would be so unsatisfying that it would be a flop. They're also saying that there is no material being made to fit on a screen like that and it would be so hard to watch a whole movie on such a small scale.

What every one seems to be forgetting the web video silent partner. Cell phones. Already major studio's have efforts for playing on an iPod sized screen. Most prominently is Fox with thier series of 1 minute episodes of 24 delivered to phone by subscription. There are also many independent companies selling subscriptions to small, short video offerings just for playing on phones supporting video. And the full sized iPod screen seems maxi compared to the little cell phone screens.

It is my belief that there will be a video iPod. And that Apple will do it brilliantly, as they always do. And it will changed everything, just like the original iPod did to music. Be prepared, the culture is about to shift again.

Also, you may no be aware, but there is a new emerging trend. First there were blogs (which has now grown into the millions on all kinds of topics, altering the way print media views the broadcasting of news), then you had podcasting (which is currently clawing angrily at the door of conventional radio and has them a bit nervous--like not even satalite radio was able to do), and now what's the next wave? Video. Some call it video blogging (or Vlogging), others have refered to it as video podcasting (or Vodcasting).

I'm not sure I like either of those names, but the point is that there is a growning movment of people using the internet to publish and distribute short form video. Sure, some of it is goofy and amaturish (some is down right awful and boring), but some of it is quite good. We discovered hidden writers of excellent quality through the blog world, podcasting is giving exposure to a lot of talented home brew radio show producers and musicians, and now we are on the brink of discovering the hidden T.V. production people and brilliant indi film makers in a way like never before.

As you can tell, this all kind of excites me. It may or may not begin on September 9th. Apple's press release was very vauge, but very charged. In the annoucement they say, "In 2001 a thousand songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again." But even if the video iPod doesn't launch a week from Friday, it will happen ---of that you can be sure.

Just wait for it.

And a hush falls

I know I've been kind of quite on the ol' blog lately. School started this week and suddenly it feels like everything has gone into fast motion. I've also got a video project I'm working on and that is taking up every spare minute of my time. Not to mention that the hay-fever ball has dropped and so I'm in kind of a fog between the medicine and allergy. My allergies have gotten less severe over the past couple of years, but this time of the year still kind of knocks me for a loop. At any rate, many things have played together to divert my efforts to post.

School started on Monday and that has made everything feel very different too, even after only two days. I guess I had thought that we would just get into it and things would sort of pick up where they left off at the end of May. But it all feels very different. More significant somehow, this time.

The kids all woke up on their own on Monday and were long ready before I was even out of the shower. One of the big differences this year is that half of last year's carpool is at the high school now, and that's with in walking distance, so they probably won't be riding with me much, if at all. In the morning now Kitten just kisses me as she's headed out the door. I didn't realize how much that little 15 minute ride in the morning could mean. We had a chance to laugh and talk some and be a little group together. With licenses just a year or two away, that 15 minutes is now just a favorite memory.

Kitten also tried out for the fall high school play, which is a musical this year. They're doing "Big River", a musical based on Twain's "Adventures of Huck Finn". And being a theater person, I know what that means---if she makes it, she'll be living on the stage after school more than she's at home.

I stood in her door on Sunday evening after I had kissed her goodnight and shut off the light. I just stood there looking at her. I couldn't shut the door. I just stood there looking at her in the light that was coming in from the hall and falling across her bed. She had the covers pulled up to her chin and was cuddled down ready to give in to sleep, until she noticed that I wasn't leaving and asked what was wrong.

I told her that I didn't want to close the door because it felt like once I did everything would change. It felt like I was at the crest of the first hill on a roller coaster, and that as soon as I clicked the latch and turned to go upstairs that we would move into this uncontrolled free fall. I could picture myself, with alarming vividness, opening the door on the next morning three years from now and seeing her bags packed there on the floor of her room. I'd take them up and put them into the car taking her to college or Japan or wherever she is bound. It felt like closing that door would close a chapter of my life that has been everything I hoped it would be, and that I didn't want to end.

But of course I did close the door. Can't fight the tide, just have to ride the wave.

That's just me, I guess. I always get a little reflective in the Fall. Autumn is a strange season of beginnings and endings. With school starting it has always felt more like New Years than Jan 1. School beginning, classes starting, activities getting back into full swing after a summer break, sometimes new friends and opportunities---and all that newness gets oddly juxtaposed against the ending of summer, the beginning of the end of the year, the death of all the green things again as winter overtakes us. It can make me feel complicated and mixed up inside. It always has. Yet it's a very vibrant time, as well.

It seems like Fall itself has come a little fast this year, too. Summer sort of gave up without a fight on the first day of school. Suddenly it's darker longer in the morning, and earlier at night. And the weather seems to have flipped a switch, getting almost instantly cooler.

I also find that my boys look so much older on Monday night than they did on Sunday morning. And saying things like that makes me seem so much older that I feel like I should be.

Today was Leemur's first full day of school. I hope he's doing well. He never has anything to tell me about school yet, and every time I ask him he says that he can't be expected to remember all the way till I get home a 8 o'clock! I hope his memory gets better as the school year gets into full swing. I really do want to know what he's doing and how things are going.

So much to look forward to. So much already done. Shhhh, let me have just 5 minutes more of now before tomorrow gets here.

Technical difficulties

Well, I am being beleaguered by comment spam. I believe the are finding my new posts because they've hooked up a bot to my rss feed. This is my hope. So I'm going to try to close that and see if they go away. I hope this doesn't mess anyone up. I don't know if anyone is using my rss feed anyway.

If you are, please email me (cyberjazzdaddy [at] mac.com) and I'll try to get a feedburner feed or something that you can use that I won't post on the blog (to keep it a secret from the bad guys hopefully), but you can put into your aggregator. I want to try this before I go to the length of turning off anonymous comments.

So annoying. Bad spammers. Bad!

I guess that since the gov got rid of the telemarketers with the don't call list, now we have spam. The cosmos seems to abhor a vacuum too. We have to have something to hate.

There's camping and then there's camping

As you know, I got back from camping this weekend with the Robo boy. He is just made for that kind of thing--at the genetic level. I watch him and feel I have passed on some recessive characteristic that, although provided by me, is as unlike me as his red hair.

I came to the camp late on Thursday because I couldn't get off work to take him down. He had gone in earlier with the leaders at about one in the afternoon. I arrived after 9 that evening.

When he spyed me coming up the path, he broke from his group of friends and ran to give me his signature tackle/hug. He immediately started rattling off about the afternoon adventures with a bright face and broad smile, stepping on the half spoken sentences of his friends who clamored areound to tell me also. He told me how in the afternoon it had rained hard and he had danced in the downpour, and then hiked along a swollen creek that he proceeded to fall into, meaning that he was down to his last dry set of clothes---the clothes he was wearing.

And with these exploits came a new nickname that he wore proudly: Splash!

For all my anxiousness at the prospect of camping again, I found that I was truely glad to be there to witness him in his element over the next two days. Boating, hiking, swimming, archery, pottery---he seemed to just drink it all in like this was what he had been waiting his whole life to do.

On the last night of the camp I started getting into bed a little early and noticed that my boy was right there beside me getting ready as well. Without being told, without a fuss. He had been right beside me most of the weekend actually. While other boys seemed to run ahead and away from their fathers, Robo was always checking to be sure I was right there. Even on occasion separating himself from the other boys running around to just come and sit beside me, leaning up against me, content to be able to share a piece of dirt with me at that moment.

And now here he was, quite contrary to character, getting ready for bed while boys were still running and playing right outside our tent flap. As we lay in the dark listening to the muted ruckus that was keeping us from being able to sleep, I thought this might be a good time to have some kind of father son bonding conversation. So I asked,

"Hey buddy, what was your favorite part of this weekend?"

He thought for a quick second, then replied,

"Um, let's see. . .the BB guns. . .the lakefront (where they had done rowboating). . .

. . .and when you got here."

Gulp.

I made the top three.

Somehow I think that, despite all my complaining, there's going to be a lot more camping in my future. And I'll count every uncomfortable moment of it a privilege.

My brother did some camping this week, too. And while what I did with my son was a very good thing, what my brother did was very, very important.

He volunteered for a camp that his church sponsors where they take abused kids who are now in foster care and try to give them a moment in their fractured lives where they can find a cool drink of friendship and normalcy.

Please read it. It's kind of long, and it contains what some may consider to be "churchy" passages, but please read it to the end---to the final poem he writes. It tore me up.

In this time of headlines about the politicizing of religion, this is something that is so rarely reported. A faith based act of love that happens away from the limelight, away from the voting booth, and with no desire for a pat on the back. An act out of a strong desire that the pat would go to a much smaller, younger back. One that is carrying a much heavier burden.

During the camp, the young campers get to celebrate a mass birthday party to recognize all their birthdays on the same day, no matter what the actual date. I've been told that they do this because for many of these kids, this is the only proper birthday celebration they every get.

The pastor who organized this camp has done so for years. He told me how each camper gets a special birthday care package during this party. He told m he's had campers come back to him years later when they were grown to tell him that this little birthday package of trinkets they received made such an impact that they had kept it and valued it their whole life, a little treasure chest full of selfworth and validation they had gotten from this camp.

Please read it. Read it with an open mind and heart. It's so important.

The Boys Are Back in Town

In the 80s and early 90s I was a big Stryper fan. You remember Stryper, don't you? Yellow and Black spandex and big hair. Singing Heavy Metal Jesus music? The "To Hell with the Devil" album. The had a top forty song called Honestly?

My wife even let me use one of their tunes as the recessional for our wedding.

I tried to see them several times when I was in High School and had no luck. Some commitment always came up. Even to the point where one friend who got to see them in Lincoln while I was at a play rehearsal came back and reported to me that a snow storm had prevented all but about 50 people from going to the concert. So after Stryper got done playing, they just came down off the stage and hung out for a while with the people who showed up to see them. I was excited for her that she got to hang out with my favorite band, as the knife plunged deeper into my heart.

Then, in the early 90s, when the hair band phenomenon was fading, Stryper faded with it. And so too, my hopes to ever see them live. They all had individual projects they went on to after the band dissolved. They were still working musicians. I kept up with them that way---but I was always hoping the unthinkable would happen.

Two years ago it did. They're back! Less hair and no spandex (thank goodness---how did the whole rock and roll spandex thing start anyway? Sheesh.) and a new bassist, but rocking as hard as ever.

On their 20th anniversary they did a tribute tour and found that they still had a bit of a fan base. Enough so that a small record label picked them up and now, today, they are releasing an all new album for the first time in years. Aptly titled "Reborn"!

And with it a promotional tour kicking off next month. Alas, he closest they'll be coming to me is Minneapolis, a 6 hour drive. Also on my daughter's birthday weekend. They seem to only want to play smaller big city houses, like The House of Blues type venues. No road house tour for them. Not that I can blame them. I wouldn't want to do the struggling artist thing again, either, if I didn't have too.

I'm just glad they're back. I may not catch them on this tour, but at least there is still hope I might catch them at some point. At least there's that. And a new album to enjoy. When it finally comes to iTunes, that is.

5 in '05 Flashback

This months "5 photos on the 5th in '05" entry is a little bit of a cheat. And it's late--again. Seems to be the rhythm. Oh well.

At any rate, it's a cheat because two of the pics will be out of the archive, meaning from my past. Not taken on the 5th this year, hence the infringement. But it's done to make a point. You see, a lot of things happen with my family that I wouldn't have envisioned as I began my married life back in college. I never would have anticipated a child good at math, one that was naturally athletic and outdoorsy, and I wouldn't have pictured myself working in the finance department of an internet company.

But one thing that I did think might just happen, and even hoped for, has happened. My whole family is in love with 'Chucks'---canvas Converse high tops endorsed by the historic basketball legend Chuck Taylors.

I posted this first picture because it's one of the few college photos that shows my feet. And there they are---one of my 8 pair that I had in college. Yeah, I had me some hair in those days. It was at the height of 80's hair band metal, you must remember. Be kind.

At any rate, these Chucks were extra tall and folded down (the yellow part that you see there is the lining folded down). I had this pair, a pair in yellow, aqua, black, white, raw canvas, all black (black with black laces and rubber), and a zebra striped pair that glowed in the dark. I used to mix and match them too. I'd wear an aqua on the left and yellow on the right---or a black and white combo, or black and yellow. I've never had so much fun with shoes before or since.

This picture is also to prove wrong those people who would say that those shoes are of a color that doesn't exist in nature. Matches that bush in the fall pretty exactly in my estimation. The baby is my little girl back in 1990, not even just a few months old. I'm making that face to mimic her cry. She just wouldn't be happy for the picture. My wife behind the camera snapped it at that moment.

This next pic is of me and the little lady napping on my father in law's sofa when he was still alive. My daughter is the only grandchild from our family he saw before he passed away. My wife and I still lament this from time to time. He would have loved and had such fun with all of them.

(I'm the one in orange sneakers.)



Then, almost 15 years later the torch is passed. My daughter shows up after a day of shopping with her grandma, and guess what she picked out!

Of course, the brother is immediately jealous. So grandma gets word that he would love to be in the market for some Chucks, and they return after a Saturday at the shoe store with multiple pairs in tow.






Even the little guy gets a pair--and with flames no less. And yes, Dad is back in action too.



It's funny---they kids were as excited about me having a pair as they were about their own new shoes. It was a crazy sight for them, seeing their dad in sneakers. I thought this was so strange. It's only been since I started working full time and supporting a family after college that I haven't worn anything but leather shoes and boots. Then I realized, to me that's only been a few years---but for them it's been their whole lives. Or at least the parts they remember vividly. So to them this seems like the first time I've worn sneakers in real life ever.

We didn't get them for the baby boy because they are just a little to expensive for that, and the wife doesn't like them much, so she didn't care for a pair for herself. She wore them once in a play and didn't like the way they felt. I, however, have never seen her in more attractive shoes. In my book I don't put much stock in the fancy red dress and strappy heels----but put my woman in jeans, a white T-shirt and black Chucks and that is HOT, I'm telling ya! (I'll post that pic of her in the play if I can ever find it.)

Not everyone feels that way about such an outfit, but in my estimation a woman can't get more attractive. Unless she also wears wrist bands and bracelets and has extreme hair color. I realize I'm a bit out of the norm when it comes to what I find attractive.

You can also see our new carpet and my haircut from this pics as well, if you were so interested and wondering.

Well, yesterday I took my daughter to visit an open class for the Japanese language course at the community college. She enjoyed it and is more excited than ever.

And today I'm off to go camping again with Robo. And it's going to rain all weekend. Perfect.

Please enjoy some civilization for me this weekend.

If you need me, I'll be appreciating all the discomforts that the last 100 years of progress have removed from our daily lives.

But all for the love of a boy, so I guess it's worth it.

Poetry Corner

I'm really not much of a poetry person, if the truth be told.

I mean, I appreciate the spirit of it, and the soul. But I just have never been able to get into the vibe. Reading it, hearing it, and especially writing it.

And definitely not if it rhymes. Not sure why, but if it rhymes and it's not Suess, Shakespeare, or song lyrics, I'm out.

Occasionally I do find something that resonates with me. Rosie (O'Donnell, from the Rosie show) has a blog that she writes in kind of word-image bites. She says it isn't poetry but it seems poetic to me. I've been able to really get into some of the stuff she writes.

Thing is, I found out this week that my little brother writes poetry and I never knew. Never even suspected. He put some on his blog and to me it seemed to come out of the blue. It struck me as so uncharacteristic that I kind of gave him a little bit of a hard time in his comments. He enlightened me to this secret part of his inner life in his next post. He was a good sport about it all, never losing his sense of humor---but still. . .

So, in an effort to try and retract my unintentional discouragement, I said that I would put up some "poetry" of my own. I used to keep journals, you know, the kind with paper and a binding that you have to write in with a pen or pencil. Old fashion stuff. I did this through grad school in an effort to capture my creative energy for use later in writing or directing projects. It started out as a class assignment and I just kept going after that.

After I finished school, I dropped it. At one point I wanted to get back to it, and so I bought a new little journal and wrote in it for a bit. That got laid to the side after a while too, but when we were putting in carpet, and turning our house upside down in the process, I found it again.

I discovered a couple entries that might be considered "poetry"---they feel like that. Kind of poetic. I didn't set out to write poetry but just sort of wrote "thought fragments" that strung themselves together on the paper in kind of a piece of word jewelry.

Anyway, I told my bro that, to be fair, I would put myself out there like he had. So, here they are:

#1
when
till then
always the never sometime (next time)
I can't say
can't pray
my mouth as dry as death
when I speak
thru love
my words sting
and you fling
them back at me
with my silence I'm killing you

#2
When I write I need the music
when I hear music I need the words
when words meet music make
them stand
make it move with light
then it's complete--I can rest
it lives in you now

Short Post

Yesterdays post was a bit long. I know. Sorry 'bout that for anyone who found all those words daunting.

Consider it a chapter from my book. It's titled "People don't come here to listen to you type!"

At any rate, today's post will be much shorter. You're welcome.

The Bear peed. But not in the woods.

He did it in his little potty chair in the bathroom. It even played music when he did it.

He remains unimpressed. He won't even talk about it.

If we try to cheer him on, he changes the subject. Usually to Godzilla.

I guess a giant radioactive fire breathing lizard destroying New York City is more exciting to him that a little pee pee. So who's the goofy one in that situation. No wonder he's giving me those looks.

His mom is singing the "I don't think he'll ever be potty trained blues".

Second verse, same as the first.

When good pipes go bad

Well, it's the beginning of a new week and my appreciation for technology has moved in a new, unexpected direction. I've become a big fan of a technological advance that isn't quite as modern as my other fascinations---but as I've learned, it's equally if not more important than the latest cell phone or newest computer.

Plumbing.

I'm still not any good at it and it frustrates me to madness, but I am sooooooo glad that it's there.

We had another little foray this week into the wonderful world of plumbing. Last night, after I was done putting my daughter to bed and making sure we were all ready to send her off to her youth conference in Denver the next morning, I went in to busy myself in my office. I was only beginning to unpile what I would be working with back onto my lap when she called out that she wanted me to come and listen to something.

I yelled back that I didn't have time. I was busy. I told her to go to bed and I'd listen to it later.

She was insistent. There was this annoying little sound that sounded like electronic static, she said. But everything in her room was off and she was really annoyed by it. She said sometimes it was louder, sometimes softer.

So, now annoyed myself, I put down all I was doing and went in and listened. We followed the sound over to a place on the wall in the corner. It sounded like the noise was coming from the other side of the wall. Or inside it. On the other side of that wall of her room was the inside of a little closet in my makeshift office. So around I went, back into my office stepping over piles of file folders and electronic components and squeezing past the metal shelves I had installed in the closet where once a dowel had held clothes.

Once inside the tight narrow closet, I followed the sound to where there was a shelf space about the size of a mini fridge three feet off the ground. It was an area that had previously been walled off using a piece of paneling by the people who originally build these two little back to back rooms in the front of the basement, but I had at removed the rectangle of wood at one point to use the space for more storage. I had put cardboard boxes full of cables and old computer keyboards in there among the bare 2x4s, insulation and pipes.

Yes, I said pipes.

We tracked the sound down to back of the cubby hole, and when I went to push one of the boxes aside to get a deeper look, I discovered to my dismay that the cardboard had turned to oatmeal. The boxes hadn't been anywhere near the pipes, but they were close enough that whatever was happening back there had gotten them soaked to uselessness.

It's at this point that I'd like to take a moment to do my parents some justice. I know I've been dwelling a little lately on the issues we've been having as new homeowners, but I don't want to give the impression that our new house is a dump that is falling down around our ears and my folks who sold it to us are in Rio toasting the scam with the cash from our home loan.

They are behind us 100% and this has been a wonderful house. We love having a place with room for all the kids and their friends and our friends. A place for having picnics under the arbor covering the patio in the back yard during the summer while the kids run around in the grass. And in the evening when the firefly catching is over, it's great to have this place to snuggle down in where everyone can be safely tucked away for the night.

Back when we were a family of four (and soon another one on the way), we came to this house after living in a two bedroom apartment in the middle of the city where the only grass around us was a token strip by the sidewalk the size of a beach towel. There is not a day that goes by that I'm not humbled by the blessing that this house has been in our lives.

But when you get that mote in your eye, it's all you can think about and talk about. And this is where I do that, I guess.

So, back in the closet, I was finally able to move all the stuff to new boxes and get back in the cubby hole with the insulation and the pipes----and there it was. A thin little stream of water shooting in a tiny arch that sparkled in the light of the bare 60 watt bulb of the closet.

The elbow joint on the copper water supply line pipe coming into the house (but after the shut off valve, thankfully) had sprung a little pin hole leak and the sound that Kitten had heard was that thin little spray hitting the back of the drywall along one side of her room.

Kitten was the hero. I had been irritated. I had wanted to wait till later. Probably till after she returned from her trip in 5 day. It was obvious now that this course of action would have lead to a much larger disaster.

The spray was small, but we'd had a similar little pinhole problem in a different part of this same line back when we first moved in that went unnoticed for months and ended up soaking the whole carpet in that room. Worse yet, if the straight piece in that elbow joint had worked it's way loose, we could have had some serious flooding. Suddenly, this was one time I appreciated her teen-age propensity to not take no for an answer.

(One time. ONE. Hear that Kitten? This ONE time. Ok.)

So, here we were, faced with another evening with the water off. Luckily most everyone was already asleep. But after several days with the water off last week and now last night, this is where the appreciation for plumbing comes in.

I have taken plumbing for granted all my life as something just as much a part of civilization as clothes, and a convention just as ancient. Yet, we just celebrated the 100th birthday of our nextdoor neighbor this past Sunday, and when I think about it I realize that she would have been a person who had grown up in the Midwest in a time when back yard pumps and out-houses were more the standard. I realize now that I know and interact with a person who would have experienced a world transitioning to indoor plumbing in a not so far off time.

Once I went off in a speech class I was teaching, describing another cultural transition I myself remembered. It was not so long ago, when people, city people, would trundle out all a-buzz to the appliance store just to see some new crazy invention. They would arrive at the store and quickly move to the correct isle where a demonstrator would be describing the way this device would change our daily lives forever, like he was hawking snake oil. It was said that this thing could make water boil almost instantly, and without a heating element.

A glass of water was placed inside and the group jockied for position to peer through the darkened glass on the front of this little metal cabinet. Indeed, within seconds of the man turning the timer, the water was boiling right before our very eyes. He would open the front door and people would reach in to confirm that the glass of water was indeed hot, and then place their hands on the miraculously cool white sides of the little oven. The eyes of the people in the group would look in wonder.

They called this amazing new invention the microwave!

This was all lost on the room full of recent high school graduates I was telling this to. They did not seem to grasp was a marvel it was and I received stares like they were expecting next to hear my stories of coming over on the Mayflower or my lunch with Napoleon.

But how quickly the newness fades and becomes mundane. I remembered coming into that same store and down that same isle just a season later and seeing the wonder box sitting there on the same shelf like a faded rock star, ignored by all who passed. The lack of bustling people now a mocking reminder of what once was. The glass was still inside but now crusted with water deposits as if to say, "if you want to see the marvel, do it yourself. No fanfare here anymore".

According to the History of Plumbing website (isn't the stuff on the Internet great), indoor water like we have now only really came about in the early 1900's, and of course it wasn't very widespread yet at that point. The growth of indoor plumbing really occurred between the 1920s and the 1950s in America, according to the site. So much so, though, that today any place that doesn't have running water is considered "high adventure camping"---as few as 55 years later.

Now consider the computer----a trip over to ComputerHistory.org will show that the first designs for a stored program computer were developed as early as 1945. Granted that the computer and plumbing each have a long history of predecessors, but in their current incarnations they both came into being at roughly the same timeframe. Yet, the Internet, a network of computers into peoples homes, is still making headlines---while the network of pipes into all of our homes hardly merits a whisper today. Except to be cursed when it's spewing it's cargo onto your DVD collection.

But not by me. Not anymore. I've gained a new appreciation over the last 10 days. That plumber that showed up this morning and set things right is as big a hero to me as Bill Gates. Of course, I'm a Mac person so that's not a huge stretch, but still, you get the idea.

Then that got me to thinking about what it would have been like back in the day--always needing to think about water management--having to stay close to rivers or dig wells and pray for rain out of a concern for running out of this precious life giving liquid? And what about the guys on the cattle drives going across the deserts with only their canteen.

And then I got to thinking, when those guys on those cattle drives were riding across those dry arid wastelands with only cactus and dirt as far as the eye could see--what did they use for toilet paper?

Dude. Forget about rustlers and coyotes and hostile indigenous tribes threatening them with death at every turn like the old westerns glamorize. Think of the e-coli issues they must have had going through those camps. I'm surprised any of them made it through alive.

No wonder you never see them shaking hands in those movies except with gloves on. Maybe that's why you always hear of them eating nothing but beans for months. Get themselves good and blocked up so it wasn't an issue.

In the end I must confess, if I was forced to make the choice between the World Wide Web or flush toilets---just call me Analog Willie.

Yippie-ki-yi-ay.