The Daily Parker

It turned out that I had an actual task today. Two, in fact. Both were pure stupidity on my part. And both completely scotched my goal of doing nothing worthwhile for four days.

First, I had promised something to my team at work before I left, but didn't realize until I checked email this morning that, well, the task was not completed. (Notice the subtle use of passive voice there.) So I had that task, which took half an hour.

Second, mentioned forgetting a few vital items in my luggage, so I had to buy them. And I paid a stupidity tax. The cost of one hat, two pairs of shorts, one pair of sandals (which I didn't already own and therefore had planned to buy here anyway), and one bottle of sunscreen was two hundred bloody dollars. In other words, I paid a 100% tax on bad packing.

So to compensate for having to do things today, after accomplishing both tasks I put on my new shorts, sunscreen, and sandals, then walked the 800 meters from my hotel to the opposite side of Maho Beach and watched planes land for three hours. I need to point out that along the way, I walked through the Caribbean Sea. My new shorts got seawater on them. I think this is exactly what they're for. Especially since the seawater was about the same temperature as the air (27°C), and unlike walking through Lake Michigan on any day except that one day in the beginning of September when everything lines up perfectly, it felt really good. (My feet are, in fact, still wet.)

I also met a few good people, had a few good drinks, and learned that the best airplane landing of the week occurs tomorrow around lunchtime when KLM flight 785 lands. It's a 747-400, the largest plane that flies here. If I have to stand out in the rain, I'm going to see this thing land.

Of course, this means I now have a plan. Even though I came to this island with the explicit goal of not accomplishing or planning anything, except maybe reading a book or two, I just can't help myself. The Dude is onto something...I just can't get there yet...

My plan is:

• Tomorrow: sleep late, eat something, walk across Maho Beach, take photos of the 747 landing, walk back to my hotel, change my shoes, walk somewhere else (possibly Marigot or Phillipsburg), have some drinks.
• Saturday: sleep late, walk somewhere (maybe even take a bus and then walk), read something, walk somewhere else, read some more, have some drinks.
• Sunday: sleep late, shove things into my suitcase, walk somewhere, retrieve my suitcase, go to New York, have some drinks.

Understand that "have some drinks" is an ongoing activity. And the happy accident is that the room I got for cheap through Bookings.com includes free drinks.

Someday, and that day may never come, I will do nothing for an entire week. Meanwhile, this is the least I can do right now. Baby steps.

I'm sitting in the only spot in my hotel that has free WiFi, with a dozen or so other people doing the same thing. Plus, it's possible this is the slowest WiFi in the world (I'm getting 150 kbps). These things make it easy to get out of the building, into island air that's currently 27°C.

I know, I said to people I wouldn't use the internet, but I actually needed a map and some local info that the giant book of wristwatch advertisements guidebook didn't actually tell me.

Plus, I forgot three somewhat useful things, so I'm waiting for the shops to open. Which I think they are now. So I can get the shorts, sunscreen, and hat I need to go for a hike, as the shorts, sunscreen, and hats I have back in Chicago (current temperature: -17°C) are kind of useless here.

Since I intend to be useless here, but I don't want to overheat or get sunburned, and all 300 emails that came in overnight have finished downloading, off I go.

The huge furniture move is almost done. I finished moving the rooms around, so my office is now where my dining room used to be, etc. Here's where the office used to be:

Since the purpose of this exercise is to make my small apartment look a lot bigger, part of the plan requires moving a bunch of things to storage, including several nontrivial pieces of furniture. At that point the project will be complete. So I have to live with this mostly-finished living space for two weeks. That does not make me happy.

Nor does my primary WiFi connection. With the IDTWHQ in a completely different part of the space, it's not possible to have a wired connection to the primary DSL unless I move the laptop back to the other room. Which, I guess, is an appropriate thing to do with a laptop, so it's not such a hardship.

Wait, isn't there some kind of sports game on right now?

Now that the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC) has gone away, my apartment the IDT World Headquarters has a few more options. It's not a huge space, which has become a problem now that I'm trying to sell it.

Essentially, I'm rotating three rooms clockwise. That is, my office is moving to where my dining room is, which is moving into my living room, which is moving into my office.

That this is possible suggests the difficulties of having a server rack in the spot most people would ordinarily put a TV. I needed to put the rack next to an outlet I could isolate on a 30-amp circuit, right next to the main phone jack. That forced the TV, and therefore the living room, into the area most of my neighbors use for their dining rooms. So that forced the dining room into the are most of my neighbors put their desks.

I'll have the full "before" and "after" photos when I've moved all the furniture. (I may actually put some pieces in storage, because no amount of rearranging can reduce the volume of stuff in the place.)

Here's the "after," showing the true victim of all this disruption:

I looked through my old photos just now—yay indexing—and this is the closest analogue I could find:

(That's from March 2009, when I reinstalled windows at the office.)

The project should be complete in time for the game tonight.

I'm not going complain about how the 33 consecutive days of snow cover makes entering or leaving my house a complete pain in the ass (complete with Parker automatically flopping over when we get back inside so I can wipe off his paws*).

No, I'm going to post today about chicken wings:

[Bill Roenigk, chief economist at the National Chicken Council,] says the magical pairing of humongous athletes and itty-bitty chicken parts got its start with the rise of sports bars a few decades ago. Sports-watching demands cheap munchies, and wings were both convenient and cheap. "Ribs and pizza were the competition," says Roenigk. But ribs cost more money, and pizza — well, pizza tends to lose its charm if it sits on a table for too long.

In an odd twist, the once-cheap wing has become the most desirable and expensive part of the chicken. Per pound, chicken wings are now pricier than bone-in chicken breasts, perhaps inspiring this epic wing heist.

"People say, 'You ought to produce more wings,'" says Roemigk. This year's Wing Report lays out the crucial obstacle: "A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken."

This leads to a huge question for me: how long will my remote office continue to have a 50c wing special on Thursdays? (They have the best wings in Chicago, by the way. After some discussion, the staff and I determined that they make them with orphan tears and unicorn sweat.)

As for this coming Sunday, I may in fact be eating wings at the Duke of Perth around game-time. But since they have no televisions there, I might have to wait to see the ads on YouTube later on. Now, if only the Bears, Giants, or 49ers had made it...

* The ritual paw-wiping concludes with a vigorous belly-rubbing, so he seems to enjoy the whole thing.

I've got outside meetings every day this week, and those tend to compress my days. So there might be more link lists like this one coming up:

• When I get some free time again, I can catch up on my HBO shows. Here's the list of what's coming when.
• Does it matter what Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange believe?
• We atheists aren't out to destroy civilization. Really.
• The right wing are never wrong, no matter what evidence you have.

Back to the mines.

The Chicago Forestry Department removed a tree near my house back in October but left the stump. No one could figure out why—until they tried to remove it a few days ago:

I'm not an arbologist, but it seems to me that the tree had bionic parts. Actually, it looks like it grew through a steel grating in the parkway and then absorbed the grating. In any event, I hope no one got hurt when they tried sawing through the stump.

I recently had a routine checkup, and my doctor suggested revisiting the allergy tests I had way back in 1988. Only now, they have a blood test for most allergies, obviating the uncomfortable patch test I had to go through way back when.

Nothing has really changed except my sensitivity to cats, which has gone down. When I was a kid they made me sneeze; now, they just make my eyes water if I forget myself and forget to wash my hands after patting a cat.

That's all a long setup for this bit of doggerel that I came up with when I got the test results. They really tested for nearly all of these things.

Ahem.

I'm not one bit allergic to peanuts,
Nor scallops, nor soybeans, nor clams,
Nor hickory trees, nor cedars, nor bees,
Nor elms, ashes, mushrooms, or yams.
Not cats, not dogs, not milk, not snogs,
Not pigweed, not elder, not thistles,
Not mold fumigatus (of gens aspergillus),
Not elder, not pecan, not whistles.
It's only the poop that's too tiny to scoop
From vermin we know of as dust mites
Making me sneeze and spray lots of Febreeze.
Yes, I'm allergic to gross little mite shites.

Yes, The Daily Parker ever strives to raise literary standards on the Internets.

Andrew Sullivan tops my reading list every day. He and his staff post sometimes 100 items a day on The Daily Dish, and even if I only read a tenth or them, my day is better. He's infuriating, fascinating, informative, conservative, Catholic, gay, mercurial, level. I don't agree with him about a third of the time, but one of his best characteristics is his willingness to listen to arguments and change his mind.

So last February, when he jettisoned a paid gig with The Atlantic to become a professional blogger, I supported him. By "supported" I mean "gave him money." And now I'm up for renewal, about which he says:

What have we created together? Every now and again over the years, I've tried to figure it out. A blog? A magazine? A blogazine? A website? But every year, it changes again, as the new media shift, and as the world turns and as small experiments - like the Window Views or the Reader Threads - become ramparts of the whole thing. Do we, the staffers, write this blog? Sure, we do. But so do you, every day, with emails and testimonies and anecdotes that bring dry news stories to vivid personal life. Do we curate the web? Sure. Every day, we scour the vast Internet for the smart or the funny, the deep and the shallow, the insightful and the abhorrent. But you send us so many links and ideas every day that the creators of the Dish are better understood as a collective of all of us, you and us, correcting, enlightening, harshing and moving each other.

It's journalism, in its original meaning. It's a conversation. It's how I start to get information—but only how I start, because he always posts multiple viewpoints even while making it clear what he believes. And I'm proud to give him money to keep writing.

(By the way, if you want to give me money, just let me know.)

I've gone to my remote office to do some work. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me sit in the beer garden:

Fortunately, I found an acceptable seat inside:

My real office is closed tomorrow because no one wants to commute on the coldest day since 1995. I hope something is open. Or at least, I hope someone delivers.