Listen here . . .

• I can’t decide whether Arcade Fire’s new album, “Suburbs,” is completely, utterly pretentious and lacking in fun, or if that’s me I’m thinking about.
• The second week of August may be the second best commuting week of the year. It has felt like the week between Christmas and New Years.
• The reception areas of Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) are under construction, and the architects created a display of the materials they’re using. I like that a lot.
• Phlebotomists, who specialize in doing something inherently painful with a minimum amount of discomfort, aren’t paid well enough. I’ve been poked many times, and the ones who do it well really are amazing.
• The NWH lab dedicated to drawing blood is extremely quick. It’s where I prefer to go. It opens at 8:30.
• At 7:00 the main hospital lab claimed a 30 minute wait, but it was really an hour-long wait for 60 seconds of actual medical procedures.
• Some days I’m really eager to get to work and finish up what I was working on the day before. Today was one of those days.
• In early April, Sports Illustrated predicted the Chicago Cubs would finish second in the NL Central, with a record of 81-81. To make that happen, the Cubs will have to go 33-15 for the rest of the season. The Cubs also have an estimated payroll of $137M for the season, which is $100M more than the team one behind them, the Pittsburgh Pirates. (The Pirates!)
• I should have brought a book with me to the lab. I just finished reading about platypuses and have started reading about Romantic science.
• I was smarter during the company meeting. Now I know a lot more about “Black-point compensation: theory and application” and ICC color profile rendering intents than I did yesterday.

And now it’s time to muck around with run-length encoding.

I had intended to post some touristy snapshots from DC, but I’ve been a bit occupied — as well as preoccupied by my next trip.

Tomorrow I fly to Salt Lake City, Utah. Saturday some college friends and I are going to go backpacking along one of the canyons in southern Utah’s Canyonlands NP. It’s my first pack-trip in almost fifteen years and the first where I brought my own gear, so I’ve been fretting a bit, though I’m really looking forward to it. The Colorado Plateau is my favorite part of the country: the wildest part of the Lower-48 and (in my opinion) the most beautiful.

We are going here:

Click for larger

A bit more than an hour later, we headed for the gates since it didn’t show any signs of letting up. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

The game had so much drama and was wonderful to watch. Even Lisa was cheering for the kid, despite the Sox and Yankees being caught in a tight duel for the AL East lead and the playoffs.

And the Cubs are leading the NL Central, too! I’m hoping for a great post-season.

Friends, I think I’ve made my peace with Milwaukee. Our problems started fourteen years ago, really got going seven years back and moderated a bit since then. Today, I can say that I like Milwaukee.

You see, in my first year at Grinnell, I had a girlfriend from Wyoming who was attending Michigan Tech in the Upper Peninsula, and we decided it would be great for me to visit her over fall break. The easiest way for me to get from Iowa to the UP involved crossing Wisconsin the long way. So after my last midterm I piled into my ’63 Dodge Dart, drove through the evening in thickening fog, and somehow ended up on a Forest Service road outside Eagle River, WI. The pavement ended, and with a large bump I hit the gravel road.

A few miles later, I made the paved highway again and drove for a bit before the “oil” light came on. This wasn’t out of the ordinary for this old car, and I took a fresh quart from the case I kept in the trunk. A few miles later, outside of Crystal Falls, Michigan, I heard a loud rattle, then a BOOM, and then silence. The car glided to a stop on the side of the road about an hour outside Houghton, my destination. Opening the hood I saw bits of metal that used to be the engine embedded in the hood.

There was only one thing to do: hitchhike back to Crystal Falls, call for a tow truck, and try to get my car fixed in the morning. I also called my girlfriend, who said she would pick me up in the morning when she could borrow a car. After sleeping in my car behind the Dodge dealership waiting for them to open, I met my girlfriend and some guy, who turned out to be her new boyfriend.

Not long afterward — I had to stick around in order to sell my car for scrap and hoped in vain that I could win the girl back — I got on a bus to go back home, which is where Milwaukee enters this story. I arrived after midnight to find the ticket window closed. I had only ten dollars or so left to my name after paying for a late-night tow and a bus ticket to Milwaukee. If Greyhound didn’t take plastic, I would be forced to have my own private Idaho there in Wisconsin in order to get home. But I had more immediate concerns: Milwaukee’s bus station is rough. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you,” said a burly-looking janitor who seemed to sense my nervousness.

I eventually arrived in Grinnell about 24 hours after leaving Michigan and changing busses in Chicago. “Hey, bus driver, are you going to get my luggage from stowage?” Hey gave me a hurried look. “There’s no luggage on this bus for you.” He got out impatiently to prove his point. I was living the perfect country and western song: no girl, no car, no money, no luggage. The only things that seemed to be missing were mama and prison and gettin’ drunk; and I was pretty sure one of those was right around the corner.

Seven years later I was back in Milwaukee after flying into General Mitchell International Airport — at the time more bus station than airport — to attend a three-day DICOM course. Three days in the suburbs without a car with everything of interest miles away. Three days of pinched, nasal Wisconsin accents. Three days of wall-to-wall election ads targeting the swing state. I think I went a little bit crazy. Or at least that’s what the picture of Crazy Horse told me one evening.

A few years after that I was back to visit GE Medical Healthcare. Still no car, but I was in the middle of miles of strip malls along the six-lane Blue Mound Avenue. Walking past miles of mostly empty parking lots, I got my first sense that something was fundamentally wrong with land use in the ‘burbs.

Then last year I was in Milwaukee twice. First, for a couple days to see a baseball game and some “lazy” animals at the zoo, and later for a couple days to visit GE again. That didn’t seem so painful.

Then last Thursday, before leaving for another quick trip to see GE, I resolved that Milwaukee might not be so bad after all and that I just needed to try a little harder to like it. My trip got off to a good start when I parked in one of the conveniently located spaces reserved for hybrid vehicles at Boston’s Logan Airport and ate fresh cookies in first class seats on Midwest Express, the only airline that I really like.

Not long after I arrived, the sales guy on the trip suggested that I come hang out in the “Concierge Club” with him and a fellow coworker/traveler. I went down to the front desk to enquire about the club. “Well, usually you have to have a certain amount of frequent traveler points, but go meet your coworkers,” she said and handed me a keycard. Sweet! Free food, big screen TV, a friendly concierge from Australia who somehow ended up in Milwaukee and liked talking to Americans about Led Zeppelin. She seemed amused by our story that we were record salesmen for a certain three-letter government agency.

Friday, we met with our homies at GE, and I stayed another night to watch a baseball game at Miller Park. Beforehand, I went to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was quite nice. Like Cleveland and Detroit, the museum started with robber baron money, was sustained by robber baron wives, went through times of crisis when everyone fled to the suburbs, and now anchors the hopes of cultural renewal. It seems to have succeeded more than the others. Having a little more time on my hands, I walked through the parks fronting the water and headed inland, stopping into a beautiful federal court building that epitomizes the Gilded Era of the late 19th century and city hall, which is under renovation and whose employees and patrons appear to be members of the original cast of Laverne and Shirley.

The game itself was alright, but nowhere near as good as my seat six rows behind home plate. Since last year, the Brewers added a new member — a chorizo — to the sausage races, and he smoked them all in the sixth inning.

Happy days are here again!

Inside the Milwaukee Art Museum	A Calder Mobile
“The Janitor” — a statue	Art for a city built on beer
Me and Nikki S. Lee	Lots of little pictures
Me and my progenitors	The Milwaukee Federal Building and U.S. District Court
Milwaukee City Hall	Sausages

News flash! Fox 25 News broadcaster Maria Stephanos reports that the Red Sox’s newest pitcher, Daisuke (Dice-K) Matsuzaka is actually Dino Matsusakis from Sommerville. Red Sox GM Theo Epstein (D-Newton) and pitcher Curt Schilling (R-Westwood) discovered the young phenom at The Friendly Eating Place on Mass Ave in Cambridge during the off-season.

Stephanos said Epstein had no comment on a possible connection between the Dino/Dice-K acquisition and the demise of the Greek deli this April. Schilling vehemently denied rumors that the young pitcher’s famous (and famously elusive) gyroball is really nothing more than a silly homage to the Central Square fixture.

None of my “goals” involve home runs. I’m more of a fan of small ball: the bunt, the hit-and-run, the sacrifice, the steal. “Get on, get over, get home,” that’s my baseball mantra.

But it was so exciting — not to mention historic — to see Manny Ramirez, J.D. Drew, Mike Lowell, and Jason Varitek hit four consecutive home runs in the fourth inning of tonight’s game against the Yankees. Wicked exciting!

I kept getting distracted from my course readings as the Tiger’s Bonderman retired the first six batters then the first twelve, and then got the next three out. Yes, Bonderman was perfect through five innings, before giving up an extra-base hit in the sixth.

But superstition requires that no one talk about a no-hitter while it’s happening. So you can ask things like, “Have the Yankees had any baserunners yet?” But that’s just so that you can make sure that you’re actually seeing what you think you are. I vaguely remember the Fox sportscaster mentioning somebody else’s no-hitter at the end of the fifth inning. (Broadcasters are always doing foolish things like that.)

Alas, once again, no perfect game.

More — hopefully much more — later.