The oars are here! The oars are here! They arrived today, beautiful wood-and-fiberglass, counterweighted oars.

Only the boat’s not done yet. Still needs its coat(s) of non-slip paint on the bottom. Then it’ll be done. We’re launching in maybe a week. Alan informs me we must fly an oak twig or branch from the bow — it’s a wooden-boat tradition that honors the trees from which the craft came. Whatever. I’m wondering if breaking a bottle of champagne across the bow will scratch the paint or, far more important, be a waste of good champagne.

Alan just snapped at the dog. This usually means something else is a problem. I went out to the living room, where he was trying, unsuccessfully, to fit a bronze oarlock over one of his new oars.

"Do you need different oars, or different oarlocks?" I asked, wondering if this boat will see water before next spring.

"I need two pipes, and then I need to pull them apart," he said.

Lately, I’ve noticed I’m saying "I give up" a lot. But: I give up.

Today was the first day of student move-in. There have been warnings on the radio all week — avoid these streets! Take alternate routes! But I’m just starting to know the town, so of course what did I do today? I took the streets I was supposed to avoid and did not alternate my route, and ended up in a seething mass of minivans, shell-shocked parents and girls of 19 who apparently were issued BMW sport-utility vehicles for high-school graduation presents. When I got to Wallace House, you couldn’t find a parking place for love, money or drugs, so I did what everyone does — parked illegally. I used to be a ninja parker, could parallel park in a spot one millimeter longer than my car, but my skills are rusty. Neither Columbus nor Fort Wayne are places known for a dearth of parking; in Fort Wayne, they just bush-hog another row of grass to enlarge whatever lot you’re trying to get into. The competition there is to get the closest space, the one nearest the door, so you don’t wear too many pills off the inner thighs of your polyester stretch pants getting to your destination.

I thought of that during dinner. I had a light breakfast, a long bike ride and no lunch, so I was looking forward to a hearty, guilt-free evening meal, with someone else doing the preparation, thanks so much. I wanted Indian food — papadams and vindaloo and rump-a-pum-pum, all sopped up with big sheets of nan. But there was Kate, Miss Picky Pants, and she was in a mood. The dining-out alternatives with her are Mexican, Italian or anyplace with a bland kids’ menu. Mexican it was, and because of the clog downtown, we went for a chain that was, at the very least, close by.

Gah. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing "On the next ‘Talk of the Nation’: America’s obesity epidemic. Who’s to blame?" Who’s to blame? How about the people who came up with the idea of the chain Mexican restaurant. A "mini" burrito and a cheese enchilada were served on a platter the size I put a whole roast chicken on, with a cup each of rice and beans. My "small" margarita came in a glass I could barely lift, the salt on the rim so thick and encrusted it missed the whole point of salting the rim. Kate’s quesadilla arrived with french fries, that well-known Mexican side dish.

Never. Going. Back.

"Why is there a dirty bike on the wall?" Kate asked in the lobby. (It was one of those places where they nail a dirty bike to the wall, yes.) "To make you think this is a real fun place to eat," I told her. "Because they’re crazy! They’ve nailed a bike to the wall!" Later, all the servers gathered around for the obligatory birthday-song torture of some unfortunate kid nearby. They made her wear a sombrero. By my calculation, this formula — junk nailed to walls; massive quantities of bland, uninteresting food; birthday-song torture by flair-wearing servers — is roughly 30 years old. It’s time for the next thing, restaurant entrepreneurs.

We should have driven another mile or three down the road, where we could have had the chain-restaurant experience of Panera, at the very least. But I was afraid I’d pass another dorm en route and have to weep silently.

Deb wrote today: I don’t know where we left off, because my brain is still kind of a blur from several days of ingesting vicodin. I sprained a toe last week. you’d think this wouldn’t hurt much. you’d be wrong. at least I got to ask the doctor, "but will I play the piano again?"
just now starting to feel alert and normal — vicodin really puts you on another plane, mentally and otherwise.

Yes! Yes, it does. That’s why Hollywood types frequently end up in rehab, having to have that shit pried out of their sweaty little palms. My doctor favors Tylenol 3, so named because if you take it with three glasses of wine, you might get to sleep through the night. I got T3 for an episiotomy that tore at both ends, again for a bicycle accident that left me unable to turn over in bed without weeping from the pain, and you get Vicodin for a sprained toe? Where do I find these generous doctors when I need them? At Deb’s HMO, evidently. One of my editors said to me a few months ago, "I was cleaning out the medicine chest last weekend. You know when I had that shoulder separation? Guess what the doctor gave me for the pain — Oxycontin! Of course I flushed it down the toilet. Wouldn’t want that falling into the wrong hands."

The oars don’t fit. Traffic is clogged. Dinner was terrible. And if I was in pain, I wouldn’t get the proper narcotics. Can I come up with things to whine about, or what?

Tomorrow. Orientation!

Today’s Only in Ann Arbor moment: Coming back from walking Kate to school, I passed an older kid with the same destination. Fourth grade, I’d guess, maybe fifth. Wearing…

…a Che Guevara T-shirt.

I thought about this for quite a while. Even if this kid’s parents put off parenthood until the last minute, the way I did, no way are they old enough to both have a kid this age and care enough to dress him in a Che Guevara T-shirt. Which would seem to indicate that perhaps Che is making a comeback in some other cultural arena, like hip-hop. Or video gaming — help Che escape the jungles of …I can’t remember where he died. (Googling…45 seconds later…Bolivia!) Help Che escape counterrevolutionary Bolivian army regulars! Viva la revolution!

But I digress.

I keep missing these waves. When I read that pimping was quote back unquote, I admit to a certain bafflement. Is pimping something we want to come back? Is crack dealing…what? Like bell bottoms? Will that be back some day? I need a cup of coffee; this crap makes me tired.

Today I took advantage of a 90-minute hole in the day to do some solitary wandering around the campus shopping district. I stopped in a store to check out the half-off Patagonia sportswear and stumbled upon a rack of track-suit separates called Juicy Couture. I read in some magazine earlier this year that Juicy Couture is the hot J-Lo/Christina Aguilera just-hanging-out, getting-your-picture-taken-in-an-unguarded-pose, must-have track suit of this particular moment. It was half off, but the original price was scratched out, so I have no idea what they’re charging for this stuff — it could be a million bucks for all I know. My point is this: I could examine it at length and try to absorb its specialness in a detatched, intellectual fashion. Hey, I was within spitting distance of a great institution of learning; it seemed the time to do so.

And, God as my witness, it looked exactly like any other terrycloth track suit you’d buy at some less fashionable venue. Cut? Standard, maybe a little close to the body, but essentially, it was a hooded sweatshirt in dusty pink. (This one, I think. A mere $80.) The hit of Rodeo Drive. I give up.

There was a separate hang tag explaining how to protect the silver J that dangles from the zipper pull during washing. That, I think, was the point. Also, that this jacket was marked Large and probably wouldn’t fit over one of my shoulders, much less both of them.

On to more existential topics. I made time for the VH-1 Warren Zevon special and, of course, continued my long-running tradition of buying new WZ albums the day they come out, picking up "The Wind" at Barnes & Noble. Neither made me cry. The special was better than I expected, the album about average for late-career WZ, which is to say: Very good, but not as good as "Life’ll Kill Ya," which was a stone mofo of an album. And what did it get him? The usual. Some respectful press from the usual suspects. If there was a video, I never saw it on VH-1. Glad they’re showing up now that the show’s almost over, which WZ himself commented on, more politely, in the course of the show. "Hemingway was right," he said. I’ll say.

Oh, well. It can’t hurt, and a little extra cash in the estate for little Maximus and Augustus (WZ’s newborn grandsons) to go to college can’t hurt.

Bloggage: As much as I’m willing to work as an unpaid whore for HBO series, there’s one that I’ve never been able to handle. "Oz," of course, the prison drama. The stories seemed as convoluted and bizarre as any soap opera, and every episode seemed to end with someone getting shanked or sodomized. (Don’t speak to me of authenticity and verisimilitude. I know men get shanked and raped in prison, OK? One reason I’m a law-abiding citizen is so I don’t have to think about these things.) But I’ve seen enough to not be surprised by the horrible end suffered by former priest John Geoghan, the man said to have sexually assaulted dozens of children throughout his cursed career as a professional man of God. Richard Cohen had a good column today on whether we, now, share some responsibility for what happened to him:

Whatever the case, we — that’s you and I — are approximately doing what some of the Catholic hierarchy did about child molestation by priests: shrugging and looking away. We all know what’s happening in prisons, and most of us just don’t give a damn. …It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to gin up much sympathy for Geoghan. But whatever he was — compulsively sick or cheerfully evil — he was a man, a person like you and me. He was our ward, sentenced to prison, not to die. Through inattention, parsimony, a casual disregard for people we don’t quite consider people, we failed him, just as the Catholic Church failed the children he abused.

Depressing, but worth reading.

Also, as someone who sometimes, guiltily, ignores certain news stories out of a sense of general exhaustion, I appreciated "What I Skipped This Summer," the NY Observer’s roundup of same. My favorite was the first, Frank Rich’s — "The latest space shuttle, the Columbia, disaster. I decided: ‘This is an important story, I know. It’s sad. But in the end, they’ll eventually find whether the foam did it or whatever, and I’ll tune in then.’ Even now, when that’s happening, I’m only reluctantly tuning in. I mentioned this to a friend of mine—actually, someone else who works at The Times—and she said, ‘Absolutely, I skipped that one, too. I get the paper in the morning and think, "God, that’s five less pages I have to read.’" — but they’re all good.

Enjoy. Back tomorrow.

Could this town be any more wonderful? Today I discovered a city pool where, for city-pool admission, you can swim 50-meter laps, outdoors, all day long all summer long. So I did. For 45 minutes, it was sheer agony. This is just rust, I’ve learned many times over the years. I have a love/hate relationship with lap swimming. I love it up until I hate it, and then we have to break up until we can learn to love again. But we always do — after 45 minutes, I had 10 minutes of sheer bliss — and then there’s a day of rust, of learning to swim laps again. People watch the Olympics and think swimming is all about pushing just a little harder to get the gold at the end. It is not, at least not at our level. It’s about finding a hypnotic rhythm, of balancing the effort of reaching and stroking with the relaxation of stretching and gliding. When it finally comes, you can swim all day long, watching the black line go by and traveling to interesting places in your head. Swimming’s the only exercise I do where, at the end of a workout, I feel relaxed and loose and refreshed, rather than hot and sweaty and ready for a gallon of water, lunch and a long nap.

(You can tell swimming and I are dating again, can’t you? Wait until we break up — we fight over the time and effort involved, the goddamn special hair-care products required and how dry and itchy my skin gets. Not to mention the suits soaking in every sink in the house, so the chlorine eats them tomorrow instead of today.)

It’s hell on the hair color, though. I have an appointment for next week, but I could use one, like, now.

OK, I guess this means we’re officially out of anything, at all, to say. When you start discussing your workouts, you’re either Dr. Laura or a real blogger. I don’t know how ladies of leisure do it, and what’s more, how often they manage to convince you how busy they are, busy busy busy. Today I had a lunch scheduled with my academic adviser, a calendar block with some actual activities penciled in. I felt like a mental patient on the way to occupational therapy. An hour before I was supposed to leave, the phone rang. He was sick and had to cancel. So I read "Dog Soldiers" and went shoe-shopping, just like Carrie Bradshaw, another person with too much time on her hands.

Speaking of which, one of my TV-production friends said he watched "Sex and the City" last night, and noticed that all the actresses are lit from so far down, they seem to be wearing some sort of weird under-eye miracle makeup product. (Lighting from below shears a few years off the old puss.) Now this wouldn’t be a reason to get your knickers in a twist, except that this show has jumped so many sharks it belongs at Sea World. All the actresses do their sex scenes wearing bras now, I’ve noticed, even the gutsy, fearless Kim Cattrall. It used to be only Sarah Jessica Parker was modest that way, and I take it this means the other girls want what she gets, or else they just don’t have the sorts of boobs you want to show the whole cable-television audience anymore. I say it’s a toss-up, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because the show isn’t even funny anymore (except for Samantha’s explanation of tea-bagging; I think Cattrall is the only one who still realizes she’s playing on a show that’s supposed to be funny).

Ohhh-kay. First workouts, now television. Can Star Trek be far behind?

And speaking of bras (can I write a transition, or what?), I see that Anna Kournikova is pimping a sports bra, to be sold only on Amazon. There’s a picture on the wire of Jeff Bezos gawking at her like he simply can’t believe his luck, being allowed to stand next to such an amazing beauty, this goddess of the Caucasus, much less approve the photos in the ad campaign. Well, enjoy it while it lasts, Jeff, because I’ve got news for you — women don’t see anything special about Anna Kournikova, and guess who buys sports bras? Not the men who put her all over their websites every day.

But I’m a woman who believes the quest for the perfect sports bra is a worthy one, and so I went to Anna’s Shock Absorber web page to see what it had to offer. Ahem:

* Molded, lined cups with an inner support sling

* Shaped, padded comfort straps

* Adjustable crossover or straight strap-fastening options

* High-tech CoolMax® fabric

In other words, it has cups, straps you can adjust and a special fabric you can sweat in. That’s like saying a pair of shoes comes with "soles, to protect the bottoms of your feet; uppers, so that your feet are well-supported; and heels, to make walking more comfortable." They don’t even pretend she had a hand in its design, that she may have offered some valuable insight, based on her years of playing tennis in tight-fitting clothing before television cameras. No, it was designed for Anna Kournikova, not by her or with her.

Call me back when the Williams sisters endorse a sports bra. There are some girls who know what they’re looking for.

(If you’re looking for a great sports bra, I can’t say enough good things about the Moving Comfort Athena. I own two, and if Alan sticks them in the dryer again, he’s going in there with them.)

With that, another day crawls to a close. What will tomorrow bring? Can you stand it?

It occurs to me, with the new Tribune link, that I’m getting some new readers these last few days. They may not be acquainted with the way things work around here. They may think, when they read "tomorrow" at the end of an entry, that it means I’ll be back with another entry tomorrow. Not necessarily. I’ve been on vacation for most of the last month, and I’ve lost track of time, which is why I signed off incorrectly on Thursday. The regular Monday-through-Friday progression is no longer meaningful in my sluggardly life, although that’s about to change. Kate starts school Tuesday; the Fellowship gets under way Thursday. No more happy loafing for me.

And that’s fine. Even with Ann Arbor to explore, I’m needing a little structure, and a bit more to do. I’ve caught up on my sleep, done my little chores, settled in. Let the Fellowshipping begin, as well as first grade. Kate needs a little armature in her life, too. And Alan’s been perusing the course catalog, too. We’re all about to become students. Oh, happy day.

College is like youth — wasted on the young. This is going to be such a great year.

I can’t really say that’s entirely true. I certainly enjoyed college (Ohio University, class of ’78) plenty, but not in the way I should have. It wasn’t until junior year that the classes really began to engage my attention, and by then I was caught up in the student-newspaper whirl, turning in papers written at the last minute on the back of long rolls of teletype paper, with wire-service copy on the other side. This obnoxious inattention to presentation was our way of telling the English faculty, "You think I’ve got time for Shakespeare? I’m writing funny captions for AP pictures at 3 a.m., buddy." Childish, but lots of fun. This will be different.

I don’t know if it’s OK for Warren Zevon to go ahead and leave this mortal plane, because by passing up the VH-1 special on his final recording sessions to watch the last episode of "The Wire," it would seem he’s lost his No. 1 fan. But to me, there’s no contest. There are people who find the sight of Bruce Springsteen jamming on a guitar fascinating, but I’m not one of them. And how can anyone pass up the best show on TV when it’s winding up the last of its tragic storyline? It’s all moot, when the wonder of cable TV is: Everything gets replayed, eventually. I’ll watch WZ Tuesday evening, but I had to know about doomed Frank Sobotka first.

Speaking of which, HBO posted a transcript of an interview-of-sorts with the show’s producer, David Simon. Fans submitted questions — and it’s good to know that regular people, given the chance, come up with pretty much the same assortment of good and stupid questions, in about the same proportions, as professionals — and he answered them. I found this snippet interesting:

Do forums like these bulletin boards provide any useful information for you, the actors or the HBO decision makers? Some see them as merely outlets for the fans. But certainly they can provide an almost instant glimpse into the reactions and thoughts of fans regarding a show and whether or not you have successfully conveyed your ideas.

We scan the boards when we have time, but we don’t use them for biofeedback. I’ll be honest: I learned while writing for Homicide that viewers, if they could have their say, would generally wish for the same things over and over again. They like a show for given reasons and so they watch the show to see those reasons affirmed. Writers do not want to write the same story over and over and actors do not want to portray the same stories over and over. On Homicide, the devoted viewers wanted every episode to end with Pembleton using his intellect and power to break a murderer down in The Box. Neither Andre Braugher nor the writers were prepared to recreate the same episodes over and over. Same with The Wire. Many viewers, it seems, wanted more Barksdale family and were unprepared to venture to a new world with new issues. Understandable. But to do the same show over again and deal with the same issues is to kill the creative aspect of the show.

Next year, something new. And to the extent that the Barksdale characters are still being explored it is only because we feel there is more to say about them and their world. If not for that, they would be gone completely. Instead, we feel that they are an excellent vehicle to capture a future theme of the show. But that is character serving story, not the other way around.

Too bad someone can’t teach this lesson to Dick Wolf. Maybe "Law & Order" would be worth watching again.

There’s some other good stuff on there, about the challenge, to viewers, of presenting a novel in television form, something we haven’t seen much of before. It’s been the biggest frustration as a fan, wanting to recommend it to others, but you can’t, because if you don’t get on the bus at the very first stop, you’re not going to understand the journey. On the other hand, there are enough people on this particular bus there are plenty to discuss it with.

You see I’ve changed the nightstand reading, finally. I try to keep up with it — it didn’t really take me three weeks to get through "The Sugar House" — but I’m somewhat limited by whether Amazon has a cover image for me to filch. The two new ones this week are the product of a Border’s raid Saturday night. The Manchester book, about the middle ages, one of those black holes of my historical knowledge, was a late inspiration. The guy on the lounge chair next to me at the pool yesterday was reading it, while his wife perused a biography of Harriet Tubman. I was just writing Amy that it’s one of the shocks of living in Ann Arbor — seeing people reading real books right out in public.

That’s not to say no one reads in the Fort — we do have that excellent public library — just that if I never hear another enthusiastic recommendation of the latest "Left Behind" volume, it’ll be too soon. My friend Nancy in Atlanta says "Left Behind" is the No. 1 mass-transit read down there with not just a bullet, but about a million bazookas.

Tomorrow. Really.

I apologize for that somewhat childish rant yesterday — what is the recalcitrance of the entire call-center industry to the equanimity of a soul such as mine? (Whatever that means.) My biggest regret is that, after all that bitching, I forgot the punch line:

In this entire move, the easiest and simplest entity to deal with? The one with little or no voice mail, calm and helpful staff, low or no hurdles to getting the job done? The municipal water utility.

You know, one of those agencies Republican sharpies are always clamoring to privatize.

So they can provide better customer service.

Enough. I’m bored, now.

Today was market day in lovely A2. Farmers’ market days are Wednesdays and Saturdays, the way they used to be in Fort Wayne back in the glory days. More merchants come on Saturday, but Wednesday’s turnout was good enough. Evidently Ann Arbor is surrounded by boutique farms that grow nothing but organic vegetables (est. 1972), unless they grow heirloom vegetables, unless they bake artisanal breads. (Did you know "artisanal" was a word? I didn’t. But I’ve seen it on two menus here, so what the hell — a yuppie neologism.) I’m dangerous in a place like that — I start thinking $5 is a perfectly reasonable price for half a pound of "spring salad mix," which appears to contain a tiny quantity of a million different greens, with a sprinkling of nasturtium petals thrown in for color and eye appeal.

So we went to lunch, then to Wallace House for Alan to have a tour. Thus the day is spent.

But Alan got a look at the river today, the Huron River, and learned that some blue-ribbon smallmouth-bass water is only a couple miles from here, so he disappeared sometime after 4 and hasn’t been seen since. It’s now full dark, but I’m not worried. (Too much.) Alan’s never happier than when he’s trying to ruin some poor fish’s day (but not its life). If he got lost or kidnapped by a mutant gang of raccoons, I expect he’ll get a good story out of it and we’ll hear from him sooner or later.

The river along here is pretty, for this latitude. You usually find the shallow, clear, fast-running streams Alan loves a few degrees farther north , where the soil is poor and few bother to farm it for anything other than a vegetable patch. That may be an incorrect observation, but I always associate foul, muddy rivers with farming, where soil runs off and silts up the bottom. My next-desk neighbor in Fort Wayne claims I’m wrong, that historians estimate the three smelly, chocolate-brown rivers of the Fort were always muddy, even though they once held pike and bass and other desirable game fish (but no longer, although you should see those carp feed at the sewer outflow pipes!). Whatever.

But while we’re speaking of the Fort, I have to pass along a week-old link that any Fort blogger worth her salt should say a word or two about, a Page One NYT story from August 6 that dealt with the mystery of our city’s absurdly low real-estate prices. You may have to register to see that, but check out a few passages:

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — On a tree-filled boulevard known as Doctors’ Row, the four- and five-bedroom brick Tudor homes that are the jewels of this city’s housing stock were selling for about $150,000 two decades ago. At the time, some homes in the nation’s most desirable suburbs, like Brookline, Mass.; Sausalito, Calif.; and Great Neck, N.Y., cost the same.

Not a single house in Fort Wayne — a small, manufacturing-heavy city halfway between Chicago and Detroit, with a jobless rate below the nation’s — has sold this year for more than $800,000, according to real estate industry data. That is roughly the average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

This story ran the day I packed up the computer, and I only read the Journal Gazette’s silly distillation of it the next morning, which made it sound as though it was some wonderful secret we’d been keeping all this time, and now it was finally being shared with the world. Uh, no:

The housing gulf stems in part from the relative open space and lack of building regulations away from the coasts that allow builders in Fort Wayne and elsewhere to put up new homes as soon as there is demand for them, and sometimes even before. Prices in Austin, Tex., and Las Vegas, two fast-growing areas, have risen only moderately, for example, as high-ceilinged houses with room-size closets have sprung up over the last decade.

"We are seeing a migration pattern of talented, creative people that we may never have seen before," said Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "More and more people are demanding what’s found in New York and Boston and San Francisco, and there’s not enough space to accommodate them."

In other words: When the market values your housing cheap, it’s valuing your town cheap, too. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s worth noting. Alan and I will be lucky if our house appreciated 30 percent in value — before inflation — in the 12 years we’ve owned it. It’s not all beer and skittles, I’ll tell you. Although it certainly makes you appreciate it more, when you shop for its equivalent elsewhere. Like here, where the median home price must be above $200,000.

P.S. My friend Dr. Frank lives on Doctors’ Row. So does my family physician, Dr. Mitch. They call it that for a reason.

More tomorrow.

Here’s what amazes me — and I promise this will not become a Lileks-style rant about how Everyone In The World is Failing Me, and How Dare They — but really, it’s amazing and frightening, how we’re supposedly now a service economy, and…SERVICE EVERYWHERE SUCKS.

I’m not talking about your local dry cleaner. I’m talking about the experience of disconnecting and reconnecting simple household utilities, and you should thank God you only do this when you move, and most sane people move no more often than they have to.

Just a few quick anecdotes, and I’ll try to keep them entertaining:

* I call to disconnect our Fort Wayne phone service, go through the whole voice-mail menu, explain to the guy the whole situation. Ten minutes on the phone, minimum. After which he tells me: "Your phone is in your husband’s name. So he’ll have to make the call. I can’t take the order from you." This after I’d given him all pertinent information, including the last four digits of Alan’s SSN.

* When Alan calls to do the same thing, he asks, at my prompting, how we can have our e-mail forwarded from our verizon.net account; we’ve been using it as our home ISP. Oh, that’s a totally different number, we’re told; we can’t handle DSL service requests at all, only telephone service. But the DSL service IS the telephone service, he protests. Shut up, silly man.

* As the household computer guru, I handle the DSL call. I figure I’ll put Alan on the phone and pull his strings, if they insist he be the voice on the phone. But they don’t. It all goes swimmingly. "I’ll have that disconnected momentarily," the service rep says. "But I don’t want it disconnected momentarily, I want it disconnected the day after tomorrow," I say. "We’ll be here until Friday." She can’t possibly do this, a "postdated disconnection," she explains; I’ll have to call back Friday. The day our phone is being disconnected.

Cable was another adventure. I called four different phone numbers, finally, FINALLY landing with a service rep with a brain. "I’m calling to set up service in Ann Arbor," I said, weakly. "Please help me." She could. She explained that my problem, in which I was seemingly bounced hither and yon to call centers around the midwest, was very simple: I was calling from a Fort Wayne area code, which automatically got me routed to Indianapolis, where the Comcast Indiana call center is located. Do you understand? Here I am, trying to call the Ann Arbor/Detroit/southeast Michigan cable service area, but no matter what number I call, I’m routed to Indy, because the caller-ID sniffer assumes that, since I’m calling from Fort Wayne, I’m calling about Fort Wayne service. There’s a special, double-secret number I must call to set up Comcast service in Ann Arbor; needless to say, it is not toll-free.

I love this: It doesn’t matter what number you call, anymore. It’s the number you’re calling from that matters.

The cable guy came this morning, and hooked everything up. We’re online! We’re broadband with a bullet! Kate has her Nickelodeon fix, and she’s so happy! He leaves. Ten minutes later, SpongeBob SquarePants disappears from the screen, although the little menu band at the bottom remains, telling me that I’m watching SpongeBob. I call the non-toll-free number. I’m told that this is routine, that the service doesn’t officially start until the work order is turned in, and this could be as far away as day’s end. Broadband stays up, analog stays up, but digital cable is down. Do not be alarmed! the service rep says. Normal! Perfectly normal! The next call, hours later, reveals that there is a "computer outage" that is keeping work orders from being entered. It’s now nearly 12 hours later. Still a computer outage. On my midafternoon call, I ask for a toll-free number for subsequent calls. She gives me one. When I call it, hours later, it rings a different cable company entirely.

This is one funny joke, if you ask me.

But what are you going to do? Call another cable company?

Ha ha ha ha ha.

OK, enough of that. On the whole, our first few days in A.A. have been lovely, indolent and pleasant. We are settled. Alan, my metrosexual husband, has rearranged the furniture, rewired the sound system and rehung the art to his satisfaction. The kitchen is well-stocked right down to the shrimp deveiner. We’ve visited the Farmer’s Market and Borders No. 1 — really, it started here. We had dinner at Zingerman’s, the best deli this side of Zabar’s. I’ve taken some long bike rides, Kate has made some friends, Alan has found a hardware store that tickles his fancy. Oh, we’re having a time.

More tomorrow.

I’m closing up shop a day early. I thought I could keep things up and running until tomorrow night, and then had a blinding insight: What the hell for? Excellent question. Everybody takes a break sometimes, and it’ll do me good to have this room packed up and ready to move a little early. Note that you can send me e-mail until the bitter end. Only the desktop computer — the one with my web software — is going into storage

I feel a little bad about this. Ms. Lippman just gave me another nice call-out. (She said in an e-mail that my website is "about something," which just goes to show how thoroughly she’s been fooled.) But I gotta do what I gotta do, so: A break.

Tentative return: A week from today, August 13. Maybe earlier, but doubtful. Maybe later, but probably not. When was the last time a cable guy showed up at your house earlier than expected? By then, the house should be unpacked and settled, the computer set up, and a week’s worth of blogfodder ready for your amusement. In the meantime, let’s settle a question that’s surely been eating at many of you: Why did they call that drink — Kahlua, Bailey’s Irish creme, banana schnapps — a Blow Job, anyway?

Ashley has the answer: Because you are supposed to put it all in your mouth…the Baileys will start to curdle, and you have to figure out whether to spit or swallow.

Oh…man. I didn’t need to know that. (But now I’m glad I do.) Deb reports the Car Bomb — Bailey’s and Jameson’s, dropped boilermaker-style into a pint of Guinness — is called, up Madison way, the Irish Car Bomb. Drink a few, drive your car and become a human bomb, maybe.

Trust alcohol to lower the tone around this joint.

I got a little work done today, but not enough, having taken a long break to try to set up iChat AV on the new laptop. iChat AV combines the scintillating nature of e-chat communication with audio and video and is, for all intents and purposes, the picturephone that children of my generation were promised would be ours by the time of our adulthood. That it didn’t work out that way is only proof of my contention yesterday — that the effect of technology can’t be accurately predicted. It turns out we have good reasons to keep the telephone an audio-only device, but the idea of having a video chat with my friend J.C. in Atlanta seemed like a good idea. I was going to carry the laptop and the camera outside and show him Alan at work on the boat — all wirelessly, mind you. It seemed the ultimate stupid use of technology; I liked the idea of this particular communication being intercepted by aliens, who would say, "He’s not done with that thing YET?"

But alas, it was not to be. My video camera is incompatible with not only iChat, but the latest version of iMovie, too. This does not surprise me. It’s a JVC, about which nothing more need be said. Moral of the story: Don’t buy JVC. Sub-moral of the story: Go buy a new video camera!

And go read Jon Carroll, in a pitch-perfect rendering of why columnists shouldn’t write from vacation, even if it does make the whole trip tax-deductible. How does he do it? This is a subtle topic. You probably never realized how much you disliked Ellen Goodman’s August letters from Maine until you read this; I didn’t, anyway.

Speaking of vacation letters, I’ll see you in a week, then.

You can’t really tell, but the thing I’m holding in my hand in that picture is our portable GPS unit, which I use infrequently enough to totally forget how it works between uses. I was inspired to take it along after reading this article at FastCompany.com, which I’m belated at blogging but better late, etc.

The story’s all about the transforming power of the global positioning system, something we’re just starting to see the ramifications of. I think most of us don’t understand how great it’s going to be. When we rented our car in Arizona, I had to initial a paragraph stating I understood that if we took the car out of the designated service area, it would trigger an alarm at Rental Car HQ and our agreement would be void. The alarm would be triggered by an onboard GPS unit, of course. But what do you think of this passage:

…I am sitting in a sunlit office in Silicon Valley — GPS coordinates unavailable because the signals couldn’t penetrate the windows — when the equivocal nature of this future world becomes evident. I am egging on an executive in a GPS conglomerate, a man who thinks about position, location, and satellites all day, trying to get him to tell me how "location awareness" is going to change the world the way that, say, electricity did. He’s holding back. He wants to tell me how important it is for concrete companies to know where their trucks are. I can tell he’s had bigger thoughts.

The GPS executive’s eyes are sparkling at the prospect of reduced car-insurance rates. I’m thinking, Holy mackerel. The insurance company will have records of everywhere I drive and how fast I drive there. Not even my wife knows that.

Uh, yeah. I love technology — it’s the coolest thing about being an American, after freedom ‘n’ stuff, the ability to try out all the cool gadgets first — but by now we know that technology never transforms things exactly the way we think it will. I have no doubt that car insurance rates will not fall on GPS data, or if they do, they’ll fall infintesimally. (Profits — that’s what’ll go up.) But there will be a lot of other, less obvious changes, too. If you have a company car, and the company can track whether you broke the speed limit on that trip to Chicago? That’s going to lead to lots of pissed-off, spied-upon employees, and that will have its consequences. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. American workers have put up with a lot in the last 30 years, making the transition to a global economy where they’re expected to work harder and longer and whatever-er, and sooner or later employers will find their breaking point. Maybe GPS spying will do it. I dunno.

I’m feeling a little sour on employers at the moment because one of the city’s highest-profile corporations, Lincoln National, announced a bunch of layoffs today, and you don’t have to be a business genius to figure that most will come from Fort Wayne. The company used to be headquartered here and was a crown jewel of corporate citizenship — generous, socially conscious, responsible, forward-thinking. Then the longtime CEO retired, and they got greedy. The new guy pulled up stakes and moved the administrative layer to Philadelphia, which has been followed by a steady stream of transfers/buyouts/job eliminations. In a few years there won’t be any Lincoln in Fort Wayne anymore, and the city will never be the same. The mayor will put a little lipstick on this pig, say the real economic development engine is small business, but it’s all a cover for the ugly truth, that the city is slowly imploding. It’s not doing so in a hurry, but it is doing so, and all the "it’s a great place to raise a family" speeches in the world won’t change it.

But that’s what we offer. It’s a great place to raise a family.

For me, it’s a great place to be unemployed. I got nothing of real value done today, although I did get all our utilities in Ann Arbor set up. Tonight I get to assemble the nine million magazines we subscribe to and comb the mastheads for the change-of-address policy. So far, it’s mostly: Send us a postcard. Talk about something that could be better done online. I mean.

So tomorrow, then. And a day or two after that.

A reader, the Other Nance, sent me a note over the weekend, reporting on a visit to her daughter at college. My alma mater, actually, the fine and venerable Ohio University. They went uptown and had some festive drinks, including the Car Bomb. That is:

13-14 oz. Guinness stout
1 oz. Bailey’s Irish cream
1 oz. Jameson’s whiskey

Combine the Bailey’s and the Jameson’s, then drop it, boilermaker-style, into the Guinness. The very thought makes me cross-eyed with nausea. I guess the name comes from all that Irish stuff, a little nod to Sinn Fein. Ah, for the days of shamrocks and leprechauns. Too bad the Palestinians don’t have a long tradition of drinking; lord knows what we could dream up to name in their honor.

They also had some Blow Jobs — Kahlua, Bailey’s Irish creme, banana schnapps. I don’t even want to think about it.

Either college kids are getting too much allowance or…or… Kids these days! Sheesh! Why, in my day we rooted through desk drawers for nickels, then pooled them to buy a lousy pitcher of draft beer at the student union, by cracky. On the other hand, as I brush away the cobwebs in this particular stretch of Memory Lane, I recall that the last months of my senior year, a bar opened that featured one of those reclining barber chairs — patrons would lie down in it and have the stuff poured directly into their mouths. Not that I ever did anything of the sort; the bar was one of those frat-boy hangouts. I preferred the much cooler Swanky’s, the Union and the Frontier Room, which had a wonderful terrace. They made a nice steak sandwich at the Pub, which I preferred for a hangover treatment, along with a 6-ounce Coke in the curvy bottle. Oh, stop me now.

There was a point here: Every time I’ve had a Screaming Orgasm or Slippery Nipple or Sex on the Beach or Jizz Fizz or whatever they call those vile combinations of liqueurs, schnapps and Yukon Jack, I have lived to regret it. Mightily. No wonder they’re always bringing college kids into the E.R. with alcohol poisoning.

(Other Nance took the girls home in a cab. Wise mama.)

I’m on the wagon myself, after two nights of mild carousing. I paced myself and didn’t get overserved, but the alarm clock in my liver, the one that says I cannot sleep late after a night of more than four beers, awoke me at 5:30 a.m. Saturday and 6 a.m. today. This after not getting to bed until after midnight both nights. I got up and turned on the TV downstairs, and caught "Indochine" yesterday and "Casablanca" today, which struck me as perfect 6 a.m.-when-you-can-neither-sleep-nor-rise-from-a-prone-position selections. "Indochine" stars Catherine Deneuve, who possesses one of the most sculpturally beautiful faces in the western world but can’t seem to actually move it around in search of an expression, and this movie was made in 1992, before Botox. And yet, she can still act. Like all French actresses, with her it’s all about the wardrobe, and she had some fabu-freakin-tastic outfits. She wears the clothes, they don’t wear her. I found my attention wandering from the nascent Viet Cong to more important matters, like, why don’t women wear gloves anymore? Where did they store all those hats? And who fixed all those finger waves, anyway?

You can see the weekend’s festivities have taken it out of ol’ Nance. Both Friday night (when we bought for the table at our local newspaper bar) and Saturday night (when Emma and her husband Mike hosted a nice party for us) were quite fun. It always pays to stay at a party until the bitter end, to see the fun things that happen at that magical hour. What will it be? An orgy, a fight, a heart-to-heart talk with a person you barely know or a screening of "The Endless Summer" with the sound off, accompanied by the vinyl soundtrack recording on the stereo? Guess which one we did. It’s amusing to see that Mike, a native Ohioan like me, shares my fascination with surfing. Talk about beating your head against the wall, Buckeye-style.

All right then, this is it for now. But Unemployment Girl will be back tomorrow, a little fresher and better-rested. No more toasting. And no Car Bombs!

That spinach souffle I made for Easter dinner got under my skin. (Please, hold your punchlines.) I’ve been looking for a little celebration meal that wouldn’t require a $180 trip to Joseph Decuis, and tonight seemed to offer the opportunity, so I got out the Julia Child and made merry with whips and egg whites and a pound of the spring’s first spinach, and mmm. Dinner was an hour late, but when it’s spinach souffle and buttered baby carrots and a bottle of Fat Bastard shiraz (yes, really — Fat Bastard), who the hell cares?

Speaking of Joseph Decuis, the best restaurant in northeast Indiana, I ran into the executive chef, Lisa Williams, at Meijer the other day. It was gratifying to see that professionals capable of making magic with things like crabmeat and wasabi-ginger tartar sauce still buy Ore-Ida frozen hash browns. Her daughter is 4, mine is 6, and oh but it felt good to hear them have an argument over whether cotton candy-flavored Gogurt constitutes an acceptable snack food, the way Kate and I did only moments before.

I probably wouldn’t feel this way if I hadn’t made the mistake of selecting "Fanny at Chez Panisse" one day at the library, a book ostensibly written by Alice Waters’ daughter, Fanny, who (Alice claims) has never eaten a Big Mac in her life. In the book, Fanny expresses her enthusiasm for such entrees as halibut in grape leaves. As the French say, Bitez moi. I had one of the most memorable meals of my life at Chez Panisse, I grant Alice Waters all the mad props she has coming to her on the course of her brilliant career, but when she starts in on kids and food and her "eating is a political act" speech I have to tune her out or go insane. Life contains Doritos; deal.

Eating is (something of) a political act, but maybe only in Berkeley. Around here, you meet people with Alice Waters’ ideas about food, only they come from a religious perspective. It all comes out in the wash. Same impulse, different justification.

Speaking of religion, two things:

Richard Cohen had a good column on Santorum this morning. Yes, another. I was hoping Amy would blog it and throw a great bloody chunk of meat to her orthodox-Catholic readership, just to see what they’d say, but she says the subject interests her almost as little as the Dixie Chicks. OK, then. You go read it; I think he has a point:

On Sept. 12, 1960, John F. Kennedy, in a tight presidential race with Richard Nixon, addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. In an attempt to reassure those Americans who thought a Catholic president would take orders from the Vatican or somehow impose Catholic doctrine on a majority Protestant nation, Kennedy not only said he believed that "the separation of church and state is absolute" but added something else as well: "I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair." For this, Sen. Rick Santorum has rhetorically excommunicated him.

In contrast, Santorum named George W. Bush — a Methodist — as a president with the right approach. He dubbed him "the first Catholic president of the United States." Goodbye, JFK.

Second thing, remember when I said it wasn’t easy to write a column about turn-signal abuse, and if you thought it was, go ahead and try? Dan, another local, gave it his best. I think it’s pretty good, although he couldn’t make 700 words. Because I’m full of Fat Bastard, I’m going to let him carry us out. Because this is Indiana, he somehow makes it all revolve around a Bible verse. Neat trick. Enjoy:

Deuteronomy – Chapter 2, Verse 27

Going home in the barren darkness of I-69, Katie slept and Cindy played every Luther Vandross CD she owns. She owns them all. The last time we went to the Murat was to see Luther, so he was heavy on her mind. Somewhere after Muncie, I flipped on my left turn signal and let it go, flashing for the last hour of our trip, blinking the universal signal of distress, or a prayer for mercy, as we passed through the land of God, turning neither left nor right in the Quiet Storm of the night.

I have the best readers ever. Have a swell weekend.