You Cannot Please My Wife

Heather's suffering from swine flu. It was really bad, though with a round of Tamiflu, codeine, and a rescue inhaler, she's already feeling much better, which I'm happy about. BUT...this entire experience, my wife has been saying, over and over again:

"I DO NOT HAVE SWINE FLU!"

"Why not?"

"I hate that term."

*sigh* "Alright, I hereby declare it. You have 'Coughing Pig Death'."

"I do not *cough*cough*weeze* have Coughing *hack* Pig Death."

"Why not?"

"That's even worse! I'm not going to die!"

"Right, it's Coughing PIG Death. You'll be fine."

"It's still so morbid."

"oooohhh, you need a cutsey name, like 'Rubella.' You got it. I hereby declare that you have the 'Itty Bitty Piggy Sniffles.'"

"*cough*hack*cough*cough*cough*I DON'T HAVE THAT EITHER!"

There is no pleasing that woman...

Roasting My Own Coffee At Home

I've decided to start roasting my own coffee at home. I drink a lot of coffee as it is, and I've found it more and more difficult to find a good whole bean roast that I enjoy. I took to mixing certain brands that I liked for a good balance of flavors but this last time I bought two bags of beans at BJs and they're just mediocre at best.

So I've been looking into home roasting, and I found a ton of good resources online. I'm most excited about The Coffee Project. They offer you the opportunity to get free coffee beans and instructions on how to roast them on the stove top.

Once I get the beans I'll talk about the whole process and take pictures.

What a Weekend! Camping and Car Crashes Oh My!

It was one hell of a weekend, let me tell you...

• McKenna and I went camping with the Adventure Guides Saturday night into Sunday. This was her first event with the Adventure Guides and her first big sleep over and it went swimmingly!
• On the way to the event I ran into a concrete pole in the Giant parking lot. Bent the tire rod and strut for our van, so she's in the shop now getting worked on.

It made for a very uneven weekend to have the joy of seeing my little girl having a great time with friends up in the woods in a lodge hanging with the girls and to just keep replaying my own stupidity in my head and seeing the crash into the pole. Luckily, I didn't hit the pole head on or the damage would have been a lot worse. All I did was hit it with the driver's side tire. Still, I felt like a complete idiot because I didn't even see the pole until it was too late.

Oy.

But we were all alright so it works out, and the car will be fine. And I am fine, and so far, my wife's not threatening to kill me, so that's good. :)

Still...oy.

It's a Good Thing I'm a Red Sox Fan

because the crushing disappointment from that has tempered me for this complete joke of a football season the Redskins are putting together.

At this point I'm picking against my own team in the football pool because I MIGHT AS WELL WIN SOMETHING.

No Ass for Old Men

There is that persistent joke about old men somehow waking up without asses, and if you ever look at old men, it appears to be true. The backs of their jeans are always hanging flat off the back end. How does that happen? When does that happen?

Apparently in a man's 30's, because Heather walked up behind me and today and made a comment. I reached around and verified, to my horror, I was...half-assed.


Damn.

Why Fishing?

I never thought I'd be a fisherman. Growing up, the sport of fishing was something I viewed as just a notch above barbaric, and at least in some small part, backwards. As an English-major I admired Hemingway for his prose, but not for his obsession for catching Blue Marlins off the coast of Cuba.

I was never a particularly outdoorsy guy, and I just kind of figured I'd end up living in or near New York City, or some other large city. So it's surprising in some small part to even me that I'm so taken with fishing. And there's no single reason why I have started, or why I'm sticking with it so much, but instead a couple:

1. First and foremost, I love being on or near the water. Maybe it's because I grew up near the Chesapeake and the inlets of the Potomac River, but I'm most at peace when I'm near a big body of water. I mourned moving to Pennsylvania as a kid because I was so far away from the beach. I missed my friends, I missed my school, I missed my old house, but just as much I missed the open water. Fishing only carries me so far through that need. I've been talking for a while now how I want a boat. I tell my friends how if I won the lottery, I'd disappear off the Earth by buying a big enough sailboat that I could hop islands in the Caribbean and just disconnect for a while. I'm sure if I lived closer to the water now I'd have already bought myself a boat and I'd be out on the water damn near every weekend. My lawn would be knee-high and I'd be out on the ocean. And I'd be happy.
2. I love learning how to be more self-reliant. I figure if I learn how to go out and fish then I'm just that much more independent. And I figure if I can teach my kids to be independent and self-reliant in the world then I've done right by them. The last thing I'd want to do is raise two otherwise healthy and smart children who were either too frightened or too disgusted to fight for themselves in the woods.
3. I love any hobby where I get to obsess over gear. I just get all geeky and happy when I walk in to a place like Bass Pro and can stroll aisle after aisle of different fishing gear and try to figure out what it all does, and if I can use it. I don't need to even buy it. Just looking makes me feel bliss. This is not something I reasoned out before I started fishing, but it's one reason why I like it now.
4. But most important to me, right now my two kids beg me to take them fishing. They love spending time with me. I know this isn't going to last. At some point I'm going to be a horrible embarrassment to them. At some point, their friends, their school activities, their own lives away from here will take all of their attention and suddenly I'm good for lending them the car and doing their laundry.
   
   So I want to cash in on every moment where I'm still important enough to be with. Taking them fishing, I get to sit in the still and quiet of nature with my two wonderful children, and just, be with them. There's no need to yell, or scold, or even talk if we don't want to. We can just sit and drown bait all day.
   
   
   

Yesterday, after four hours of sitting on some rocks by the Conewago Creek in the mid-October sun and feeling happily baked, my son turned to me and said "Daddy, make sure we mark this place on the map. I want to come back here again with you. Even if we don't fish, I just want to come back here with you." I know some parents who'd give their eye teeth to be that in demand from their kids. The happiness from that moment warmed me more deeply than that beautiful autumn sun. And, you can bet every dollar you have that the minute I got in the car I marked it on the map, and I will make sure I get back there with my kids.

The fishing itself, that's all secondary. I wouldn't care if I caught nothing but boots and twigs for the rest of my life so long as I also get to catch moments like that with my kids too.

The Old Man & The Sea Pt 1

I've been making the most of my Netflix account since I reopened it, watching classic movies I haven't seen before. Since Hollywood just keeps remaking the same movies over and over again, I should just spend time with the originals. Usually they're so much better, on smaller budgets, smaller sets, and no special effects.

So I was excited to see "The Old Man and the Sea" staring Spencer Tracy. Hemingway is one of my favorite authors, and it's one of my favorite stories by him. Consider too, I'm recently interested in fishing, so this was a confluence of several things I love. How could it not be good?

I guess my expectations were too high.

The film was an absolute mess, and ruined Hemingway's book. Those who have read anything by Hemingway know that his prose is stripped bare, down to the very essentials of the story. Hemingway never wanted to waste even one word, and this works exceptionally well for "The Old Man and the Sea."

The sparseness of the prose perfectly reflects the empty barren life of the old man living in poverty in Cuba. The emptiness in the writing conveys the endless featureless sea. The constant muscular forward rhythm of the story underscores the relentless and painful pull of the marlin dragging the Old Man further and further out to sea, away from home, away from land, away from everything he knows. Like the sea, the life of the old man is all internal and underneath the surface. The man fishes the sea, and is the sea himself. He can no longer be separated from it, and his identity has been consumed by it. But none of this is spelled out for you. None of this is laid out for you. You must ride the wives with Santiago and struggle with him as he pulls in the fish.

But this 1958 version of the movie turns it into some sentimental schmaltz, like a Disney movie, or an over the top Willie Wonka confection, neither of which I have a problem with, but it's not right for this story. "The Old Man and the Sea" did not deserve this fate. Swelling strings, cute children, longing looks, montages of running through scenic backdrops of sea-side Havana. A stirring romantic moment of locked eyes between young boy and the cafe owner's daughter. None of this needed to exist in this movie. Hemingway did not put any of this in this story. This story is manly, in that Johnny Cash and John Wayne bruising knuckles in a bar fight over spilled whiskey kind of way. The fishermen don't talk of women, they talk of baseball stars. The boy looks up to the old man as a grandfather and teacher. There'd be no swelling strings in their life, only the hard plucked guitar of a man's man like Hank Williams Sr (RIP you son of a bitch). In fact, the era of Hank Williams Sr is the same time frame as this story. Let that vision guide where the story should have been.

Now picture Disney's Anne of Green Gables instead. The jarring distance between what should have been and what was was so painful as to almost make the movie unwatchable.

It'd be easy to point to other movies of the time and say that that's the way all movies were made, but that's not true. There are plenty of movies that were comfortable using silence, even more comfortable than most modern films. For example, "M" is a movie that lives in almost complete silence.

Worse yet, the movie has a narrator, which was not strictly necessary. Worse yet, like some Christmas movie, the narrator (also Spencer Tracy) speaks to the characters in the movie like a caring, paternalistic God. You feel like he's got some warmth and affection for the people on the screen. Gosh, he really does care about us, doesn't he?

There is no such God in the book. The narrator of the book is a passionless reporter, feeding you the rawest details of the man's life. When the old man catches and eats raw dolphin to stay alive pulled further out to sea by the marlin you can taste the old man's revulsion, strip by strip by strip. You can see in your mind the bloody wounds on the man's cramped claw-like hands as he struggles to keep hold of the fish. You get the most direct sense of the effort he goes through to stay alive alone and out to see, just the old man, the fish, and the sea.

Instead, in the movie, we get a homogenized and sentimental vignette which makes the ravages of a hard life and age seem nothing harder than a day at Universal Studios. "Come ride the 'Old Man & The Sea Ride!' Fight off starvation, exposure, and shark attacks in the most thrilling five minutes of your life!" Except, somehow, I think the ride at Universal would be truer to the story, and more interesting to boot.

Clearly, I was disappointed in a way I did not expect.

But all is not lost. There is another version, staring Anthony Quinn from 1990 that I have queued up. Expect a review of that in a few days.