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Normally, I don’t tire of winter until March rolls around. This year, I was tired of winter shortly after stepping off the plane that brought us back to Madison in mid-January. Sarah thinks the reason for my lack of winter tolerance this year is a combination of my time at the South Pole combined with a colder than normal snap during January and February. The seventeen inches of snow we got over the past four days certainly didn’t help matters much either.

Whatever the reason, I’m excited that baseball season will soon be upon us.The Twins kick off their spring training games tomorrow night against the Red Sox in Ft. Meyers, Florida. I’ve never had the urge to attend spring training games before, but this year I’ve got more than an urge, I’ve got an itch that wants to be scratched.

While it seems unlikely that I’ll make it to Florida this year for a game, I’m committed to going to a spring training game next year. So, if you’re at all interested in coming with me, drop me a line and let’s work something out as the day gets closer.

Mavericks of the Sky: The First Daring Pilots of the US Airmail , by Barry Rosenberg and Catherine Macaulay, is an engaging and enlightening account of the earliest days of the US Airmail system.The pilots who flew for the US Airmail system in its earliest days were some of the bravest men alive. These were men for whom the word courage was invented. Navigation was primitive at best in those days. Radio in the cockpit was unknown. The parachute hadn’t yet become standard issue. Cockpits were open to the elements. Planes were made of wood and fabric. Flying at night and in fog was often deadly. Airplanes routinely had less than thirty miles per hour separating their stall speed and maximum cruise speed. Statistically, pilots met their death in just under two years of service with the US Airmail. In short, these were men who faced every obstacle thrown at them by man and Mother Nature and who climbed back into the cockpit again and again to deliver the mail.

In addition to gutsy pilots, the Airmail system had bullheaded administrators, never-say-die mechanics, and no small amount of luck on its side. Many of the innovations common to airplanes and air travel today can be traced to those introduced by the US Airmail system by these same people. In addition, many modern aircraft companies and airlines can trace a direct lineage to people involved with the US Airmail system.

Rosenberg and Macaulay present the story of the US Airmail system in a clear and very readable manner. They use narrative and a clear timeline to keep the reader interested, rather than simply presenting fact after fact and character after character. In addition, they give interesting and sometimes relevant background about pilots and others as they enter the story. Don’t skip the epilogue or you’ll miss many of the book’s more interesting revelations.

Monday is mostly over here in Wisconsin, and unlike last week, today was a relatively benign day.Last Monday, I started off the week with a literal pair of bangs. I had an early morning trip to the dentist for a cleaning scheduled and Madison was in the middle of a snowstorm that would eventually drop a couple of inches of snow on the city. The dentist’s office is an unfortunate bike ride away from our house under the best of conditions, and snowy roads make it even less fun than usual, so I jumped into the car and headed out.

About four blocks north of our house, I carefully slowed to a stop at the bottom of a hill and waited for a light to change so that I could turn left. I was lost in that space where people go when they’re patiently waiting for a light to change so that they can continue their journey to an unpleasant destination when, BANG! our car was thrown six feet to the left by a sudden impact.

I’d just about registered that the car had been hit when BANG! another impact struck the car.

When the proverbially dust settled, I turned my head and look at the delivery van that was pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction nestled right up against the side of our car.

Fortunately, I wasn’t injured, so I got out of the car and to take a look at the damage. The driver of the van, a guy is his fifties got out to see what sort of chaos his moronic driving had caused. My first words to him were, “Oh yeah. Nice job.” Not clever, but not laden with profanity and invective like the situation warranted according to my emotions.

So, we spent the next half-hour on the side of the road exchanging insurance information. I called the police, but since the snow was causing so many collisions, they were only responding to collisions that resulted in injury. Since neither myself nor the other driver was injured, they didn’t come out to the scene.

The driver of the van insisted that he braked at the top of the hill, couldn’t stop, and was trying to steer between myself (in the left turn lane) and the car in the right turn lane. This explanation, of course, wasn’t remotely plausible. First, no sensible person attempts to steer between two vehicles to avoid a collision so that they can enter a higher speed, heavily trafficked six-lane road against the light. Second, you don’t just throw nearly 3500 pounds of vehicle straight sideways when you can’t quite stop in time. You might tap a bumper, you might dent a fender, but you don’t throw the vehicle around. Third, no one else on the road was having trouble stopping at the bottom of the hill. I stopped. The car next to me stopped. The cars that flowed past the scene of the accident during that following half-hour all stopped. It’s hard to believe that this guy found the one vehicle that couldn’t stop given the road conditions. What is more likely is that the driver of the van was traveling way too fast for the road conditions and that my car had to pay the price for his negligence.

The car could be driven, though not legally probably, so I drove it home and took some photos before calling our insurance agent. He suggested some body shops that worked closely with the insurance company and that would guarantee their work for the life of the car. I picked one close to the house, got in and started driving. Ironically enough, on the way there, I almost was in another collision when a woman in a minivan decided that a stop sign facing her didn’t really mean stop. Fortunately, I was traveling a sensible speed and was able to slow down and steer around her before the front end of my car suffered like the right side and rear had less than an hour earlier.

Eventually, I made it to the body shop where I dropped off the car. The rear tail lights were smashed on the right side. The trunk was deformed. The rear quarter panel was junk. There was a hole in the right rear door, as well as plenty of paint scratching and dents. The right front door was scratched and dented. The mirror was smashed on the passenger side. The right front quarter panel was dented and scratched. In short, every nearly every piece of the right-hand side of the car was damaged in some way.

When the estimate came back two days later, it was for $7448. The car needs body work to straighten frame members, a new back door, painting, and all sorts of trim replacement and whatnot. It’s over 100 hours of labor. If we’re lucky, we should get our car back from the shop sometime around 07 Mar 2007.

Since the car had bits hanging off of it, the trunk was no longer weather-proof, and my signal lights were no longer functional, the car wasn’t really great for driving. So, I left it at the body shop and got a rental car from Enterprise. At the time, my choices were for a Dodge Magnum, a PT Cruiser, or a Chevy Malibu Maxx. The Magnum has unusual blind spots, and is a rear-wheel drive, if memory serves, which is not ideal for winter driving. The PT Cruiser has a tall roof, but a short windshield, so that wouldn’t work too well for me. So, I chose the Malibu Maxx. Bad choice. It smelled like feet, accelerated like honey, and had all the handling characteristics of a soggy cardboard box. The seats were stained, the vents on the dash were smashed and non-functional, and the CD player didn’t work. In short, it was a heap. Even Sarah, who is far less judgemental than I am, exclaimed loudly about what a junker that car was. So, I started making plans to get a replacement from Hertz. When the Enterprise folks found out that I wanted to return their car, they offered to replace it with one better, and to their credit, they did. We’re now driving around a black 2007 Toyota Avalon, for the same daily price as the Malibu Maxx.

At least we’re not paying for the damage to the car and the cost of the rental car. The other driver’s insurance company is footing the bill for both of those items. The company that owned the delivery van had only started operations the week before, and so their insurance was just days old. When I called to initiate a claim, they couldn’t find the policy in their system because it hadn’t be assigned a policy number yet. It took the better part of a day playing phone tag with adjusters, an insurance agent, and a call center, to get things moving in the right direction.

So, the car is being repaired, we’re driving a shiny newish rental car, and all is well, right? Sort of. I’m still steamed about the fact that I had to sink so much time into getting us to this point when the collision was in no way caused by me. I feel like I should be able to bill the other driver for my time. Of course, that’s not likely something I could succeed in doing, so I’ll just have to be happy that he was insured at all.

A member of our family recently acquired a new moniker.Dalla is part Norwegian Elkhound, and part cattle dog. She’s got traits of both breeds. She sheds madly, wants nothing to do with water other than drinking it, and loves fish. All of those are typical Norwegian Elkhound traits. In addition, she’s always has to count us again and again when we’re on the hiking trail, she knows how to cut a animal out of a pack, and she’s fairly clever. All those are traits of cattle dogs. When people ask us what breed of dog she is, we usually answer with a longish answer about her background, which is tiring for us.

Last week we decided that she is part of an entirely new breed, the Wisconsin Cheesehound. How do you recognize a Wisconsin Cheesehound? Cheesehounds love: cheese, brats, beer, fish (raw or fried), snow, hiking, peanut butter, some nuts, car rides, pizza, bread, chicken, cookies, and some fruits. They do not like: lakes, rivers, largish puddles, baths, garden hoses, sprinklers, car washes, little white dogs, people who ring the doorbell, vegetables, healthy cereals, rice, wearing boots, squirrels, rawhide chews, and the basement. It doesn’t much matter what your dog looks like; if they fit the vast majority of those personality characteristics, you might be living with a Wiscosnin Cheesehound.

It’s been colder than usual here in Madison, so Sarah and I have both been wearing our down parkas and long johns when we walk the dog. When I bike to work, I’ve been wearing long johns and wind pants to keep my legs warm and a set of ski goggles on my face. We’re hoping that it will warm up to more traditional winter temperatures in the near future. This afternoon it should be warmer and we’re planning on doing a bit of cross-country skiing.

When I was gone I accumulated quite a large number of magazines to read. Now that I’ve worked my way through the stack it’s time to work on a book or two. I’ve got a few in the queue, and I’ve also requested a couple from the library.

We’ve also been talking about doing some work in the house. The vinyl flooring in the area around our front door was installed by the previous owners and they chose it to match their color scheme in the living room which was green and red. We have blue walls and the vinyl doesn’t match a thing in the room. We’ve talked about replacing it in the past but we’re getting serious about getting rid of it in March. The perfect solution might be a professionally installed slate floor, but cost may preclude that option, even though it’s only about fifty square feet of flooring. Other options are cork, bamboo, vinyl flooring that resembles hard wood, or laminate flooring. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll probably spend some time examining our options before choosing one. Regardless, no tears will be shed for the demise of the ugly vinyl flooring.

My new bike has been performing well. Several times last week I rode it to work in wind chills and temperatures that were well below zero and it didn’t miss a beat. The fenders will be nice once the temperature starts to warm up a bit and our snow starts to melt.

Sarah and I curled on Friday night as subs in a mixed league. I’d never curled in that league before; Sarah curled as a sub in that league several times while I was in Antarctica. It’s a radically different league than the various mens and womens leagues. It’s not as competitive and the teams can be skipped by players who aren’t qualified to skip in the regular leagues. We had fun but it’s not a league that I’d be interested to play in all the time.

Last night we watched the Badgers take on Alaska-Anchorage in mens hockey. The Badgers won 3-1, but they are so far out of the top of the league that there isn’t much of a chance that they’ll do something interesting in the post-season. The team is afflicted with a seemingly incurable allergy to scoring goals, even though they play solid defense. We can only hope that next year’s team will feature a better offense than this year’s squad.

Daylight savings time begins on March 11, 2007. Are you ready?

After being gone for so long, it interesting to step back into your
pre-existing life.One of the first things you discover after being away from home for seven
weeks is that the brain has quite complex and useful algorithms for
determining which information should be kept in long-term storage and which
can be safely discarded. For instance, when I left Madison, I knew the
schedules for the buses that ran near my house quite well. When I got back,
I had no idea what they were, and in some instances, had even forgotten some
of the bus route designations. So, now that I’m back, I get to rediscover
little bits of information like those.

For those who don’t know, my sister Amy moved to Madison in early
January. She house-and-dog-and-tortoise sat for us while we were in New
Zealand and Australia, which worked out well for all involved. We got to
have someone we trust take care of our pets and house while she got to stay
somewhere while she looked for a job and an apartment. She found an
apartment while we were gone, so we helped her move in the weekend after we
got back. It’s a big apartment a few miles south and just a bit east of our
place.

On Friday night last weekend, we were invited to the house of our friends
Kathie and Scott for a fish fry. Scott is a fisherman of no small skill,
and he caught all the fish that we ate that night. In addition, he made his
special family-secret fish fry recipe for us. It was great to eat three
different kinds of fish in a setting like that because it helped us to
identify how the three differ in taste. Usually, when you eat fish fry, you
get just one type of fish, or just one type of fish at a time, which makes
it quite difficult to compare the various species. We had walleye,
bluegill, and perch that night. Walleye tastes like fish; perch tastes a
bit stronger and less fishy; bluegill has little to no flavor. They really
went all out and we had the whole Wisconsin fish fry array of food: relish
tray; pumpernickel bread; cole slaw; cheesy potatoes; homemade tartar sauce;
lemons; and beer. We left their place stuffed to gills (pun intended).

Saturday we rearranged the furniture in our bedroom. The weather here
has been reasonably cold (for Wisconsin), so spending the day indoors moving
furniture around and cleaning wasn’t a bad way to spend a day. We hadn’t
moved the furniture in our bedroom since we moved in four years ago, and it
was time to change things around a bit.

Sunday was even colder than Saturday (but still not Dakota or Pole cold),
and we cleaned the house and ran a few errands before the Super Bowl. Sarah
made a big pot of chilli, some dip, and a relish tray and Amy came over to
watch the Super Bowl. Amy brought over a few dozen chocolate cookies and we
drank some of the beer that I brewed and a few Tom and Jerries while we
watched the game.

Dalla gets along quite well with Amy’s dog, Olive. They like to run,
growl, wrestle, and play tug.

I bought a new bike when I got back to Madison. It’s a 2005 Gary Fisher
Tiburon that I had slightly modified to make up for some less than ideal
frame geometry. Even though the windchill was -20°F this morning, I
bundled up and rode in. If nothing else, I needed the exercise after
gorging on all the junk food we had during the Super Bowl.

As I mentioned above, I brewed some beer before I left for the Pole. It
sat in the basement while I was gone and I’ve been drinking it since I got
back. It’s a German-style wheat and for a first beer, I’m more than
satisfied with the results. Sarah wants me to brew a pilsner for my next
batch. I’ve only got about twenty beers left, and since it takes a few
weeks to get the beer from ingredients to bottling to drinking, it is about
time to start brewing.