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We’ve gotten so much rain of late, that it gets increasingly difficult to accept the fact that Madison has actually seen several days this month without any form of precipitation.

To help myself better understand that not everyday is drab and rainy, I’ve created a Summer Rain Calendar to keep track of which days are rainy and which are not. You can find a link to the Rain Calendar in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Last night, a tornado touched down in Madison, twice, just a few blocks from our house.Sarah and I started the evening downtown trying a new restaurant for an article I’m writing. As we were biking home, the tornado sirens started up. We took a peak at the sky, and decided to hurry home, rather than seek shelter at the University (through which we were riding at the time).

Along the way, we saw numerous people standing on their front steps, staring off to the west where ominous clouds were looming.

Once we got home, we hurriedly got our bikes indoors, trotted the dog outside to pee, and turned on an AM radio station that was carrying weather coverage. There was a tornado warning issued for Dane County (Madison is in Dane County) and a huge supercell thunderstorm was heading for the city of Madison. Weather spotters were also reporting that the storm was dropping hail up to golf-ball size.

We stood in our front door for a few minutes, looking out at the heavy rain falling. Then, the rain started intermittently falling, there was a strange howling noise coming from the west, and the world got unnaturally still. At that point, I decided we needed to get into the basement, posthaste.

We gathered up the dog, a pair of flashlights, and some reading material (never know how long you’re going to be stuck in the basement), and we headed downstairs.

Once we got to the basement, we turned on a small radio that we keep down there. Reports were coming in about a tornado touching down on Madison’s South Side (several miles from us), a funnel cloud forming over the Westgate mall (not very far from us at all), as well as numerous trees being down just blocks from our house.

The storm was moving fast, about 50 mph. Once it had moved East of us, we came back upstairs and turned on the television to see if the local television stations had anything to add to the story. Now that the storm had passed and people were coming out of their basements, numerous reports of damage were flowing back to the government and the media. Since some of the worst damamge in Madison was not very far from our house, we decided to walk over to that area (Midvale and Tokay) and see with our own eyes the damage.

So, we leashed up the dog, grabbed some umbrellas, and headed out. Some of our neighbors were also heading over there, so we walked with them to the area. The whole walk over there, we could hear sirens tearing down Midvale towards the damaged area.

Once we got there, we could see the devastaion that the storm caused. Nearly every tree in the area had been damaged. The street was completely closed. Power lines were down. Gas lines had been ruptured. Roofs had been damaged. Garages had been moved off their foundations. The fire department was working hard to make sure everyone who lived in the area was okay and that those who were there examining the damage did not step on any downed power lines.

We talked to many people while we were there. One woman, in particular, was a kick. She told us about her special tornado hat that she keeps in the basement with her tornado survival supplies. Later, she told us that she would “give [her] right arm up to here for a cigarette.” I asked her if she smoked. “No, but there are times and places that just call for a cigarette,” she said. “This certainly is a time and a place,” I replied.

Another woman was there in her nightgown. When we initially arrived, she told us that the library had been damaged. I asked if a locally famous bakery located next to the library had been damaged, and she replied, “Thank God, no. I get soup from there every day.” As it turned out, the library did not appear to be “smashed.” News reports, however, indicated that the huge air conditioning units that used to be on the roof of the little strip mall that housed the bakery and library had been moved off the roof and into a parking lot next to the building by the winds.

Television channels covering the storm had footage of a funnel cloud forming over the Westgate Mall, which isn’t too far from our house. The most amazing part of the footage, however, was the people just walking around, right under the funnel cloud, in no particular hurry. Other people were filling their cars with gas at a gas station under the funnel cloud. They didn’t seem to give the funnel cloud the tiniest bit of thought. What were those people thinking?!?

Other people were completely oblivious to the weather. Numerous people stuck in traffic on Midvale Blvd. were leaning out their car windows and asking pedestrians why they couldn’t continue south on Midvale. Every single one was surprised to hear that a tornado had touched down and that the road was closed. Several even seemed to take the news personally (?!?).

My favorite beer, Solstice Weiss, is a seasonal beer produced by my favorite local brewery. Unfortunately, it had yet to appear in stores. I was getting really worried that, for some reason, I had missed it or that none of the stores at which I regularly shopped were carrying it.So, I did the logical thing and called the brewery.

A pleasant woman (not an automated system) answered the phone on the second ring. I asked her if, through some series of unfortunate coincidences, I had missed my chance to score some Solstice Weiss.

The womand responded quite pleasantly that they had been getting “lots of calls” about the Solstice Weiss, but not to worry, it was just late this year because the brewery was under construction. She said that I should start seeing it in stores during the first week in July.

The lesson here? You wouldn’t get that sort of pleasant, informative response from one of the big brewers. After wading through automated telephone hell, you might get to talk to a so-called customer service representative. That person would take your name and listen to what you had to say before most likely saying something like, “Well, we’re glad you called us. I’ll be more than happy to pass along your question/request/complaint/etc.” and that would be the end of it. You might as well have spent the time complaining to the contents of your refridgerator’s crisper drawer for all the good it would do you.

These books are part of a larger series, though neither is labeled as such.Revelation Space is an interesting and compelling story. It is one of the few sci-fi books that I’ve read where travel faster than lightspeed is not possible. In fact, travel at lightspeed itself is not possible. As such, while characters move between worlds, hundreds of years may pass. This has an interesting effect on galactic travel and politics. While there are hints that travel faster than lightspeed is possible, no one really has the slightest clue how to get it done.

I won’t reveal the book’s plot here, but I will say that at times, it can double back on itself in some very interesting ways.

Redemption Ark is follows in the footsteps of Revelation Space, but there are some new characters introduced and some new plotlines explored. At then end of the book, it is clear that yet another tome will be following these.

If you’re looking for some relatively long, well considered science fiction, I would recommend both of these books.

We used to have a circular flower garden in our front yard. The previous owners of the house had a very large pine tree cut down, and in its place, they installed a circular flower garden with half a wine barrel at its center.Last year, we used this garden to grow tomatoes and peppers since we didn’t finish moving in until July and we didn’t have time to dig up a big garden in the back yard.

This year, we decided that we didn’t like having a seemingly randomly placed circular garden in our front yard, so yesterday, we spent most of the day changing the shape of the garden. Now the garden abuts a sidewalk and the driveway on two sides, and has a wavy border of bricks on the third side. We kept the wine barrel, but planted numerous flowers and vegetables around and in it.

Since we had been having so much trouble getting a vegetable garden in the back yard, we decided to punt and put some of our vegetables in the front garden again. So, our tomatoes and peppers are in the front garden again. We also planted some native plants (Big Bluestem, Ox-Eyed Sunflowers, Little Bluestem, Red Milkweed) to try and liven the garden up a bit.

Now, we just need some sun to make it all grow.

Since the weather here in Wisconsin has been so rainy, we had trouble getting our vegetable garden in the ground. Last week, I tried using a rototiller that we borrowed from people we knew to till up part of the backyard.

That turned out to be a bust as I spent three hours working on the project and probably got six square feet tilled. It took me the better part of an hour just to get the damn rototiller started. The whole time I was struggling to get that little two-stroke engine to turn over, I kept reminding myself that I don’t handle engine failures well, and that is why I use a human-powered reel power, instead of a balky gas-powered lawn mower.

Once I finally got the mower started, it turned out to be woefully inadequate for the task it had been handed. It could barely cut through the turf in our backyard, much less dig in to the clay soil underneath the turf. By the time the I’d struggled with the tiller for the better part of a half hour, I was actively thinking about where I might be able to rent a team of oxen and a plow. Sure that would be overkill, but it would have done a hell of a job getting our garden ready to plant.

Finally, at my Mom’s suggestion, I broke down and called a professional to come take care of the problem. This morning, Jerry (of Jerry and Juanita’s Lawn Care) showed up early with a very large rototiller to take care of the problem. A half-hour (and forty-five dollars later), the problem was solved. Of course, shortly after the garden was tilled, the rain started again in earnest.

Sarah spent four days at Effigy Mounds National Monument last week working on a pair of master theses: her own and a fellow students.

Last Monday, Dalla and I drove down to help her and bring her some equipment.Before she left, Sarah and I loaded up the Saturn with various pieces of equipment and put the canoe on top of the car. Monday morning, I put my own camping equipment in the car, strapped the dog into her seatbelt, and hit the road.

It takes just short of two hours to get to the Monument from Madison if all is well. That day, it took me over two hours to get there. Between Dodgeville and Prairie du Chien, there is a windmill farm along US 18. Of course, that windmill farm is there for a reason: plenty of nearly continuous wind. So, it was no surprise when I had to slow down when I got near that area as the wind was pushing the car off the road. Normally, the Saturn wagon doesn’t have that problem, but when you strap a 17′ canoe onto the car’s roof, it’s like having a sail. So, that slowed us down. Then, when we hit Fennimore, I missed a rather well hidden turn because it was not only well hidden, but Dalla was literally howling in the back seat. Apparently, she was tired of riding in the car and wanted to get out and run around. So, we got out of town and I let her out on the leash for a few minutes. We got back in to the car and hit the road. It wasn’t until we arrived in Boscobel that I realized we were no longer on US 18, but rather a different highway and twenty miles out of our way. So, we had to double back on a little county highway that ran parallel to the Wisconsin river until we got back to US 18.

Finally, we arrived in Prairie du Chien. A quick jaunt across the Mississippi River, and we were in Iowa.

When I finally found the team of naturalists and botanists Sarah had assembled to help her with the coring she was doing as part of her thesis, I was a good forty-five minutes late. Sarah’s team was going to work on Founder’s Pond to core as far into the mud as they could. These cores would then be extracted in one-meter lengths and placed into plastic tubes. Sarah would then use these cores to help determine what plant life originally populated the National Monument. From this information, a vegetation management plant for the Monument could then be fashioned.

So, there were six naturalists there (the park’s conservation ranger, Sarah’s adviser, Sarah, another graduate student, the ranger’s seasonal assistant, and a volunteer that previously had worked as a naturalist at another national park) and six seats in the two canoes. It was obvious that Dalla and I would not contribute much to the coring operation, so while they paddled out into the Yellow River, we left to go hiking around the Monument.

By the time all was said and done, we hiked somewhere in the range of ten-fifteen miles. Some of the hiking was on nice trails while the rest was on some really unmaintained so-called trails. The temperature was hot and the mosquitos were out in swarms, but I used liberal amounts of mosquito spray (and a headnet, when necessary) and we both dranks a fair amount of water. Dalla, alone, drank two and one-half quarts of water. For a forty pound dog, that’s a good deal of water.

On our hikes we saw otters, deer, wood peckers, numerous song birds, fish, and the like. Dalla seemed to think that she would be able to take a deer if I’d just let her off the leash. I wasn’t buying.

Once the coring operation was completed, we met Sarah’s team back at the landing, where all the equipment was divvied up and stored. In all, the crew spent almost six hours on the water.

Sarah, Dalla, the other graduate student (Joie), and I went to their campsite at Pikes Peak State Park where we spent the night.

For dinner we cooked brats (in beer, of course), drank beer, and noshed on various junk foods. Dalla kept herself busy protecting our campsite from critters and other dogs and campers.

The most unique part of Pikes Peak State Park is the showerhouse. Now, Sarah and I got to see innumerable showerhouses as we camped our way from California to Wisconsin the summer of 2002 so we felt that we’d pretty much seen all there was to modern campsite showerhouses. Well, that thought was proven to be a lie.

The showerhouse has a weather radio that runs twenty-four hours a day in both the mens and womens areas. Even though I was thirty miles from the Boscobel airport, I probably knew more about the weather there than the residents of Boscobel did. We knew the up to the minute temperature, the forecast, the river level, and anything else the normally is reported on the weather radio. Taking a shower guaranteed that you would be exposed to at least two iterations of the weather radio’s information, if not more.

Dalla slept with us in our tent, and that’s something we need to practice. She spent half the night kicking me in my back and half the night sleeping on Sarah’s feet.

The next day, I took off for Madison as Joie and Sarah went back to collecting data for Joie’s thesis.

Today I finally finished getting pictures from our trip to Nashville, TN online.

I also got photos from our trips to Effigy Mounds online.

Were the Geto Boys prescient when they released “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta”?Sure the lyrics are spoken by someone pretending to be Bill Clinton, but I could imagine GeeDubya and Co. saying the same things to themselves once in a while:

    Other leaders better not upset me
    Or I’ll send a million troops to die at war
    To all you Republicans, that helped me win
    I sincerely like to thank you
    Cuz now I got the world swingin’ from my nuts
    And damn it feels good to be a gangsta

If you’re not reading Stephen King‘s Dark Tower series of books, I don’t want to know what you’re doing with your time.When I got done with The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass two years ago, I quickly awarded it a place on my personal Top Ten Books of All Time list. While the other Dark Tower books were good, until Wizard and Glass, they had been just that, good.

It would be an insult to Wizard and Glass to even try and find a degree of the word “good” to describe it. To do the book justice, you’d really need to skip the word “good” and its ilk, and move right to words like “transcendent” or “sublime” to find adjectives to describe it.

With that in mind, I worried whether The Dark Tower: Wolves Of The Calla could possibly hope to be anything other than a letdown.

It was perhaps inevitable that Wolves of the Calla would not be as surpassing as Wizard and Glass. Having said that, Wolves of the Calla is still a very good book.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Dark Tower series, you would be asmiss to stop reading now. Pick-up Wolves of the Calla and keep up with the journey of Roland and his ka-tet to the Dark Tower.

We’ve seen several movies of late and while some of them were quite good, others were far less so.By far the best movie we’ve seen of late was Shrek 2. While we were waiting in line to get into the theater, Sarah and I were trying to decide the last time we’d actually been to a movie theater to see a movie. After some back and forth we agreed upon sometime last fall. Anyway, we probably would have just waited for Shrek 2 to come out on video (like we do with everything else), except that some of our friends wanted to see the movie in the theater and they invited us to go along.

Sure, the movie is somewhat predictable, but it does have its fair share of truly funny moments. I found myself laughing quite hard at times, which is an unfortunately rare event when it comes to movies these days.

Last night, we saw 21 Grams. There is an art-house movie theater just a few blocks from our house, and 21 Grams played there for months. So, when I saw it in the video store I decided to give it a try. What, exactly, was all the hype about?

The movie was, quite frankly, boring. Characters had incredibly difficult to understand motivations. Sure, I can understand Naomi Watts’ character’s motives. I can even partially understand Benicio Del Toro’s character’s motives. But the motives of Sean Penn’s character? Just too far out there. Half way through the movie I was keeping myself entertained by playing with the dog.

Big Fish was a surprisingly good movie. I little to nothing about it, other than Tim Burton directed it. The movie itself was very entertaining, and even heartfelt. It could have been really corny and dumb, but Burton really pulled it off and made a very entertaining movie.

This year’s award for overly-hyped, “I Can’t Believe It Won A Best Picture Oscar” goes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. If there was a more boring movie released last year, I didn’t see it. This movie carried with the burden that nearly everyone knows how it ends. How do you build up drama to a foregone conclusion? You don’t. While the visuals were interesting, the storyline (once the writer and director got done mangling it beyond recognition) wasn’t very compelling. This was another movie where I spent a fair amount of time playing with the dog while it ran on the television.

Sarah and I mixed work with play this weekend and got several projects finished while still taking time to enjoy the reasonably nice weather.On Saturday, we put some more plants in our herb garden, potted plants in hanging planters, and weeded a few garden areas. Sarah also fixed the toilet in the basement that had developed a tendency to run.

After all of that, we headed out to Governor Nelson State Park to take advantage of Wisconsin’s Free Fishing Weekend. Neither of us knows much about fishing, nor do we have an extensive collection of fishing gear. But, fishing is a very Wisconsin thing to do, so we decided we’d better get out there and try it once in a while. An hour and one-half of fishing later, our biggest haul was a piece of waterlogged bark and a tennis ball.

We took Dalla with us to go fishing because we wanted to see how she would react to all the water. Suffice it to say that she was rather unimpressed by the lake. The first time she got her nose near the water, a wave came to shore and soaked her nose. She leaped back from the water like it had bitten her and never got terribly close again.

Sunday we did some more work around the house. I cut a dead and rotting limb off the birch tree in our front yard while Sarah weeded the garden in front of our house.

In the afternoon, we went for a long bike ride on the Military Ridge Trail. We biked for just short of two hours, so my estimatation is that we rode about thirty miles. Not a terribly long ride, but in the relatively hot and humid weather, long enough.

Nine people died on Wisconsin’s highways and by-ways over Memorial Day Weekend.Of course, all seventy words of that story ran on page B2 of the Wisconsin State Journal.

The big news was that the Madison metro area got more rain over Memorial Day Weekend and some people’s docks are covered in water. That apparently much more newsworthy article got 530 words of page B1 coverage, above the fold.

So, the body count on America’s highways keeps going up. Nine people died last weekend? Who cares?! We got rain on the a three day weekend, after all.

Why don’t Americans find something wrong with this sort of news coverage? Even more baffling is why they don’t find something wrong with the deaths of nine people over a weekend (270 people have died so far this year just on Wisconsin highways alone). That’s more than one person a day who leaves home or work, never to return because they died in a wreck on some Godforsaken asphalt somewhere.

This morning, Dalla and I were out for her morning walk when we saw a kid on a bike get hit by a guy driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee.The accident occurred probably 50 yards in front of us. The kid, a middle school-aged kid who was heading to the school two blocks from our home, was in the act of crossing a very busy street, Midvale Blvd. He was riding his bike in the crosswalk from east to west (Midvalue runs North to South).

The Jeep Grand Cherokee was trying to turn left (North) and was paying no attention to the kid. The driver of the Cherokee was, instead, fixated on only the cars and trucks. So, when he saw a small opening in traffic, he gunned the moter of his Jeep Grand WasteOfCapital and roared out into the road like demons from the lower regions of Hell were hot on his trail.

Too late, the moron driving the Jeep saw the kid on the bike. He stepped on the brakes, but even with squealing tires, the Jeep’s front end made impact with the middle schooler.

Being the angry bicyle/pedestrian that I am, and seeing as how this was a kid lying in the street, Dalla and I hurried the rest of the way to the scene of the collision.

The kid was lucky. He was wearing a helmet and he didn’t appear to have any major injuries, but his bike was banged up. He was shaken, to say the least.

A woman in a Honda Accord stopped to see if she coulder render assistance.

The driver of the Jeep got out and started to brush the kid off while collecting the kid’s bicycle for him.

I asked the kid if he was okay and if needed me to call for the police. The kid replied that he needed to call his teacher at school so that she would know why he was late. I suggested that he call his parents instead, and let them call his teacher.

Just then, a cacophony of sirens filled the air as an ambulance and fire truck arrived on the scene. (There is a firehouse just two blocks away, so they didn’t have to come far).

Seeing as how the kid was in the good hands of firemen and paramedics, Dalla and I started walking again towards the library (our original destination).

Seeing that kid get hit by a Jeep made me really mad. What will it take before motorists start actually looking for bicyclists and pedestrians? Will nearly everyone have to lose a close friend or relative to a needless fatal collision with a car before they pull their fat heads out of their asses and realize that when they take the wheel of a car, they actually need to open their eyes and pay attention to everyone using the public road?

Confidential to the Jeep Grand Cherokee driver: Dude. Your’re a tool; a gullible tool. No one who’s anyone who ever has to travel offroad buys a Jeep Grand Cherokee. If you actually needed an offroad vehicle, you’d be driving an Isuzu Trooper (with an offroad package) or a properly outfitted pickup truck. Jeep Grand Cherokees are marketed at people who like to think about going offroad once in a while, but never really get farther than the visitor center at the nearest national park. Our Saturn wagon almost has more ground clearance than your supposedly mighty machine. More than anything else about you, Dumbo, your choice of transportation tells me plenty about you.

This morning on NPR’s Marketplace, I heard that sales of SUVs rebounded in May after falling off in April. What are people thinking? The great American public once again has its collective head up its collective ass! The actual need for these gas-guzzling, environment-destroying vehicles is about 5% of the total actually bought.

Let’s start paying attention to the EPA numbers that every vehicle model has assigned to it.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Unless you’re a business & can prove a need, slap a 25% surcharge at time of purchase on any vehicle with a rating below 20 mpg.
2. Put a chip in every car identifying its EPA rating & have gas pumps that can read that info. Then when you go to fill up your gas tank and if the pumps detect that your vehicle is wildly inefficient (anything below 20 mpg), you get the pleasure of paying an extra $1.00 per gallon.

All money collected should go to EPA enforcement efforts &/or Superfund cleanups, which the present administration has de-funded.

My rant for today.

-Mike