…I usually find this columnist at the other paper about as adept at story-telling as a DOS-era computer program, but every so often one falls into his lap. This is one of those yarns where all you have to do is just lay the fact out like cards in a solitaire game.

It reminded me of an incident a few years ago, where I went down to the garage to take a bike ride, hit the opener button and watched the door rise like a curtain on…a car, and not one of ours. Our garage opens directly onto the street behind us, and someone had obviously mistaken it for a parking place. But wait — someone was in the car. I tiptoed up on him, wondering if I’d find a guy shot through the chest or otherwise in dire need of help.

It was a young man, head tipped onto his right shoulder, sleeping like a baby. One hand was deep in his pants, no doubt clasping his weenie for some childlike comfort, the other wrapped around a plastic cup held between his thighs. I tapped on the window gently. No response. I tapped harder, and he stirred. His head moved to his left shoulder, but he didn’t wake up. I knocked as hard as I could, but no further response.

I called 911 and set off on my bike ride. By the time I returned home, his car was being attached to a tow truck and he was sitting in the back of the squad car, looking very, very bummed out. The cop on the scene said he was so drunk the inside of the car smelled like a distillery. I thought it was remarkable he managed to park so neatly, and not run into our garage door in the process. Apparently that didn’t cut any ice with the law.

Most of us reach middle age fairly sure that no more real surprises will come along. That’s not to say we don’t change, but our change takes place within some well-known parameters. Our basic personality template will remain the same.

So I was intrigued when, a few weeks ago, a psychologist told me people have two big risk periods for developing drinking problems — in their 20s, which everyone would figure, and again in their late 40s-early 50s, which I never figured, although now that I think about it, I should have. I think I said it here before: I never really understood why my dad would come through the door after work and practically lunge for the liquor cabinet until I hit 40. I’d walk into the kitchen, start dinner and, with a real pleasure I’m not entirely comfortable with, open a bottle of wine.

My dad usually stopped at two, although he went through a pitcher-of-martinis period that led to an 8:30 bedtime for a while. I try to stop at two, but three is not unheard of. And no, I don’t think I have a drinking problem. I don’t think my dad had a drinking problem. But I have it in me, and I’m mindful. Especially when I consider the psychologist’s factoid.

Last year, when we were in Toronto, I read a column in the Globe & Mail complaining about how boring January and February are, socially, because everyone’s in a self-imposed post-holiday dryout period. I recall this quote, “My doctor told me that to maintain a healthy liver, you should abstain one day a week, one week a month and one month a year. The day is doable, the week is almost impossible but my only chance at the month is January, so I’m dry.”

Here’s another sign of middle age: In being mindful of my drinking, I always consider whether I’m going to be driving. I usually consider the example I’m setting for Kate, and whether I have work to do later. But I never, ever think of my liver.

Tonight I had water with dinner, and tried not to wish it was cabernet.

Do you think about your drinking?

Nothing like meeting a friend for a drink early in the afternoon to raise the big questions: Is this too early to start drinking? What if I stop drinking after I have this drink…OK, these drinks? Does the fact we’re having an ice storm have any effect on the moral issue here? Well, does it?

Then you think: The reason we’re meeting is, he’s leaving town tomorrow for ever and ever, so it doesn’t matter. When your friend and colleague blows town, you lift a glass. And have the spinach-artichoke dip so you don’t absorb the alcohol too fast, and then drive very carefully afterward. And I only had three. I am such a soccer mom.

It was perverse, in a way, having an ice storm on his last day in town, considering his destination: Florida. Andrew is one of those people who does not suffer winter gladly, who’s always planning his next Florida vacation, from which he returns as tan as a saddle and deeply happy. Now he’ll live in his vacation spot. Well, good luck to him. We’re both getting shut of the place when the water’s only lapping our knees. Something to toast.

Of course, one way I’m escaping the sinking ship is by jumping overboard. So that calls for another beer.

I’m glad to be home, though. The weather outside is pretty awful — sleet, snow and ice (which the TV weathercasters call “wintry mix,” making it sound like something you pass around in a bowl at cocktail parties.There’s some satisfyingly howly wind, too, which makes me grateful for a warm house. And beef stew for dinner. Mmm, you’ll never catch me moving to Florida. When would you eat beef stew?

Yesterday’s remarks about TV news touched a nerve or two, so here’s a much more cogently argued reiteration, from Minneapolis. And this WashPost piece, on the incredible smarminess of American network coverage of the tsunami, is spot-on:

The network superstars have arrived in the stricken areas, as if only by being there can they dig out the essential feel-good stories that allow Americans to reassert faith in a benign God and order and meaningfulness in the world. The print media are there, too, searching for the same scraps of redemption, but without the sentimentalizing touch of the television camera, the tone of familiarity, the relentless, oozing empathy of first-person celebrity journalism. …”If we do story after story that is nothing more than misery, there is a danger of viewers just shutting down because they can’t comprehend the enormity of it all,” said “NBC Nightly News” producer Steve Capus in yesterday’s USA Today. …Only a churl would deny anyone the consolation of hope, but this frantic drive to find heartwarming alternatives to the death and destruction seems more a symptom of the American psyche than a “fact on the ground” in the tsunami zone. We impose hope because it allows us to contain a horrific story.

Images of destruction inspire an intolerable sense of futility in those far from the catastrophe. The obvious response — to send aid — is adequate only to prevent further suffering. About the suffering that has already happened, the losses that can’t be undone, we can do nothing. Except watch for a time, until we’re numb, or bored, or angry at the repetitive misery — and then, in the back of the head, cue those violins, the sunset mood, the irrational affirmation that allows us to ring down the curtain.

Yeah.

And speaking of tsunamis, there’s been one aspect of this story that has, without fail for nearly two weeks now, been an instant click-away/channel-changer: The God Angle. Trying to parse the Almighty’s motives in a natural disaster just doesn’t seem … worth the time. Also, potentially infuriating, as when someone offers, “Maybe he did this to see how the rest of us would react.” That’s not a God worth worshipping, if you ask me. I’m not much of a God-botherer anymore, but I figure it all boils down to: If we understood, we wouldn’t need God in the first place. I’m reminded of a line from that great theologian, Warren Zevon: “the vast indifference of heaven.” That’s mostly how I track God these days — through perplexing indifference.

That said, I liked this Ron Rosenbaum piece in the New York Observer about the uses and abuses of theodicy, the subset of theology that wrestles with this stuff full-time: “A vindication of the justice of God in ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil,” to quote from the dictionary. (Aside: What is “natural evil,” anyway? If a tornado rages across an empty landscape, is it evil? Just wondering.)

Anyway, enjoy. I have leftover beef stew to eat for days and days! Envy me!

A question, with all due deference to our dear friend Vince, who is not part of this particular problem:

Why the hell does anyone watch local TV news?

I watched my own last night, to see if today’s plans — telephoning, work, sparring with the mortgage guy (6.1 percent?!? I don’t think so), making beef stew — are going to be shot to hell by a school delay or cancellation. We’ve been under a winter storm warning for about two days now, giving the local weathercasters ample time to inflate an entirely normal winter event into a near-apocalypse.

You’ve heard this whine before, though. This time I paid more attention to the other things that always bug me — the way the girl anchor delivers her line, then turns to look expectantly at the boy anchor; the vertically folded script, a meme that must have been peddled by consultants; the toss to the reporter on the set, who pretends that what she heard at the school board meeting is so very, very important, the overarching sense of incredible urgency,. I mean: Who falls for this crap? It’s worse than talk radio. All I want is a weather report! And not one with furrowed brows! Sheesh.

No wonder Jon Stewart is so huge.

Go read G. Beato’s piece in Reason on the year in excuses, rationalization and other equivocating.

And I missed this on Monday, but …wow. This is tops in tasteless, the rest of the story of WashPost reporter Michael Dobbs’ tsunami experience, presented here as more of an Annals of Ruined Vacations piece for a really cool cutting-edge travel magazine:

Taprobane is a tear-shaped rock just off the southernmost tip of the tear-shaped island of Sri Lanka. In the 1920s, a bogus French aristocrat created a luxuriant garden on the rock, topped by an exotic octagonal villa. In the decades since then, Taprobane has played host to a succession of aesthetes and eccentrics, ranging from the writer Paul Bowles to the art patron Peggy Guggenheim to the adventurer Arthur C. Clarke. My brother, a Hong Kong businessman who bought Taprobane a decade ago, markets it to rich Americans and Europeans as “the isle of dreams.” Geoffrey, who is known for throwing fabulous parties, had invited an eclectic selection of guests to this isle of dreams to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s.

Only 12-year-old Jojo, a sports fanatic with a tough-guy persona, seems impervious to the wave of altruism sweeping through the Dobbs family. “The good thing about all this,” he told us, as we cut short our vacation, “is that we will be back in Washington for the last Redskins game of the season.”

Oh, thank GOD.

With all the hot gas of late about who has the more sincere and Christ-centric Christmas wishes, this package arrived like…well, like a package that comes two days after Christmas.

Inside, two Matchbox cars, shot glasses glued to their roofs. Inside each, the recipe for a “Sticky Hickey” — 1 oz. Bailey’s, 1 oz. chambord. Etched on the glass, “Happy New Year 2005 from Scott and Samantha” (the Hickeys).

I find a lot to like about this. Although I plan to use the glasses for vodka rather than Sticky Hickeys.

This morning, after days of trying every possible trick in the bag to get my wireless router to start talking to my cable modem again, it came to me in a flash, like a revelation from heaven: Delete the entire network, reset everything, and build a new one from scratch. Lo, it will work.

Lo, it didn’t work.

But then, just as I’d figured on spending the next month stealing a free wireless signal from my next-door neighbor, AND using the enforced down time to do something completely different, like start noodling around with fiction again, I opened the laptop and everything is working smoothly again, and I have no idea what happened, but it happened, and lo.

So much for my fiction career.

But what the hell — why not start a discussion on this story, which I read over the weekend, about people who sleep with their dogs. I mean, in the bed with their dogs. According to this story, 40 percent of American dogs share a human’s bed.

As part of our family’s long-running comedy routine, in which one of us will speak the thoughts of our canine member, we have an unending debate over the dog sleeping with us. I’ve never objected to a dog in bed, but Alan is appalled by the very idea. For years, Spriggy slept in his own bed next to ours, and after Alan’s allergies reached a crisis he was banished from the bedroom entirely. (He now sleeps within sight, out in the hallway.)

I’m always intrigued at the different permutations of human-animal sleep my friends confess to. I’ve known women who slept with huge Labrador retrievers or German shepherds next to them. Vince’s Daisy sleeps under the covers. I dog-sat a Springer who insisted on curling up in the curve of my knees, and patiently readjusted himself after every shift in my own position. It was really sweet and cozy.

Do you sleep with your pet? Why or why not?

Happy New Year to you, too. If nothing else, I figure, it’ll be way different from the last one. I’m hoping it will be interesting, and not in the Chinese-curse sense of the word.

Sorry for my intermittence these past few days. If it didn’t feel right, it felt necessary — once again (deeeeep sigh), my broadband is out, and this time I have no idea what’s wrong or how to fix it. It should work, but alas, it doesn’t. At this point, I’m ready to take all the hardware out into the street to let a few cars run over it, because at least then I’d know why it doesn’t work.

But enough geekery. How was your Christmas week? Mine was sublime, perhaps because, I realized at midweek, this was the first Christmas week I’ve had off in…my adult life? Yeah, that sounds about right. One thing about the newspaper business is, the beast must always be fed, and for years, I was one of the feeders. Why waste a week of vacation in winter, when you can bargain with a family type for a week at a better time? You get a week of desk-cleaning and waiting for breaking news (which rarely happens), while the paper fills up with year-in-review finished in mid-December.

Not this year. This year, Alan headed out the day after Christmas to start his new job with a lonely bachelor-guy furnished apartment as home base. I hoped he’d say, “When I get a stake, I’ll send for you and the child,” but no. We’ll be there in a month; until then, I’m soloing and we’re having a weekend marriage. When he came home, I said, “How’s the new place?”

“The people downstairs f*ck every night from 11:15 to 11:45,” he said. “Loudly. She’s a crier; he hoots like a baboon.”

I’d forgotten what apartment life was like.

OK, then.

In what promises to be an enervating series of lectures about how much more evolved they are, morally, than you and me, an IWF-er tells us why we feel let down after Christmas. Unfortunately, she’s right — Christmas has been made unbearable in recent years, thanks to our old pal capitalism. I think they had it right in the Middle Ages, when the season began on Christmas Day and continued at least until Epiphany. I still remember visiting London a few years ago and seeing the Christmas decorations finally going up in Piccadilly Circus the day we left — December 12.

So I plan to have myself a merry little Christmas, even though we took the tree down today. I had to do it when I had the help.

Back to the mangle tomorrow.

Ashley Morris is many things — accidental composer for pornographic films, tenured professor at a prestigious Midwestern university (and you right-wingers who visit, please don’t read anything into those two items in juxtaposition — the former is a hilarious story he can perhaps be coaxed to tell again, and the latter is entirely deserved. Besides, he teaches computer science, for the lovea pete), supporter of ground-breaking television.

It’s in the latter capacity that we praise him today. He’s set up Don’t Burn the Wire, to, ehh, encourage HBO executives to renew our favorite show for another season, preferably two. Go, follow instructions, tell all your friends, forward to TV writers for major newspapers, etc.

God bless my husband. I asked him, weeks ago, “What do you want for Christmas?” He replied, promptly, “‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ on CD.” You can either read this as a) typical baby-boomer nostalgia wallowing in itself; or b) a great idea. I’m going with B. I forget, as my distance from classic rock radio grows, how many great records were made in the ’70s by artists who swiftly devolved into bad jokes. Like: Elton John. Blood, Sweat & Tears. You can’t really call Neil Young a joke, but my fave albums are still “Neil Young” and “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” although I guess if you’re not counting “American Stars and Bars,” “Rust Never Sleeps” and about half a dozen others, you’re just not paying attention.

Which is the long way around to saying that before Rod Stewart became a parody of himself, he made a decent record or two.

“Every Picture Tells a Story” came out in 1971. I was 14, so you can’t claim my fondness for it translates to some wonderful period in my life. I was in junior high. Life hadn’t even started yet. And junior high isn’t wonderful in anyone’s life.

Ah, it was a nice holiday. You may have read about the Midwest’s surprise snowstorm a couple days out, which crippled much of the state and pretty much ruined my Columbus relatives’ celebration — my brother moved in with my sister, who at least had electricity, unlike approximately 200,000 others — but here? It was a blissful white Christmas, if cold. I got “Wolves Eat Dogs,” by my beloved Martin Cruz Smith, and I have to keep finding other things to do, so I don’t finish it too fast. The family present was the deluxe edition of Scrabble, and we all played a game yesterday, marveling over the swiveling board. Kate, at 8, is keeping up with her parents (with a little help). She also knows what an ibex is now, and how to spell “yacht” and “waltz.” Sooner or later I’ll have to teach her chess, and then become her punching bag at that, too.

My appearance here this week may be spotty. I appear to have a faulty Airport Extreme, which will have to be remedied, because while I can put up with a lot, I can’t put up with being un-wireless again. In the meantime, I liked G. Beato’s take on the Christmas wars, if you can stand to read some more. I can just about guarantee you, though, that his will be the only one where you’ll find “high definition ass love” and “William Donohue” in adjacent paragraphs. Enjoy.

Thank God for neighbors with wireless signals that drift over property lines. My b’band seems to be hosed again, so I’ll make this brief: I’m off for a bit of traveling and a bit of celebrating, but if we keep missing each other, have y’all a merry little Christmas. In the meantime, I think Lance has something sensible to say about the Christmas wars.