I need help

It was starting to feel this way around here yesterday.

I'd finally had it with my AppleTV STILL trying to finish syncing less than 20gb from the night several months ago that my friend Noel helped me mess with channels, realized that 2 of my 3 Expresses were not 802.11n (or whatever that number is) capable, and reconfigured it as a WDS with two remotes and told me to put my oldest Express in my briefcase to use in hotels. It was better but obviously my AppleTV's inability to sync a lousy two seasons of "Mad Men" in two months demonstrated that it still had serious problems.

So finally I did two days of seriously geeking out on wifi networking, even downgrading two base stations' firmware to 7.3.1 and playing with KisMac for several hours to determine exactly what all my neighbors have going on with their wifi networks. (Most are running Cisco routers on the default channel 6 with WPA encryption, and only half have bothered to hide their easily-guessed ssid names. One has something like a dozen devices attached to his network, so despite inferences clearly available from this email, I am not the neighborhood's worst geek. And FWIW, KisMac is one scary-ass powerful piece of open source software. With a few more days of KisMac monitoring I could be the evil neighbor who announces "all your base stations are belong to us" and then reconfigures everybody's networks to be more secure and to use different channels for less interference with each other. Really, it would be a public service! And it would be more convenient for me when I need to Google something from my iPhone while walking the dog! Please explain these things to the public defender assigned to my case.)

When none of this improves anything, I finally break down and RTFM.

Apple's "Designing AirPort networks" reveals that WDS was a bad idea, because it pretty much forces everything to use the slow 802.11b/g protocol. For 802.11n you're supposed to use Airport Utility's much-simpler checkboxes to configure your boxes to extend and join networks.

The doc explains dual radio mode on p48, which was 47 pages further into the details of how wifi works than I've ever wanted to get before, and that idea was the ticket. So the new plan is this: run my main base station (the Time Capsule in my office), the music room's Airport Express station, our laptops, and the AppleTV on a primary network that is 5Ghz only. Run Ethernet from the Time Capsule to another Airport Express in the office, and use that as a bridge to broadcast a second, differently-named 2.4Ghz network with another Airport Express remote upstairs on the channel KisMac revealed to be least busy for benefit of my iPhone and guests with older laptops! Ten minutes and very few mistakes later, I'm done. Problems solved! AppleTV finished syncing!

Only took me two and a half months! Let's hear it for RTFM being within the first ten things you try to troubleshoot computer problems instead of being what you do when ten weeks of Googling and futzing doesn't produce results!

So I see this comic this morning while lying in bed and playing with my iPhone, because several friends have posted this web comic's link to FaceBook. That's when I realize that if I explain all these things to my friends, they will help me get help. They will know that it's time to send me away for a while...

But make sure I figure out why Victoria's laptop isn't joining the new network before you do... I probably need to delete her Airport preferences, then repair permissions, restart, empty caches, zap her PRAM, upgrade to Leopard, and upgrade my base stations back to 7.3.2...

Hmmm, time to wrap this up--I have to get out of bed and get to work now...

Leadpipes and statues and boats, oh my!

Dag to i Oslo began with the promised better strategy at breakfast. I started on the hot side but unfortunately found that the pølser weren't as good as the day before and the weird thick pancake things were definitely some kind of fiskekake--not bad, though. The potatoes were hot and yummy, but the egg-sausage scramble was awful. Mom came up with smørbrod combo she likes quite well, putting both Jarlsberg and gjetost together on a sandwich with a slice of ham or whatever. Seems weird to me, since Jarlsberg is tangy and savory and gjetost is sweet and gooey, but it works for her. (Today she finally tried a piece of bread with gjetost on one half and just butter on the other, with two kinds of jam going in halves the other direction, for a cunning sampler mosaic. She says the orange marmalade on gjetost quarter was best.) Once again we each assembled an extra smørbrod to smuggle out in Mom's spare ziploc bag for a free lunch on the go. (Today we spotted a sign in the breakfast buffet saying we'd be welcome to make a lunch packet for 85kr/person, about $12. We smuggled once more instead. We have a perfect record going, after all!)

After breakfast, I called Dan the horn maker and made an appointment to go out to his shop in Stabekk. I was on a mission to pick up a new leadpipe for my friend Alicia. He kindly met us at the train stop and walked us to the shop on a tricky walking path through the houses, which saved us a ton of time. I tried both leadpipe options and quickly decided with Mom's agreement that the one Alicia was leaning toward was indeed the better choice. Dan advised us on how to get to our next destination, walked us to the bus top, and promised to meet us at our last destination for the day with a finished leadpipe. (Leadpipes start life as straight chunks of tapered brass tubing, and after you choose one, it has to be filled with pitch, bent into shape, cut to the right final length for your horn, and have a ferrule added to reinforce the first six inches or so against bending, banging, and other calamities. It's an hour or two of work, and we didn't feel like sitting around wasting our limited Oslo time any more than he probably felt like having a bunch of old women watching over his shoulders. Plus I've been there and done that--I spent a whole weekend at Kendall Bett's Lawson Horns shop last winter, and although it was fascinating, I didn't think the rerun would be.)

We took the #38 bus to Olav Kyrres plasse, changed to the #20 bus (or maybe those numbers are the other way around), and accidentally rode it past our intended Vigelandparken stop to Frognerstadium or something like that one stop further. Fortunately the stops aren't that far apart so it wasn't any big deal to walk back to where we meant to get off. We arrived at the park gate a few minutes later needing a restroom stop but were confounded by a 5kr coinbox to get in (about 75 cents). Fortunately there was a cafe next door where we could get change. I feel rude going into businesses just to ask for change, so I decided to buy a something for 15kr with my 20kr coin so I'd get 5kr change instead. Unfortunately, either the price was marked wrong or the clerk made a mistake, because he charged me 20kr for the ice cream bar I'd chosen, so then I had to ask him to give me two coins for my 10kr coin. He gave me a knowing grin along with the coins. Oh, well--I tried.

Here's a weird tangent: I couldn't think of the name "ice cream bar" so I asked Mom, who said when she first got to college in Minnesota she was confused by her classmates' excitement about having Cheerios at a welcome picnic. She coudln't figure out why the oaty breakfast cereal would be such a big deal at a picnic for college students, but when she got there she found a pile of ice cream bars branded "Cheerios." Seems like a trademark-protection problem to me!

Our business done, we strolled into the park. It was quite cold out, so we were wearing out ski caps and gloves and still shivering a bit, and we were eating an ice cream bar. Are we snow-belt natives or what? I was a tiny bit proud of us for that.

Vigelandparken is an incredible and overwhelming thing. It's a huge park with sidewalks spoking out from a central "monolith" sculpture zone and a whole mess more sculpture along the main axis from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock, and another piece out at 3 o'clock. In the outer zone it's mostly bronze figures, and the inner zone is all granite figures. Wrought iron gates along the way also feature silhouettes of figures. All the figures are nude, male and female, every age from infant to geezer, always touching each other or interacting with each other somehow, many tangled together as if in ballet poses or love making or cuddling or comforting, occasionally in an unrealistic way, like the man with babies all around him, in his arms, flying out from him at various directions, one hovering in air above a foot that appears to be lifting it up from the ground the way a talented hackysack player might lift a grounded sack with his foot. There are some animals--dogs, wolves, bears I remember--and a few puzzlng ones with skeletons. The central "monolith" features a huge granite obelisk carved with a ginormous stack of entangled nude people. What these sculptures all have in common is that the figures are real-people looking, usually both muscular and hefty (no scrawny ones or fashion model or body builder magazine lean ones, even though most are clearly muscular and strong), and they're all nude. No matter what combination of ages and genders appear together and in what apparent situation or relationship, there is a joyful, connected, sexual energy in their interactions. It's not smutty or perverse, though--it's human and joyful and real. There are penises and breasts all over the place, and there is no way these would appear in a public park in the US, but it all comes across somehow as very wholesome and affirming. Somehow in making every set of figures overtly sexual he has deemphasized sexuality from the charged, controversial thing that it is (at least in contemporary American society) back to the natural, everyday, lifelong thing that we know it really is. It's fascinating, liberating, and comforting all at once.

I promise to add some photos to illustrate these points when we get back home and I have a little more time.

We then walked over to the Vigelandmuseum, which is a massive building the city of Oslo gave him to live and work in for the rest of his career, in exchange for his current and all future work belonging to the city, most in the massive sculpture park. Stroke of civic genius! The building is now a museum displaying more sculpture, clay models, sketches, tools, displays explaining how he worked and how models were converted to granite sculptures by teams of stone carvers, and so on. Even the smaller-scale models are mammoth and imposing. Even knowing he had an at times huge crew, it boggles the mind to imagine how one man created so much, let alone such creative, beautiful, thought-provoking, and technically impressive stuff.

From there we caught the #30 bus back down to Olav Kyrres plasse, changed to the #20, and rode down to the Norge folkmuseum in Bygdøy. We arrived at 2:45 and were informed the indoor attractions all closed at 3, but we were welcome to walk around outside until 6pm. We hurried, therefore, to the main attractions--a stave kirke from the 1200s and a farm village from following centuries called Setesdahl. We arrived at the stavekirke in time to hear a lengthy description and explanation along with a group on a guided tour. Stavekirker are built on huge posts (staves) at four corners and more huge posts at corners of an exterior wall. The weight of the elaborate roof of many slopes is carried on the interior staves and also transferred diagonally down to the exterior staves much like flying buttresses, except that the exterior staves are also surrounded by walls, creating a covered pathway all around the church that is in between outside and inside. I found a book in the gift shop that had many explanations for this, including: it made a place for people to wait for services to begin, for the unbaptized to be near but not in the church, for the observant to "walk circles" around the church, which apparently was an early ages ritual to mark importance and ownership, and so on. Interestingly, many of the farm houses also had this same basic architecture (though much simpler, of course) including the exterior surrounding compartment. I'm assuming this was used for many of the same purposes and perhaps also for livestock, but I'll need to research that.

Finally we walked a few blocks to the Vikingskipsmuseum, which houses four big Viking ships and numerous smaller boats and artifacts. They were huge. One thing that impressed both of us is how much extra effort they put into carving elaborate, beautiful decorations on their boats, their furniture, even their barns. Is this the product of a long winter? A society so prosperous that it has excess time on its hands? A slave economy? Superstitions? Praise? Probably a bunch of all of the above.

Meanwhile, we'd texted Dan to let him know we'd arrived there, and he texted back that he'd be there in half an hour. We'd arrived 15 minutes before closing, so we had close to 15 minutes standing in the parking lot freezing to death, but we were rewarded with a ride back to our hotel in a nice warm car instead of numerous changes of bus and subway. We got to experience a little slice of normal life in Oslo sitting in mild rush-hour traffic, too. It wasn't too bad, but you could definitely see how it could get bad and be frustrating without too much more traffic.

After dropping our stuff and the new leadpipe in the hotel and having a glass (okay, plastic cup) of wine, we set off on foot for dinner. We looked for an Italian restaurant we'd found on Google maps (neither of us were in the mood for julebord menyen) but couldn't find it. After a long circular route we ended up back at an Ethiopian place near the hotel. We had a delicious but shockingly expensive meal of kitfo lebleb and doro tibs. I also had a beer, and I think our tab was around $75. Prices like these are pretty much how it goes, though--we have yet to find a cheap meal in Norway.

Back at the hotel, we both fell asleep within half an hour. This time Mom slept soundly most of the night, but I woke up around 2 and stayed awake until about 6, then finally fell asleep in time to be groggy for breakfast. I spent most of the time tapping away at the computer, chatting about the home fires with Victoria, chatting about art criticism with Meg in Massachusetts, reading lots of newspapers, answering a bunch of email, and so on.

Our adventure continues in the next installment, which shall discuss "Norway in a Nutshell," our scenic trip by train, train, boat, bus, and train to Bergen by way of Flåm, Gudvangen, and Voss.

Oslo and the collective unconscious

It's Wednesday morning here.

Mom and I both slept abysmally Monday night, though Mom better than I did. I think I got maybe 5 hours total. We both gave up around 1:30am and had a wine break, and then Mom got back to sleep by 2:30ish and slept most of the rest of the night. I slept maybe an hour, then woke up again and read news on my iPhone most of the rest of the night. I finally fell back asleep around 6am and was extremely groggy when Mom got me up at 9am.

We had a pretty good breakfast in the hotel (Hotel Anker, a short walk north of Oslo Sentralstasjon on Storgata). I needed a better strategy, though. I started at one end of the buffet and took small amounts of everything that looked good, and when my plate was full, I discovered stuff that looked even better. Net result was a huge breakfast. Lousy coffee, as you might expect, but a wonderful selection of sliced meats and cheeses, whole grain breads, knikkebrøder, gjetost, syltetøy (the latter I feel obligated to eat in honor of our Siamese kitties of the same names), soft- and hard-boiled eggs, herring (nei, takk!), and so on. Mediocre machine jus (eple, lemon, orange--anyone need translation?). Lots of milk and that yogurty-liquid stuff that I haven't yet worked up the courage to try. Decent tea bag selection.

And then I discovered the hot food! They had roasted potatoes (not hot, unfortunately), several kinds of pølse (little hot-doggy-looking sausages conveniently chopped into beanie-weanie-sized bites), and a very funky looking thing that I have yet to figure out. It looked like a small, fat pancake, but the texture was chewy and the flavor was decidedly savory. If I were in Japan, I'd have decided it was a fish cake, but it didn't taste fishy. I wonder if it's some kind of potato sausage? It was good, whatever it was. Today I'll start in this part of the line.

Since I clearly had too much food, I decided to do a frugal traveler move and assemble a little smørbrod (literally means "buttered bread" but practically speaking it's the national lunsj, an open-faced sandwich of whatever you like on buttered bread) for lunsj on the go. Mom decided that was a good idea and followed suit.

(If anyone's curious about my horrible spelling, I'm taking up Nikki's challenge to keep mixing up my languages and throwing in lots of Norwegian words as I go.)

We finally set off on foot for Sentralstasjon to pick up our "Norway in a Nutshell" tickets for later in the week, and then to the tourist information desk to pick up our Oslokorter (Oslo cards), which get us transportation and admission to just about everything for two days at a reasonable price. It was probably 11:30 by the time we had all that sorted, and then we continued on foot down Karl Johann's Gate for a walking tour of the central Oslo shopping district. We passed by the cathedral dome, enshrouded in plastic (or fish skin? see below) and closed for extensive renovations, alas, but Mom spotted a fun photo op: a neon sign in the building next door reading, "Cathedral restaurant bar" and proving for any who still doubted that lutefisk Lutheranism is a much happier version of Christianity than some.

After taking a few pictures of the royal palace, we turned north and walked to the Cultural History Museum. We decided only to look at the Norway-specific exhibits, one on early to Viking times, and another on polar life. Both were fascinating. Lots of the usual archaeological treasures, of course, but with some fun discoveries. I particularly enjoyed seeing the little metal critter in the shape of a moose and pointed out to Mom, "Look, they even had a travel mus!" in reference to a quip of Jane's years back about a tiny stuffed moose we saw in a gift shop being a convenient travel-sized moose. We had a good chuckle about that and then read the description--this was a weight! Commerce was so important to them that not only did they have all kinds of balance scales and weights and measures, they even took the time to make their weights into fun moose shapes! Gotta love those Vikings.

A little further on we saw displays of Viking-era jewelry (that would be "jewellery" på norsk), and although they were clearly early, primitive pieces (we're talking bronze and iron ages, after all), we both thought some of the items were surprisingly attractive. Mom and I talked about how maybe Carl Jung was onto something with his idea of the collective unconscious, because we both found these works to be viscerally appealing. (We're Norwegian-German, in case you're confused.) You wouldn't think much of that, necessarily, except that we've recently seen much fancier stuff from earlier periods in China, Korea, Japan, and Afghanistan--on Saturday we went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco--and although lots of it was undeniably pretty and much fancier, more elaborate, and technically advanced than the Viking stuff, we both liked the Viking stuff a lot better. Go figure.

In the Arctic/Antarctic exhibition, we saw still more cool stuff including an early raincoat stitched together from a bazillion panels of what we later learned was fish skin--translucent and strangely modern-looking--and we both particularly liked the Sami clothing and preprosterously fancy hats. We wondered what purpose such elaborate hats served, and I suggested that perhaps they were inspired by their reindeer-friends' antlers. A taxidermified reindeer in the exhibit was indeed quite cute, and shorter than we expected--kind of large dog-sized--but pictures showed larger ones, too.

I admired the early kayaks, very little changed from the one I use today except for the materials and colors.

We then walked around the block to the Nasjionalgalleriet (sp?), another free museum with some really nice paintings. Gee, there's an impressive bit of art criticism for you! Once again I pondered my "collective unconscious" notion, because numerous painters of similar era and technique to more famous ones captured my fancy more--e.g. the JMWHMSPinafore Turner guy whose gloomy landscapes fill the Tate Britain in London leave me completely cold, but a Norwegian dude who was clearly his contemporary did technically similar paintings that I just liked a whole lot more. Mom agrees.

Of course, Munch's paintings are the main reason to visit the Nasjionalgalleriet, and they didn't disappoint me even on second viewing (I saw them when I was here in 1998). There's something about his stuff that just speaks to me, I guess. Mom liked them, too, but commented that she couldn't see hanging them on her walls where she had to look at them every day--she's not into people paintings as much as scenery. Her remark made me realize that a huge share of the paintings we were seeing in the gallery (not just the Munch room) had people in them--even the landscapes. Mom says those are appealing, though, because they're not about the people so much as the situation. I kind of agree with her when it comes to portraits--unless there's something about portraits that give me a glimpse of daily life ("oh, so that's what it looked like inside their houses!" and so on), I move quickly.

From there we walked toward Akerbrygge while eating our purloined smørbroder, stopping along the way to check out Heimen Husflid in the Hotel Bondeheimen on a tip from Ruth. Good tip! Lots of gorgeous sweaters and all kinds of other stuff. I drooled over some thick felt slippers and some elk-hide-and-mystery-fur slippers, but they started around $100/pair, so I decided I could survive without them. We found quite a few gorgeous sweaters, but none in the needed sizes. A few blocks further on, though, we popped into UniQue, another sweater-heavy joint, and parted with a bunch of our money. By this time it was getting darned cold out, so we both got hats to match our sweaters, and within half an hour, we were both wearing our new hats. I think today I'll probably be wearing my new sweater, too, because although it's only 32ish out, it's COLD and snowing, and I've gotten wimpy after 14 years in California.

We tried to check out the Norge Hjemmefrontmuseum (Norwegian resistance museum), but it had closed at 4 and it was now almost 5, so we strolled around a bit of the Akerhus Festning (fortress), but it was quite dark by now (only 4:30pm) and the wet and sometimes icy cobbles seemed a bit treacherous, so we cut that short and proceeded on our way toward Akerbrygge. There was a big village of tents selling Christmas stuff, so we walked through and poked into a few tents.

Then we continued to Akerbrygge and decided fairly quickly that it was time for warm indoors and dinner. We settled on Albertine Cafe, where we shared half a liter of Barbera, Mom got a red wine-braised lammeskank with potato puree and lemon-thyme saus, and I had a venison stew (hjortegryte! what a great name!) also red-wined braised on potato puree with loganberries. Yum! A basket of yummy ciabatta-like olive bread further tempted us from our supposedly gluten-free diets. Yeah, right--not here!

After nearly falling asleep in our plates, we decided to hike back to the hotel, taking a slightly different route through the town center, and by 8:30 we were both falling asleep over our books. I slept solidly until about 3, when I gave up and poured some juleøl and resumed my book. Mom had been mostly awake since about 1, so she also gave up, got up, poured some wine and resumed her reading. We were up for an or so and then both went back to sleep. I slept pretty well until the phone vibrated around 5, and then I was up for good. Mom says she slept fitfully, but I know she got a lot more sleep than I did after our reading break.

It's 9:15 now, and we're both showered and dressed, so we're going to head down to frøkost and try to improve our strategy from yesterday.

Breakfast in SFO, dinner and breakfast on LH, lunch in FRA, dinner in OSL

Mom and I flew to Oslo yesterday and today, hence the complicated meal plan. Our flight took off early Sunday afternoon from SFO, where we killed time with brunch at Andale--Mom had yummy chili verde and I had a pretty good burrito carne asada.

We flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and I am trying to figure out how it is that American airlines are all going bankrupt and can't afford to give us meals or drinks, but Lufthansa can provide two decent hot meals and lots of wine and booze on basically the same ticket pricing structure. Dinner was pretty decent--I had pasta with mushrooms and marinara, and Mom had some kind of chicken rice dish. We both got edible rolls, okay salad with good dressing, and a tiny triangle of chocolate cake with whipped cream and a strawberry. There were good Ritter chocolates available in the galley overnight when I went up to get us drinks. For breakfast we had another good roll, an omelet that wasn't great (when are eggs ever good in an airplane?) but was at least a lot better than some of the eggs I've had in United Business lately, and fruit salad just like every other airplane fruit salad: red grapes and pieces of underripe melon; oh, well. But still--two hot meals and plenty of free alcohol, on a route that United would have given us one hot meal, one disgusting breakfast snack, and drinks for $5.

We had lunch in the Senator Lounge at Frankfurt airport, which has a pretty nice buffet, including Frankfurters, chicken meatballs and Shanghai noodles, a funky tuna salad, some beautiful Christmas breads that I didn't try, some serviceable minestrone (perfectly good but not a knockout like some German airport lounge soups I've had), olives, After lunch I enjoyed a campari-gin-bitter lemon and some Jelly Bellies. I wish we could buy bitter lemon in the States. Maybe I can figure out how to make it, now that I've got a CO2 tank and am not afraid to use it.

The unhappy part of our stay in Frankfurt was that my new AT&T mobile account didn't seem to include international roaming after all--the guy I talked to when I switched said I was all set, but that turned out not to be the case. This wouldn't be that big a deal, except that I needed to check my email and voicemail right away to find out whether I had an appointment with a natural horn or not. It turns out I didn't. But what I had to go through to get AT&T to fix things is absurd. Since my phone didn't work, I couldn't use it to call them. I can't remember the last time I saw a pay phone anywhere, so that meant I had to buy an hour of wifi and $10 of Skype credit so that I could use Skype and wifi to phone home, whereupon I reached an agent who said I'd have to call back after 7am Eastern when a certain department opened up--which was when we were boarding our flight to Oslo. In the end I couldn't get it all straightened out until we got to the hotel, where I connected on the free wifi and again used Skype to call AT&T. Naturally just as we were getting things working, the call dropped and I had to call in AGAIN and finally got things working--and got the news that it's $1.29 a minute for anything, including receiving but not answering calls, receiving voicemails, or actually receiving or placing calls. It's highway robbery. Of course, when getting or missing a call means getting or missing a gig that pays $100ish or more, it's worth it, and calculations like that are why wireless companies get away with charging so darned much. Argh!

Back to food, it was a good thing we ate in the airport, because SAS charged for everything on the connection to Oslo, with prices starting around three euros for coffee or soda. We were happy to pass.

We landed in Oslo at 3:45, collected our bags, got cash and airport express tickets, and were in downtown Oslo by 4:30. Our first order of business was to pick up our train tickets, which was only partially successful. Now that I've got email access again, though, I've got the various confirmation numbers I'll need to get the rest of them. After that we searched out a vinmonopolet (literally "wine monopoly"--other than weak beer, all alcohol in Norway is sold by the state) and picked up some provisions for our hotel room so that we'll be equipped to cope with any jet lag, and as I type this Mom and I are enjoying a lovely, fruity juleakevitt by Linie. Since we were tired and only vaguely hungry, we ate supper in "Erwin's spiseri" right in the same food court.

So for our first Norwegian meal, Mom had "husets kremefisksuppe" or the house special cream fish soup, which we both thought was quite yummy. I had the "julelunsj tallerken" or "Christmas lunch plate" (I think) of gravet laks and sweet mustard sauce (yum), pickled herring (ick), a slice of ham, a slice of brie, a pile of the most iodine-y bay shrimp I've had in a long time, bread and butter, and a mound of--of all things--Waldorf salad. The Waldorf salad was good but I think it's the first time I've had Waldorf salad since I was in the hospital with pneumonia during second grade. Somehow I remember eating a lot of Waldorf salad in that hospital, and for me it's a dish lost to time. It's kind of a perfect Norwegian salad, though--white, bland, sweet, and everything from a can. "Except the apples," Mom pointed out, but I can't say that I found any apples in there. I washed it all down with a pretty good juleøl (dark Christmas ale) by Ringnes.

After dinner, we walked the rest of the way to our hotel, which isn't fancy but seems decent enough and has free wifi.

In electronics sadness, somehow I managed to erase everything from my iPod before we left, so I couldn't do language immersion learning by zoning out to Norwegian podcasts during the long flights as I'd hoped. Not exactly tragic, but how on earth did I do that, and how will I make sure I never do that again? Fortunately we had decent movies on the long flight: "Happy Go Lucky," a diverting but pointless Mike Leigh film (someone please enlighten me if there was a plot) and "Nanny Diaries," which wasn't as good as the book but was entertaining enough.

I'm still a little stuck on the Sunday NYT crossword but I'm not ready to give up and seek help from Rex Parker's blog yet.

Nano-opera: Boris Godunov

16th century Tsar Boris proves he is Russian by wallowing in guilt for three hours until finally dying of guilt. Librettist proves he is Russian by giving long list of characters long names but very little to do. Composer proves he is Russian by giving long list of instruments very little to do but sound colorful.

But who cares about any of this when Samuel Ramey is singing?

A military perspective on Obama vs. McCain - the MAJORITY perspective

Here's an email I got from a friend of mine, whose husband is in the Air Force. I think it's worth reading.

Dear family and friends,

TO ME THIS ELECTION IS A LIFE OR DEATH ISSUE (no exaggeration).

Most of the public is completely disconnected from the wars on a personal level (which was my life before) so I want to try to personalize it for you:
My husband is in the Air Force and I have had the humble (& challenging) privilege of learning about the military world for almost 10 years now. I have seen first hand, the toll that this war has taken on countless families. When our daughter was a baby I took her to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in DC for checkups, where I saw soldiers with limbs and/or parts of their head missing from combat. When our close friends are in war zones, I pray for their safe return. My heart hurts when I see children suffering due to an absent parent (for 15 months!!) and spouses struggling to keep their families together. Due to frequent moves, we typically do not have the luxury of living near family and close friends, so we often bear the burdens on our own. Military members and spouses are some of the STRONGEST, most HONORABLE and IMPRESSIVE people I have ever met.

Regardless of your position on the war(s), if you appreciate the sacrifices that our MILITARY (over 4,000 dead, many with serious lifelong physical and mental issues, increased numbers of suicide) and their families are making to serve our country, I BEG you to THINK about THIS COMPELLING FACT (from the NON-partisan Center for Responsive Politics), and PLEASE pass the info along to as many people as possible:

DEPLOYED TROOPS ARE CONTRIBUTING TO OBAMA 6:1 OVER MCCAIN.

To me, this says everything. If so many of the troops don't want McCain as their Commander in Chief (and Veterans groups support OBAMA far more than McCain), THE PUBLIC REALLY NEEDS TO TAKE NOTICE (particularly because this is supposed to be McCain's strength).

I have joined a group called Blue Star Families for Obama (www.bsf4o.com). We are military families who are PRO-MILITARY and PRO OBAMA, and we are working hard to get the word out that many military families want Barack Obama to be our next President.

The deadline to register to vote is rapidly coming up (especially for people serving overseas) - please see voter registration info below. PLEASE participate in this historic election.

With love, ACTION and FAITH in our goodness,
Kimberley Taylor-Beer

-----

Kimberley -

Registration deadlines are coming up soon. Tell your friends, family, and neighbors to check out our new one-stop voter registration website.

Just forward this message.

VoteforChange.com makes it easier than ever to register. Instead of tracking down the right forms, all you need to do is answer a few basic questions and you'll be ready to vote. You can also:

Confirm your existing registration
Apply to vote absentee
Find your polling place
If you don't know your own registration status or you'd like to learn more, take a minute to visit the site right now.

This race is too close and too important to stay home on Election Day.

It's people just like you who will transform this nation.

Thanks,

Barack

On Sarah Palin

All this excitement about Sarah Palin is bizarre. Sure, she's funny and pretty, but her opinions about and track record on governance are scary! How is a funny, pretty scary politician any better than an ugly, boring scary politician?

My friend Alicia has taken to calling her "Caribou Barbie."

I think Hillary Clinton got it right: 

I don't think [Palin is] what this election is about. Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic.

Nano-ballet

Recently we attended the San Francisco Ballet's Program 2, which opened with Mozart's "Divertimento 15" and choreography by Balanchine, continued with Mark Morris' "Drink to me only with thine eyes" on piano etudes by Virgil Thomson, and closed with Stravinsky's "Firebird" and the original Diaghilev choreography by Possokhov.

I'm not a dancer, I'm a musician, and my reaction to the program can be summed up as briefly as: "I'm a hopeless modernist."

The Mozart was performed well and the dancing was lovely, but all I got out of it was, "Oh, look at the pretty dancers. Oh, hear the pretty music. They make it look and sound so pretty and easy. Ho-hum. Zzzzzz." Honestly, I think I would have gotten more out of the music if the dancers hadn't been there doing their repetitive arm-y fluff-y things every beat. They made pretty shapes, sure, they looked graceful, and for the first movement, it was all very pretty. After that I was bored silly. My dancer mate Victoria loved it. (I've lived with ballet dancers. I've roomed with them at summer camps. I've learned all about toe-tape and how broken dancers are from all the crazy stuff that they have to make look easy and natural. I have tremendous respect for the accomplishment of it all, and then I'm bored.)

I loved the Morris/Thomson. The visuals perfectly matched the music and added to it. The dancers embodied what I hear in the music, carving melodies with arms, tracing harmony in the space. Not only did it all match what I as a musician-geek hear in the music, it also created a complementary new, spatial dimension that was right and appealing, making the music fresh. This is pretty much always my response to Mark Morris's work, and it's a sharp contrast to the Balanchine, where I think I'm probably seeing ballet the way amateurs hear music: the way I used to hear music before I had all this music education: "oh, look at/listen to the pretty dancing/music!"

And then came the Stravinsky/Possokhov! It suddenly hit me what the problem is--I'm a modernist!
The classical Balanchine stuff bored me silly, the newest stuff was fascinating, and the big shocker from about a hundred years ago seemed perfectly natural to me. Instead of being tempted to riot, as Stravinsky's first audiences apparently did, I felt at ease watching the narrative play out. I got it in both large and tiny strokes, from the blocking to the fingers fluttering and the flirty eyelashes. I still saw plenty of tutu-arm-fluffy stuff, but with a backdrop of evocative music that keeps spinning out at least an abstraction of a story. And for this musician, finally seeing the ballet was a revelation. I noticed lots of music that didn't make it into the Firebird Suites we always play in orchestral concert presentations, and I've decided that's just as well, but I also noticed many passages where familiar music made sense for the first time, seen in its narrative context.

I was puzzled by some details. I'm not sure where the schoolgirl picnic fits into the story. I'm not sure why the one character had a train of chiffon coming out her ass; it reminded me of when our black lab eats too much grass and then has the so-called "Klingon effect" when she poops.

So you think you want to install Elfa closet systems?

Recently a friend planning an Elfa closet system asked if I had any tips, since he knew I'd built three Elfa closets after our big hardware flooring project this summer. Do I ever! The Elfa system has worked out really well for us, but I do have a few tips about designing, purchasing, and building an Elfa system.

First, it's largely a waste of time to go through their online design process, as the guy on the other end will invariably make a dozen stupid mistakes (switching around numbers, misunderstanding your requests, etc.) that will take you a while to discover and correct. However, it's worthwhile to fill out the form a few times, just to make sure you have all the necessary measurements and are clear on which measurement is which, and also to make sure you have measured out how much hanging space of each length (shirt, pants, dress) that you need. You might even measure your longest shirts, pants, and dresses just to be sure that their norms make sense for you. V and I are both tall, so we disagreed with some of the defaults.

So, go to the store (we went to Container Store) and do the design in person--that's how they fill out your order, anyway, and you can lean over their shoulder and make tweaks. While they're doing it, keep an eye out for wasted space--we were able to add four inches here and there, squeeze in way more shelves closer together for shoes, and so on. For example, our master bedroom closet goes up a ridiculous 8', and we're both tall, so we had them move the double closet rods about a foot higher than they thought was reasonable, and then we put TWO rows of 12" shelves all the way across the bottom for three rows (one on the floor, two on the shelves) of shoes. Above the closet rods we have two and three rows of shelves for wicked-hard-to-reach storage of out of season clothes, fat pants and skinny pants, etc. They weren't willing to think of these things because they're inconvenient, but for us it was important to cram every list smidgin of storage into all three of our closets. We even have one hanging rod that is intentionally too long--it sticks out the side and runs to the wall, because the closest-fit Elfa framing was that many inches narrower than the space. It bought us hanging space for 15 more of Victoria's dresses. It might look weird to the Container Store people, but in our closet it makes perfect sense.

Second, choose between chrome or white. Ignore all the other choices (wood types, etc.) because they're just extra pieces that they charge you extra for that you slap on as the very last step, and it's a pretty bogus way to run up costs for no extra value whatsoever. Choose a basic color, build your whole system, and if you still care, go back and get the decorative bits.

Third, they'll sell you a whole bunch of little bits that you don't need, like closet-rod ends, shelf bracket covers, and so forth. Again, skip them and go back later if it turns out you care. Also note that for drawer stacks, they have lots of options, and they'll start by trying to sell you the most expensive kind, which you don't need. You also might not want top-covers

Fourth, before you leave the store, count every last doodad. We had to make three trips back to the store during our installation to get the pieces they'd forgotten to pack. They were nice about taking us at our word, but it was a royal pain that we did NOT need while building.

Fifth, if you have any trouble at all sinking the screws/bolts into your wall, run (don't walk) to your nearest Home Depot and buy (a) a screw gun (the best $80 I've ever spent) and (b) some boxes of drywall screws at 1/4" lengths from 1-1/4" to 2". Get the HD guys to show you how to use the depth-adjusting choke collar thingy--it's a little weird but very handy. Our contractor friend George assured me that the drywall screws are plenty strong for the situation, and believe me, they were way easier to get into the wall. I started with the default hardware where I could, then used 2" screws where I couldn't, and if those didn't work, I used progressively shorter screws until I could get one all the way in. Depending on what's going on behind your drywall, these are likely to work a lot better than the default hardware, and I ended up using a big old mix of fasteners in different places.

Sixth, make sure you have a long level--say 30" minimum. Mark where you think the hanging brackets should be, then use that long level to make sure that height is going to work all the way across the closet. Closets tend to be way crookeder than you expect. Don't get hung up on the height that the Elfa design recommends--it might make sense to hang your system as high as possible, as it did for us. Now, attach the first bracket by sinking the first screw through it, and use the level to hold the bracket in place and sink the next screw. This step requires a helper for the longer brackets, which are heavy. Now you're done with the level until you sink the rest of the screws and are ready for the next bracket. This way is much easier than trying to make and understand pencil marks with any precision.

The rest is pretty straightforward--as long as you're not missing any pieces!

Oh! And while you're at Home Depot, get a small tub of joint compound and an assortment of putty knives from 1-1/2" wide to about 6" or more inches wide (in the drywall department). When you demolish your old closet fittings and when you make mistakes on the Elfa installation, you'll get holes in the drywall. You'll quickly swipe a generous lump of joint compound with the smallest logical putty knife into the gouge, then use the largest putty knife to smooth it out. If you end up with any massive holes (like I did a few times because I was using the pry bar wrong), then crumple newspaper into the hole first, and then use the joint compound. Don't worry about bits of newspaper sticking out of the compound--they'll sand off easily when dry. If your closet walls are white, you might not even care about painting over the joint compound zones. --Erin