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The weather warmed up significantly this weekend. Sarah and I spent most of the weekend outdoors working around the house. Saturday morning we ran a number of errands. The farmer’s market near our house opened on Saturday, and we were able to make our first purchases of the season. They weren’t much (some tomatoes, milk, yogurt, and sauerkraut), but they were a promise of the season’s produce yet to come.

Sarah weeded the herb garden and spread cocoa mulch to hopefully keep the weeds from coming back. I’ve been working on making one of our rain barrels stop leaking around the spigot. If my attempts with one barrel are successful, I’ll drain the other barrel and fix that one, too. We’ve been busy pulling dandelions out of our yard, but given their numbers and our available time, neither of us is holding out hope of a successful counter-attack.

Saturday afternoon, my second-cousin, Scott, came to town with his son, Taylor. Taylor was playing in a soccer tournament, so we dropped by to watch the game. Taylor’s team lost 3-0 after a particularly ugly first half, but even though they played better in the second half, they could never muster the offense to pull even. After the game, Scott ate dinner with Amy, Sarah, and I at the Great Dane pub near our house. Sarah and I had to leave early because we had tickets for “Urinetown: The Musical.”

“Urinetown” is a farcical musical that is now springing up across the land. It won several Tony awards, and after seeing the play I can understand why. It is a sharp, clever piece of musical theater. Sarah didn’t enjoy the show as much as I did, and that’s fine. Not every show is equally appealing to everyone.

Ira enjoyed spending most of the weekend outdoors. He tromped around his pen, ate some freshly pulled dandelions, and generally enjoyed getting out of his winter quarters. Dalla helped us whenever we did any digging, which both Sarah and I found enormously helpful. I put a couple of pictures of Dalla in her picture gallery.

Last weekend, Sarah and I made the decision to pack up the car and the dog for a trip to visit Sarah’s grandmother in Pennsylvania.This trip had been scheduled for later in the week, but due to her grandmother’s failing health, we decided to accelerate our departure date to Monday morning. That meant dropping Ira off with my sister, Amy, for the week, arranging to stop our mail and newspapers, and other various and sundry things.

Monday morning, we drove east with a very full car for the 700+ mile trip to southeastern Pennsylvania. The first day, we made it to Ohio where we spent the night at Sarah’s brother’s house. That went well except that Dalla and the Zee, the house’s resident blue heeler, do not agree on which of them is the dominant dog. It always ends up with a big fight and dogs being hauled off to opposite ends of the house and this visit wasn’t much different. Unlike our last visit there, Dalla established the upper-hand this time. Of course, since she spent most of the visit on the leash, her victory was largely symbolic.

Tuesday morning, we put our gear back in the car, and headed east, but in two cars. Sarah was driving her mother’s car to Pennsylvania so that her parents would have another vehicle for their use if they needed it.

After an uneventful five hour trip, we arrived at her grandmother’s house.

At this point, I should mention that Ohio and Pennsylvania really throw an inhospitable spring. Both states were cold, rainy, and gray. While we were driving from Ohio to eastern Pennsylvania, we drove through mountains still covered in snow with temperatures in the thirties. Wisconsin is no garden of Eden, but we generally have better weather.

As you can see, Sarah’s grandmother lives in a modest brick house that isn’t any bigger than ours, and since all the bedrooms were occupied, we needed to sleep somewhere outside of the house. We’ve tried sleeping in hotels with Dalla before, and it is hard to label such an experience “sleeping” without stretching the traditional definition of that word beyond all recognition. Dalla spends all night barking at slamming car doors, conversation in the hallway, and people coming and going from surrounding rooms. Since we weren’t eager to repeat such an experience, and we had all the gear, we decided to give camping a go.

Caledonia State Park was open and accepting campers, so we targeted the campground for at least a night or two of camping. If it turned out to be too cold and uncomfortable, we would try to find a hotel, but our goal was to spend as many nights as possible in our tent.

As it turned out, we had a very pleasant camping experience. The nights were definitely cold with temperatures in the lower forties and upper thirties (we got snow the first night, that melted when it hit the ground), but if you’re tucked into a down sleeping bag with a stocking cap on your head, you don’t even notice the cold. In fact, I woke up one night because I was actually too warm and was sweating in my bag. Dalla sleeps quite well in a tent for some reason, so we didn’t have to worry about her making a big fuss every night. In fact, the only downside to having her in the tent was that she kept trying to steal my sleeping bag. Apparently, a down bag is better for sleep than her expansive, comfortable dog bed that took up a disproportionate share of the tent.

In addition to being cheap ($16/night), the campground was quiet and nearly deserted. All of your disruptive, loud-music-playing, late-night-car-door-slamming, bathroom-destroying yahoos are still at home and most other campers have a very narrow season (read: summer) in which camping seems like a good idea. There was one woman besides Sarah in the camp, and maybe seven or eight guys besides myself. That meant no problems getting in the shower or letting Dalla wander freely around the campsite.

We really enjoyed our stint at the campground though certain members of our families definitely thought we were insane for camping in mid-April and they tried several times to tell us just how insane we were (though to their credit, they never used the word insane or any of its synonyms). Yeah, there isn’t much vegetation to offer shade and there certainly any campground programs put on by rangers, but there also aren’t any bugs and you’re not likely to be camping next to the entire cast of Animal House.

Thursday afternoon, we started our journey back to Madison. We drove to Cleveland and spent the night at Sarah’s parents’ house to avoid further dog drama between Dalla and Zee. The next morning, we set out for the eight-plus hour drive back to Madison. We finally arrived in town about 19:00 on Friday evening.

Some thoughts that don’t fit the above narrative.

• Ohio and Indiana: Welcome to the twentieth century. Care to join the rest of us in the twenty-first? Electronic tolling is the future in those states. Too bad that Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and other states with toll roads beat you to it. Tickets are archaic and outdated but that hasn’t stopped either state from handing them out by the millions. Once you go electronic, you never go back. If you’ve gotta pay a toll, being able to roll right through the toll plaza without stopping (or even slowing down in some cases), is slick. It doesn’t matter if the weather is cold and rainy, because you don’t have to stop, roll down your window, and carefully hand over some bills and change; money is simply deducted from an account that you maintain. I was initially skeptical of electronic tolling, but this trip really cemented its utility and convenience in my mind.
• When ordering decaf coffee, you cannot exercise too much vigilance to make sure that you actually get decaf.
• Pennsylvania: Why are seemingly all the service plazas on your toll road closed simultaneously? What genius came up with that bright idea? Quite frankly, they don’t provide much in the way of service when they’re closed.
• Illinois: As if I needed one more reason to avoid living there, the traffic around Chicago is it. The state’s open road tolling deserves commendation and their service plazas are open (take note, Pennsylvania), clean, and modern. None of that offsets the miles of stopped traffic that we saw while driving through the area. It was merely good luck on our part that all of that stopped traffic was trying to go the other way and that we weren’t caught up in it.

While listening to Radio Paradise today I heard Dana Lyon’s song “Cows With Guns.” The song was so unique, that I didn’t immediately trust my recollection of what I heard, so I went looking for a copy of the song.

What I found instead was a hilarious music video (Flash). If you’re in need of a pick-me-up, I recommend giving the video a try. Make sure that you watch it all the way through to catch the surprise ending.

Tonight while I was sitting on the sofa, something caught my eye across the street running down the sidewalk. One of our neighbors over there has a pair of little black dogs that run free at times, so one of those dogs trotting down the sidewalk was what I expected to see.

What I didn’t expect to see was a large wild turkey wandering freely through the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is far from rural, so seeing a large animal like that wandering around in twilight was a real surprise. I grabbed the camera and tried to get a picture, but it was too close to dark to get a good shot.

Dalla, of course, wanted her chance to take down a turkey once she noticed it.

While at a used book store, I picked up a copy of Peter F. Hamilton’s book, Fallen Dragon. It must printed with some of the thinnest paper in the world because even though it was 630 pages in length, it measures only 1 1/4″ thick in the hard cover edition I bought.Fallen Dragon revolves around the story of a man, Lawrence Newton: his youth, his present day, and several important episodes in between. In the present day, Newton is a marine for a multi-planetary multinational where piracy, known euphemistically as “asset realization,” is the corporate norm. The economics of this system are a bit suspect, and Hamilton asserts in the book that perhaps this economical model is due to collapse and that the time of that collapse is not too distant in the future.

Hamilton litters the book with extended flashbacks that some reviewers have deemed unnecessary or extraneous. Maybe those folks read a different book than I did? Since many of those flashbacks provide detailed information that helps to inform the reader as to why the protagonist acts as he does, they seem integral to the story. The fact that Hamilton wrote them with his careful attention to overwhelming detail doesn’t make them superfluous, it just means that he wrote them in his style and you shouldn’t be reading the book if you don’t like his style.

Like Hamilton’s other books, this one is a page turner. The story draws the reader inexorably towards the ending much like a black hole sucks in all that surrounds it. You’ll be turning some mighty thin pieces of paper, but you’ll be turning them at a prodigious rate.

The book changes tack about three-quarters of the way through, and until Hamilton pulls all the strings together at the end, the reader can be left scratching their head and thinking, “Huh? What does that have to do with anything that took place in the first 500 pages??” Stick with it, however, and Hamilton offers a tidy ending as a reward. You might be left pondering the nature of paradox and time travel and Hamilton’s understanding of the same (as I was), but if you’re content to let those sleeping dogs lie, you’ll be satisfied with how the book ends.

Spares by Michael Marshall Smith is a book where the title has little to do with the main plot of the book and it’s clear that the author didn’t quite know what he was doing as he wrote it.The initial premise of the book is that when embryos are first formed in human mothers and the process of mitosis begins, a number of cells are harvested and grown artificially into a person with an identical genetic make-up to the person who the mother births naturally. This carbon-copy person is kept in a series of tunnels with no education or interaction with the outside world, except for on those rare cases when the original needs a spare body part. At that time, the carbon-copy’s body is harvested for the needed limbs or organs. These carbon-copy bodies are known as spares. That’s where the book starts.

It then shifts track radically to become your standard crime who-dunnit with a disgraced cop fighting his demons (his wife and child were murdered, of course) and attempting to right past and present wrongs. Along the way, his former partner is killed, so he gets diverted again, to solving the case his partner was working on (even though the protagonist still isn’t a cop). Along the way a number of characters typical of this style of book are introduced, as are numerous ho-hum, seen-it-before situations, including the ever popular “Protagonist Must Partner With Villain Who Probably Killed His Family And Former Partner To Right Greater Wrongs”. Did I mention that his buddies include the mid-level gangster who also runs a bar and the hooker with the heart of gold (who just happens to fall for him)?

Then, the book jumps the track again, and the protagonist is back fighting in a crazy world between worlds in a Vietnam-style engagement. Does this have any connection to the previous two-thirds of the book? Uhh, not really. That obviously didn’t stop Smith and he roars ahead into this goofy segment with abandon.

Where are the spares, the title characters, during all this? Mostly dead. They’ve pretty much been dead or ignored for all of the previous two segments.

In the end, Smith uses a hasty and silly ending in an attempt to gather all of this mess up into a bowl and make some sort of literary goulash where the sum of the whole will be greater than the individual parts. Unfortunately for the readers, he fails miserably.

Unless you’re trapped on an airport tarmac due to the corporate malfeasance of an airline, skip Spares. There are many better books out there.

On a tangential note, who are all the people who rated this book so highly on Amazon.com? Five stars?!? I’m not aware of a substance, legal or otherwise, that could mask the literary wrongs of this book.

If you search for information on-line about how to remove the interior door panel from a 2003 Avalon, you’ll find plenty of questions and no answers. As such, I’ll share my experiences here to help other people.First, I haven’t removed any of the front door panels, but I’m guessing that they function the same way as the rear door panels, which I have successfully removed and replaced. Second, patience is key in this exercise. If you get hasty and overly aggressive, you’re likely to break some of the plastic bits that hold everything together.

1. Start by emptying all the pockets and cubbies in the door panel.
2. Open the door wide.
3. Remove the triangular plastic bit (sail panel?) above the door panel. This pulls straight back to disengage and is held on with one so-so fastener and a piece of double-sided tape obviously added at the factory to compensate for that sub-par fastener.
4. At the bottom of the door are two exposed black screws. Unscrew them completely.
5. Along each side of the door panel are two plastic expanding rivets. Push on the center cicle of the rivet until you feel a click. You should now be able to completely remove both the center circle and the outer portion of the rivet. These can be fairly easily broken so set them aside where they won’t be stepped on or otherwise damaged.
6. Remove the woodgrain plastic piece from the arm rest by gently prying up the rear of the woodgrain part with a flat-head screwdriver or putty knife. There is a clip that links the front of the woodgrain part to the door panel.
7. Unplug the wiring from the woodgrain part and set the plastic piece aside. Note: If you want to put the window up or down, the wiring needs to be connected to the woodgrain part, even if you use the front-seat controls.
8. Inside the cavity where the woodgrain part usually sits there should be a brass-colored screw visible. Unscrew it and set it aside.
9. There is a little door that is snapped shut covering a screw in the hard plastic door handle bezel. Open the little door by using the tip of a knife on the left-hand side of the door and gently prying the door open. Unscrew the screw inside.
10. On the left-hand side of the door handle bezel, insert a flat-head screwdriver, between the door handle bottom (near the axle of the door handle) and the bezel. You should feel a slick click as the bezel is released from the door handle.
11. Repeat the last step on the top left of the door handle bezel, inserting the screwdriver between the lock button and the door handle bezel.
12. You should now be able to remove the door handle bezel.
13. At this point, the door panel should now lift straight up and relatively easily off the door.

One final note: when you’re reassembling the door, you may need to remove and replace the double-sided tape that holds the plastic sail piece on the door.