I've been totally offline for seven days now. Drove to Detroit, where I've been working on my late father-in-law's house, trying to convert it into my sister-in-law's house. Several changes are most evident, starting with being in a house with no newspapers. There is TV, but not anything I've been able to, much less cared to, watch. So I was rather shocked yesterday to sit down in a restaurant and notice the TV showing Dow Jones figures down around 8500 -- a drop of a couple thousand since last I noticed. Couldn't touch base with the internet until today, due to a wiring snag we haven't solved so much as worked around. In any event, I've been too busy to worry.

Should be here another week, maybe two. Built a fence. Installed seven vinyl replacement windows. Hopefully the new kitchen floor will go down tomorrow, followed by new base cabinets, counter top, sink, dishwasher, stove. Interesting work. I never understood how chain link fence worked before, but it's pretty obvious once you look at it closely enough to build one. I've watched people install windows before, but not as closely as when doing it myself. Tore down the old kitchen tonight, an act of deconstruction literally as well as semiotically -- not to mention archaeologically. This follows a couple of weeks of working on my own house, and will be followed up by several more.

Needless to say, no Jazz Prospecting this week, nor next week. Couldn't even put up the usual notice last Monday. Packed some stuff, but haven't listened to much: Bobo Stenson's piano record has been good late evening fare; I've dabbled in François Carrier's digital box a bit, enjoying what I've heard; managed to play the new MOPDTK on the way up, and it certainly has strong moments; old Nik Bärtsch records have become comfort fare. That's about all I recall.

Finished Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which was better than I expected. It helps a lot that he gives the left credit for spearheading all movements toward social justice, instead of just carping about how the left were undeserving even when right. He also tees off on the general-admiral ranks of the military. I'd say that the problems go much deeper, but that's a much needed start. Started James Galbraith's The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Looks like a tremendous book.

Made it back to Wichita late today: 995.8 miles house to house from Oak Park, Michigan. First time I measured the drive it came out very close to 1000, so I figure anything shorter is a testament to efficient driving. Left about 2:30 PM yesterday and got as far as Terre Haute, IN: almost 400 miles. Corn is more mature than two weeks ago, with golden tassels providing contrast to the green stalks. Not sure when it ripens, but I saw none of the gold on the way out. Good weather. Moderate traffic. (Saw a used car lot in Terre Haute that was almost all SUVs and monster pickups. Still a lot of trucks on the road.) A couple of construction delays. Saw a hideous backup the other direction, where a jacknifed semi on I-70 in Indiana stopped about 20 miles of late-night traffic -- at least two-thirds trucks.

This has been a difficult, tiring trip. I did no jazz prospecting while I was away, and no Jazz CG writing. Also nothing on the book, and not much on the blog. I went to one record store. Got there ten minutes before closing, and came away empty-handed. Spent very little time in bookstores. Read a couple of books -- far less than I took with. None of which is surprising under the circumstances, but past trips allowed me more latitude. Should start to get back to normal now, but it may take a while.

Clearing out of Detroit today, headed back on the road again. Drove downtown this morning to clear up a legal snafu -- advice: never do business with National City Bank. (It took us the intervention of an expensive lawyer to close out an account there.) A lot of corn between here and Wichita.

My father-in-law, Kalman Tillem died today. He was 92. I should write more, and someday I will. Even when expected such things always come as a shock. I feel fortunate to have known him. The picture at the right was one I took in May when I was in Detroit, and just ineptly hacked down for the moment.

I imagine the blog will be in sorry shape for the next couple of weeks. As it is, I'm packing now to start the drive tonight.

Update: I got to Detroit late Sunday night. Stopped over Saturday in a place called Sweet Spring, MO, about 1/4 into the 1000 mile drive. Had good weather and a smooth drive all the way, but I was surprised at how thick the traffic was. Still, a long, tiring schlep.

Funeral is Tuesday, July 8, 1PM, at Ira Kaufman Chapel.

I used to follow sports more closely than political news. Back when I lived in New York, I favored the Daily News over the Times, mostly because of better sports coverage (also comics). Over the years, my interest waned: can't say as I ever had any interest in hockey or soccer, so football was the first sport I gave up on (by 1990, most likely sooner), then I lost my taste for baseball during one of the lockouts. So basketball is about all I have left. Don't have time for watching TV, but I occasionally scan the boxes -- not like I used to with baseball, but enough that I have some sense of at least half of the NBA rosters. Watched some of the Boston-Detroit series this year, and maybe half of the Boston-Los Angeles finals, including last night's finale blowout.

I've never been a fan of either team. When I first moved to Boston back in 1984-85, I tried watching Celtics games on TV. The Celtics were supposedly a great team back then, but they only televised road games, and they sucked in the 20 or so games I actually saw. This was a team with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Danny Ainge -- the only NBA team of the era that was mostly white and still pretty good, a formula that Bostonians favored as long as they could get away with it. (The Red Sox were the last MLB team integrated, and even in the 1980s treated a player like Jim Rice coldly. Even later, the Patriots went out of their way to build losing teams around white QB Doug Flutie.) I might have been open-minded about the Celtics, but I wasn't much impressed by the games I saw, and I soon grew annoyed by the local press. Once the Detroit Pistons emerged as rivals, the press turned rabid, and I found a team I could really root for.

I was still rooting for Detroit this year, but the Celtics played so strong they became much more than just anyone-but-the-Lakers -- a team I've disdained ever since they left Minneapolis, another case of perpetual hype rubbing me the wrong way. That story goes back a long ways, probably picking up some guilt-by-association with the Dodgers (my first allegiance was to the NY Yankees) and maybe even UCLA (gimme KU, or practically anyone else). Still, I had noticed Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol in the box scores, and thought they might make for an interesting team, especially when they so easily dusted off the Spurs. They do, but there's still the matter of Kobe Bryant. He's always struck me as a whiney, self-important potentate, but this year he gets the MVP and I've even heard Barack Obama tout Bryant as the best player in the game.

Last night's game should put an end to such foolishness. I knew the game was going to be a blowout about midway through the first quarter, when the score was still close and the announcers were all agog over Bryant hitting three straight 3-pointers. By that point, Garnett had established his shot and was clearly going to be a big factor, which he hadn't really done before. But I also figured that Bryant would take his hot streak for granted, shooting everything he touches until he's back to his usual .350. (He wound up 7-22; he was .405 for the series, 53-131 -- how impressed should we be that a guy who takes 22 shots per game can score 25 points?) From the very beginning the whole Boston team outhustled and outmuscled LA. Once Boston's shots started dropping it turned into a rout.

One more peeve. Several times the announcers remarked on Boston's one-year shift from 24 wins to the championship, as if that sort of transition was something any team could do with the right leadership, coaching, and chemistry. Actually, it was a very Boston kind of deal, which is to say it's a rich team's fancy. Garnett and Allen are both maximum earners past their prime. Any team looking to build over 2-4 years can expect them to slip, very expensively, by the time they're ready. With Pierce already on board and near his peak, those deals gave them 3/5 of an all-star team if they're lucky and no one slips too hard or fast. Boston then added veterans like PJ Brown and Sam Cassell who have no long-term future but can fill in for now. It all worked to plan: they started the year unbeatable, and rarely slipped. But they're not posed to get better next year, and they're going to pay a lot both now and for retooling. Unlike their teams from Bob Cousy through Larry Bird, this isn't going to be a dynasty. Still, they're more fun to watch than the others I can remember.

Went to the funeral of Zula Mae Reed yesterday, in Dodge City, KS. She died on December 30 at age 85, after an extended illness. She was my father's first cousin. He probably had more cousins, but she was the only one we were close to. They were both born near Spearville, KS in 1922-23. Their parents were brothers, Robert and James Hull, and they grew up in Hodgeman County northwest of Spearville, on a piece of high prairie their grandfather Abraham Hull homesteaded in the 1870s. (In between there was an Abraham Lincoln Hull.) My father's family moved to Wichita in the 1940s, then his parents moved to a farm northwest of McPherson, KS (near where my grandmother came from), and that's where I first recall them living. For most of the first 15-20 years of my life, we managed to see Zula Mae, her husband Melvin, and two kids Sonia and Rick, 5-10 times a year. I remember they had a dairy farm for a while, then moved into Dodge City, where Zula Mae taught elementary school. Riding with Melvin to the dairy was an eye opening event. Trudging through the fields behind my dad hunting pheasant turned me off the sport forever.

I grew up in a family that held grade school teachers in the highest esteem. I don't know how doctors or professors might have compared, since we didn't know any -- one cousin became a lawyer, but moved far away and was remembered mostly for his basketball skills. It wasn't clear to me where this reverence came from. My parents grew up on farms and had little schooling, but it turns out that my father's parents had both taught, and teaching was a Hull sideline for several generations, alongside milling wheat and raising sheep. Anyhow, we had two teachers in the family: Zula Mae Reed and Freda Brown, the widow of mother's brother Allen. I was a precociously smart kid, and they quickly became my favorite relatives.

Not that I paid much heed to relatives or anyone else back then. I retreated into my room and books as a teenager, rejecting pretty much all around me, then moved far east as soon as I got a chance. Over the last 10-20 years I've gradually reacquainted myself with many of the relatives I shunned 40 years ago, and it's been a fascinating, gratifying venture. I've even toyed with the idea of writing a book on them, like Ian Frazier did in Family, but still know far too little.

Since we moved to Wichita in 1999, I've managed to get to Dodge City a few times. I talked to Zula Mae after Melvin died, and after my dad died. After my mother died, we drove to Arizona to see her last sister. I remembered a time when Zula Mae came to Wichita and talked us into going out for Chinese food, which at the time I had only eaten once or twice. So I made Dodge the first stop on our drive. I wanted to cook Chinese for her, and recreated for her what was actually the meal I had fixed for my mother on her last birthday: Szechuan chicken, dry-fried string beans, strange flavor eggplant, fried rice. The last time I saw her we made a tour of the area, stopping at their old farmhouse north of Dodge City -- abandoned and now decrepit, only skeletally akin to the farm I remembered; the old "Hull Ranch," with rubble from a house that was already decrepit with Uncle Otho lived there in the 1960s, huddled down in a rattlesnake-infested gulley that would have served the Dalton Brothers well; the Spearville cemetery with numerous Hull family markers. Went to that cemetery again yesterday.

I gather she had a very rough 2007, in and out of the hospital with pulmonary problems, the cigarettes she still smoked a couple of years ago eventually doing her in. I heard from her a year ago, and nearly every day thought I should write or call -- skills I never much had, atrophied further with email -- but I've had a pretty lousy 2007 myself, haven't traveled, and have lost touch with many others, all of us only getting older. The drive itself was easier than I remembered it, and we've done it hundreds of times in the past. We skirted through Greensburg for the first time since it was destroyed by a tornado last spring, and the wreckage -- especially the bare tree stumps -- is still vivid.

Got to spend some time with Zula Mae's children, who I hadn't seen in 40 years. They remembered us better than I expected, and they knew more about our shared roots than I do -- probably the result of sticking closer to the homestead. They also have long life stories, including grown children of their own. It would be a shame not to make something of this reconnection. Otherwise we're just left with a void as the old ones pass.

We had family get-togethers are our house last night and today for the first Christmas ever. My parents bought a house in 1949 a year before I was born, and lived there until they died three months apart in 2000. After then my brother moved into their house and continued their traditions until he landed a contract job in Oregon and decided it was permanent enough to move his family there in October. They came back to Wichita this week, largely at the urging of their grown children, who live on the east coast and still have friends here. The house is still in the family, occupied by our favorite Superartists, but they spent the weekend elsewhere, returning just in time to eat. So I threw out a plan for a small meal with presents on the Eve and a bigger meal on the holiday proper. Those have always been rudiments, but I got a chance to vary the menu this time.

My sister liked to point out that my mother's love of Christian holidays was essentially pagan: Easter egg hunts; Christmas trees, candy, and presents; and most of all an obligatory family dinner. My parents never evinced any doubts about Christianity, but there never was anything religious about Christmas. I missed a bunch of those while living on the east coast, then when I moved back to Wichita got sick and missed what proved to be the last one with my parents. It's never been the same since then, and never will again. I planned my menus to shove Jesus a little further out in the snow. (I can't recall a previous white Christmas in Wichita, but it snowed on Saturday and has barely melted since.) For the Eve, I went Ashkenazi:

• Potato pancakes, with sour cream and homemade applesauce
• Chopped liver (served with toasted roasted garlic bread)
• Salt-cured salmon
• Store-bought herring and pickles
• New York cheesecake

We usually make latkes during Hannukah, but didn't manage it this year, so they seemed overdue. I've picked herring in the past, but couldn't find any this time.

For dinner today we did something I call Moroccan Grill and Matt Superartist calls the Meat Meal. The dishes actually include items from Turkish and Iranian cuisine, so we can chalk most of the meal up to Muslim influences -- even the Sicilian eggplant, with the desserts of more uncertain providence. The grill items were:

• Cornish game hens (Moroccan)
• Chicken wings (Iranian, with saffron, onions, and lime)
• Swordfish (Turkish, with onions and paprika)
• Lamb shoulder (Iranian, with onions and wine vinegar)
• Ground lamb kofte (Turkish, with onion, garlic, parsley)
• Tiny potatoes (no recipe, just olive oil, salt, and pepper)
• Pearl onions, cherry tomatoes, slices of onion and red bell pepper, threaded onto skewers, mostly with swordfish and lamb

The sides and desserts:

• A mixed bread salad (green bell peppers, scallions, cucumber, tomato, parsley, olives, feta cheese, capers)
• A basmati rice pilaf (Iranian, with dried apricots, dates, raisins, and crisp fried onions)
• A cucumber-yogurt salad (Iranian, with mint, raisins, walnuts)
• Caponata (Sicilian: eggplant, onions, tomatoes, olives, capers, with a strong sweet/sour flavor)
• Sauteed shrimp with garlic, cumin, and paprika
• Date pudding (Amish, with a caramel sauce and whipped cream)
• Brownies (from scratch, with pecans and serious chocolate)

Matt ran the grill, and Mike did a lot of the prep work. We fed 12 the first time, 13 the second. The food was pretty great. I messed up the rice recipe several ways but it still came out. Had a lot of problems keeping the space organized and finding places for everyone to sit, so from my standpoint it seemed especially hectic -- and at my age pretty tiring. Rachel took some pictures, which will probably appear sooner or later at Porkalicious.

We gave nothing but books this year: Reginald Hill, Carl Hiassen, Doris Lessing, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Matt Taibbi's Smells Like Dead Elephants, Molly Ivins' Who Let the Dogs In?, Steve Rinella's The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, America (The Book), art books, cook books, and an HTML tutorial.

Still hasn't felt like Christmas since 1999, but it does mark a transition of sorts. Unfortunately, it also seems unlikely to happen again, given the distance between here and Portland, the increasing cost and difficulty of winter travel, and the general tendency that we all have to disperse and settle into our own little lives. The sense of family that my parents had and the knowledge they handed down are quickly disappearing -- with all but a couple of my aunts and uncles gone, I've already lost track with just about everyone at my cousin level. Having read Jane Jacobs, this just reminds me of Dark Ages Ahead.

Went to a funeral today, in Independence KS for Yona Julian, 36, the daughter of a cousin. I was especially close to her father when we were growing up. He was (still is) seven years older than me, the closest person I ever had to a role model, although it seemed like he specialized in high standards I could never live up to -- one example is that he was an Eagle Scout, whereas I topped out at Life. He's the reason I grew up as a New York Yankees fan. But he also, no doubt inadvertently, taught me to hate tennis. I recall visiting him in the first few days after he moved to Independence, fresh out of college with a job teaching political science at the local juco. I figure five people (could be a couple more, certainly fewer than ten) of the 200 or so present today knew him then. Almost everyone else came as the result of the life he built there. He married a local girl, changed his religion, raised four children, finally retiring from the same job that brought him there. I moved away from Kansas, hardly ever saw him, barely know (or knew) his kids, least of all his eldest, Yona. She was a star athlete, stayed close to home, married a local boy, was diagnosed with cancer a few months after giving birth to her fourth child. She valiantly fought the cancer for 16 months.

All this happened slightly out of sight and reach. The rich set of interfamilial relationships of my mother's generation have split into separate cocooned nodes, a nuclearization explained or perhaps just excused by pressing time and divisive space. So I've been aware of Yona's ordeal from near the start, getting regular reports about someone familiar but barely known, me keeping what seemed to be a respectful distance. I guess the funeral today at last seemed like an opportunity for respectful presence. Still, I don't think I did any good except for the tiny number of people who knew me. I didn't talk to Yona's husband, but what could a stranger say? I could have mentioned that I was about his age when my wife died after a horrible protracted illness, but it's hard to say that the two cases offer any insight or comfort for each other. For one thing, with no children I felt strangely like my life was being restarted with a clean slate, whereas with four children he must feel completely different.

I just heard that another cousin suffered a stroke over a month ago. It was severe enough that she's still in a rehab hospital, and she and her husband will be moving into an assisted living facility when she gets back -- a move from Arizona to California that is dictated by another of those nuclear family nodes. My mother had seven siblings. All together they had 23 children. When my mother died in 2000 all 23 of her children, nieces and nephews were still known to be alive, with the oldest ones up around 75, and my immediate family by far the youngest. One is known to have died since then, but with my mother's generation gone we hear little of the far-flung cousins, let alone of their progeny, by now too numerous to keep track of. (I visited an aunt ten or more years ago. She assembled her whole clan to meet the nephew from Kansas, incomprehensible dozens of people, bragging that she had five generations present.)

I can't help but feel a sense that we've lost something here. Maybe you can chalk that up to jealousy -- that having no node of my own that I can look down on, I look up and around at others. But you lose something when you slough off cousins to focus on your own nuclear family. When I think of my 20 cousins I see a wide range of options and variations that are still rooted close enough to my life that I can relate to them, and that expand my understanding of who I am and where I come from. Those options and variations narrow considerably looking down. Maybe also the skills to deal with them. Jane Jacobs, in Dark Ages Ahead, saw the decay of family relationships as one sign of losing our ability to understand the world.

Billmon used that title several times as he was contemplating giving up on his blog. In my case, the title is more homage than veiled threat, but it is occasioned by a break of activity. I've been dog tired and more than a little depressed all week -- eyes hurt, can't see the computer or anything else very well, probably some allergy issues although it's usually the spring pollen that gets me, not the fall ragweed that does the most damage in these parts. Thought I could at least pull some of my book notes out to fill in those calendar squares. That explains Tuesday's John Dower post, but even though I have pages almost ready for Chris Hedges' American Fascists and Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, I didn't have the strength to post them. Those and many more like them will probably appear sometime this month, as I try to get out from under some things and back on track.

The foremost out-from-under is the Jazz Consumer Guide, which is in its 13th week of prospecting this week -- by definition of a quarterly cycle this should be its last. I'm stuck at 1061 words, needing 1600+, and procrastinating listening to records that have no real chance and even less urgency -- and having trouble making my mind up on them. I'm torn as usual between not tracking down many of the things I think I should be listening to and not being able to spend enough time to do justice to the records that are kind enough to track me down. I'm also annoyed that more and more of the latter are turning up lame, as CDs without packaging or with narrow slipcases that are hard to track or file -- for one, I can't find that Marty Ehrlich-Myra Melford duo on Palmetto that I wanted to play before moving on to the similarly stripped down Melford trio on Cryptogramophone. Then there are labels which let me download, which might be a nice perk for an I-Pod-wielding high schooler, but is a mechanical nuissance for me -- one of many new labor-shifting technologies, like self-checkout lines, that I've steadfastly refused to facilitate.

I don't read much about other critics complaining about these matters, which may mean I'm being overly sensitive, or may mean I'm just becoming overly frazzled. But it raises the question: if it all comes down to money for the label, shouldn't it all come down to money for me? It hardly takes any time at all to determine that writing Jazz Consumer Guide is a dreadful expense of time. Of course, it's not all money to me -- I thought about working on free software back when SCO expanded my free time, then came to the conclusion that free content was more needed. My website is a half-assed way of doing that, and Jazz CG does help feed the website. But how much that's worth is hard to gauge. And it's far easier to imagine that writing my book might somehow pay back the effort than that I could parlay any amount of music writing into a future.

One problem with Jazz CG is opportunity cost: it takes up so much time I can't get any traction on my book. I've alluded to the book many times in the past. Six months ago I started writing a post with a brief outline, then never managed to get back to it. Here's an even briefer outline:

1. Introductory primer (60-80 pages): A rather schematic survey of the essential background that every reader needs to have in order to understand the sections that follow. Three sections: science (how the earth works, environment changes, life evolves, resources are used and wasted; population, diseases, stress); history (key points, especially developments in technology and economics; the making of current political geography); everyday life (the current state of the world, with the usual bias towards life here in the US). This section should be noncontroversial and unsurprising. Anyone who is literate about science, history, and society should be able to skip it, but I suspect those people are in fact few and far between, so this provides the essential reference background for topics that appear throughout the book.

2. The progressive tradition in America (30-40 pages): This steps through events and movements in US history that promote the ideals of liberty, individual rights, equal rights, opportunity, cooperation, etc. Historical periods include the Revolution, the Civil War, the antitrust movement, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, the free software movement. I want to show how these ideas evolved from American experience, and to set up the contrast of how they've been misused by conservatives.

3. Conservatism as ideology and organization (40-60 pages): Outline the growth of conservative thought and organization, mostly from post-WWII anti-communism of McCarthy and Goldwater, on through Nixon and Reagan to the point where Republicans were able to seize control of Congress (1994) and the Presidency (2000), with the emphasis on how tightly focused these forces were on arrogating power. Explores complementary threads of white racism and fundamentalist Christianity, which have deeper roots. The focus here is on winning arguments and elections, not on governing, implementing policies, or coping with things that go wrong.

4. Conservatism in practice (60-80 pages): This was originally intended as the core of the book, a chronicle of how Bush took bad ideas and turned them into disaster. It should probably start with Gingrich in 1994, inasmuch as Republican control of Congress to a large extent determined what Clinton did and did not do. It could even look back further to the one institution that was thoroughly conservatized before 1994: the US military. But the main emphasis will be on Bush: the use of government for patronage and power to reinforce Republican political dominance, and the furtherance of militarized state power, expanding both across the globe and deep into the "homeland" security state. Bush's very success at these policies drives us into a cul de sac, where problems multiply and government collapses under the dead weight of its corruption and incompetence. Iraq is both an example and an ideal.

5. The way things ought to be (60-80 pages): Title stolen from Rush Limbaugh, who doesn't deserve it. Alternate: prolegomena to any practical utopianism. Probably a rough sketch for a future book, but here a wormhole out of the conservative black hole. Starts by focusing on basics like trust, integrity, transparency, and how these concepts settle uneasily with individualism and the notion of a public interest. Then moves to basic economic models (entrepreneurship, cooperation) and the role of government in balancing ends. (Government's historic role has been one of groups pressing their advantage through force; I see a different role/function, whereby government implements the adjustments necessary to balance a public interest against individual interests. Democratic governments should lean toward the latter, but in practice are often perverted by group identities.) End with a case example, like health care.

6. Appendix (who knows how many pages?): Main thing here is a glossary, which provides a way to hang brief comments on various topics of political interest, fleshing out the worldview through concrete examples (e.g., abortion, advertising, affirmative action, capital punishment, estate taxes, nepotism). Some may merely analyze problems, others may offer positions or programs. How broad and how deep this will be is open. Other appendices are possible, including a further study guide. Some of this could be withheld from book and published on-line, where size is much less of an issue.

Although virtually none of this is down on paper, much of it flows quite nicely in my head. Transcribing that, of course, is easier said than done. I would write the book largely in public on my website, both maintaining the reference text and every now and then dumping bits into the blog. Hopefully I'd get useful feedback along the way. The web would allow extra scaffolding for reference -- e.g., a timeline, a bibliography, a who's who, etc. Most of the book contents would be well known and unoriginal: certainly there are many books that cover the same ground, so much of what I figure to offer is my skill at pulling all that together into a clear and useful digest. I think I'm relatively good at that, and can imagine later moving on to longer and more detailed digests on science, history, economics, etc. -- maybe even music. The philosophical treatise in the last section is likely to be more novel. For instance, I see capitalism as a historically bounded epoch that corresponds to the rise in an S-curve over the period it takes humans to expand production to the point where it is limited by resources. Post-capitalism then needs to find an equilibrium with resources; otherwise we would be beset with repeated boom-and-bust cycles, most likely with diminishing booms and deepening busts. On the other hand, I'm quite conscious that we evolved in scarcity with selection in favor of disruptive expropriation, which is where many of our habits (often bad, but not always) have come from. Despite my reference to utopianism, I tend to think more like an engineer; i.e., as someone who understands that whatever one wants to do has to be done within the constraints of what's possible. Human nature is not immutable, but it's also not arbitrary. I have no desire to throw out something that's impossible, least of all because I'm attracted to the idea. After all, that's a big part of what's wrong with conservative thought, and that's the point of the book.

I always figured the more political parts of the blog make for rough drafts toward the book. When I started that post six months ago, one idea I had was to posit a second book, which could take the blog posts and various letters and documents and edit them down to a chronological journal of the Bush-Cheney years. That's still an idea. I'd merge a skeletal timeline in with them, edit the posts for clarity and compression, and tack on some footnote comments where appropriate. I had done some counting at the time, figuring that the notebook files (a superset of the blog posts) add up to something like 3500 pages. A lot of that is unusable -- lists and things -- and at least half is music, which may or may not be relevant. Don't know about letters and other files, but after weeding out there are probably a few hundred pages worth considering. So it's basically a big editing job, but it should be secondary to the book -- indeed, it would be worth more as a sequel, but it could be done any time.

Needless to say, there's also a huge cache of music writing scattered on the website. I've just handed in the 47th Recycled Goods column, which bumps the reviewed record count up to 2007. Don't have the Jazz Consumer Guide count handy, but it must be over 400. Jazz prospecting must be well over 1000. There's much more, albeit of decreasing quality, in the notebooks. And the rated record count is over 13,500. All this could be stuffed into a database and turned into a website. I built something like that for Robert Christgau, so it's never been beyond the range of possibility. I've just never settled on the compromises to make it work, something we can chalk up to what Brooks called "second system complex" -- the tendency to fail the second time because you got overconfident and overambitious after succeeding the first time. (Another fine example is the Iraq war.)

Meanwhile, I've spent, what, 4-5 hours working on this post about why I haven't been working on posts, interrupted mainly by shuffling low-probability jazz records and moving them from the pending to the flush files. My eyes hurt. It's late. I'd rather be reading. (Although I can't say that the recent spate of books on Russia has been cheering me up any. I look into their misery and see the same groundwork of idiocy and cruelty that Bush so aspires to.) I still have to jot down a note on a record that I neither like nor dislike. And post this.

Don't know whether I feel better or not. But I am pretty sure that the next couple of years are going to be rough going -- most likely even worse than the last few. Even if I do get that book written, I doubt that it will help much. But there's a certain satisfaction in knowing better even if you can't do anything about it. The book would help a few people know better. But a Jazz Consumer Guide would be a more immediate source of pleasure. Too bad it's such a bitch to write.

Back in Wichita, after spending the better part of a week in or near Detroit. We went to visit Laura's father, 91, living alone in the small Oak Park house Laura grew up in, and doing pretty well, all things considered. We flew this time. I'd rather drive, but it's an even thousand miles from Wichita to his door, two days and a lot of corn each way. I find the drive relaxing, but it wears on Laura, and pushing it undercuts the pleasure.

Another advantage to the car is that we can pack liberally -- I usually take some reference books, a tool box, and a cooler, which in the past let me pack home some Karoun yogurt. But flying called for minimal packing, and limited what we could carry home. When we got there, I did some work on the house, limited by my lack of tools. I also did less shopping than I would have, making notes on books rather than buying, not even bothering with the food stores. I had looked forward to the used CD shops, but only managed to get to three -- Record Time in Ferndale and Roseville, Street Corner up in Bloomfield -- winding up with a mere 18 CDs and a sore back for my efforts. Only got to two of the four bookstores I normally drop in on, and found very little I didn't already know about.

Plane trip out was uneventful, with a stop in Chicago. Trip back was delayed out of Detroit, then delayed further in Chicago, where we were queued on the runway when a squall line forced the airport to shut down. We caught a break in the weather after an hour or so, and took off before another line stormed through. Read the next day that 250 flights were cancelled in Chicago that day, so we were fortunate not to get stuck. Everything was secure when we got back.

Didn't take my notebook computer -- discovered just before packing it that the screen is burnt out, rendering it useless for travel -- but we did have a computer available there. Was able to check mail, and made some notes on web browsing, but otherwise couldn't get into my writing. Also couldn't listen to music: didn't bring any, and had no way to play anything I picked up. I've often said that music is what keeps me sane, so it's not surprising that by the end of the trip I was more than a little ragged.

We did, however, eat well: a middle eastern joint called Flaming Kabob had saganaki, a salad with spinach and chicken shwarma, and lamb kabobs; Beau Jack's had parmesan-crusted walleye; Bastone's, a Belgian restaurant in Royal Oak, had good mussels; a Polish restaurant in Hamtramck, Polish Village Cafe, had good potato pancakes, kielbasa, chicken livers, and pork chops; and of course we had lunch at the Bread Basket, a Jewish deli we've frequented nearly every trip.

Weather was surprisingly cool, but we caught a lot of rain, with reports of flooding, especially in Dearborn. I tend to black out on news when I travel, but I gather there was quite a bit of flooding in Texas/Oklahoma as well as Michigan/Ohio during the week, not to mention a big-ass hurricane down in the Caribbean. Got rain when we got back here. It's unusual to see green grass this late in the summer here. Don't seem to get much travel in these days. Was hoping for a nice car trip, at least this fall, but this one turned out to be pretty uncomfortable. But was good to see Kal, and help out as much as we could.

I've replaced the two stolen computers with new ones built from scratch. Both are slightly above mid-range machines, with nice Antec boxes, dual core processors (one AMD Athlon X2, one Intel Core2Duo), 2GB RAM, 320GB disks, PCIx16 video cards (both nVidia, one 7600 GT, the other an 8600 GS), etc. One is running Fedora Linux, the other Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition. The AMD/Linux machine came together nicely, feels rock solid. I still do a lot of my work on an ancient 333MHz Pentium, but I'm gradually shifting over to the new box. The Intel/Vista machine has been a lot of trouble, with several hardware failures and software I never managed to get to load -- wound up having to take the machine to a dealer/builder here twice, first for hardware diagnosis and again to install Vista. Finally did get it working, but I've hardly used it thus far. Just hooked up some speakers and a thermal printer, but haven't turned it on yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Anyhow, those machines aren't the topic here, although they do offer mixed lessons on building vs. buying -- the former's a good idea when it works and a bad idea when it doesn't, and from my sample the main difference is Linux vs. Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether my new Intel/Vista box will turn out to be better than what I could have bought in one of the box stores, but it certainly wound up costing more, and taking a lot more time to get working. And it's a machine I'm hardly ever going to actually use, so it certainly wasn't cost-effective for me to build. Such projects often seem smarter on the drawing board than in retrospect. What I want to write about here is another computer project, done (I suppose) because I managed to get through the last two without too many scars.

I have a lot of old computers, mostly collecting dust in the basement: the oldest is an Ithaca Intersystems S-100 bus, Z-80 cpu, with 64K RAM and two 8-inch floppy disks, bought circa 1980 -- actually, my second computer. A relatively recent one is a Gateway from around 1999 that still runs Red Hat Linux decently, although it had a tendency to crash since I upgraded the RAM and video card a few years ago. I was using it as a print server and a development machine for websites, and figured it would still be good for those things if only I solved the memory flakiness. So my big idea was to rebuilt it with a new motherboard/CPU/RAM. I set a budget of $200, and sent off an order to Newegg:

• Intel Celeron 430 CPU (Conroe core, 1.8GHz, Socket 775), in retail box with fan: $57.99
• Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2 945GC Socket 775 micro-ATX Motherboard, with 1 PATA, 4 SATA, PS/2, LPT, ethernet, sound, Intel G945 video: $54.99
• Kingston 2x1GB DDR2 667 RAM: $82.99
• Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA Hard Disk: $52.99

That actually overshot the budget a bit. My original thinking was that I'd use 1GB in the upgrade, and 1GB to replace a bad module in the Vista box, but after Kingston agreed to replace the bad module, I figured to splurge on the upgrade. The SATA disk wasn't necessary, but the Gateway had three PATA devices whereas the new motherboard only had one bus for two devices, and the old hard disk was 13.6GB, hardly worth salvaging. I've added lots of upgrade equipment over the years, but never a new motherboard before. So there turns out to have been things I hadn't thought of: the old 200W power supply only had the original ATX 20-pin power connector, whereas the new motherboard expected a 24-pin connector plus the extra 4-pin 12V spike, so I had to get a new power supply; and the Gateway case didn't have the usual standard removable back plate -- just holes for the PS/2, COM, and LPT connectors -- so I would have had to cut a large rectangular slot out of the steel backplate to fit the new connectors. So I went to a local computer store, looked around, and spent another $60 for an Apex 800 mid-tower case with a 350W power supply mounted in the bottom front. Compared to the Antecs it's cheaply built and noisy -- even without the missing (optional) case fans, just the CPU and power supply fans -- but it solved the problem without digging too deep a hole.

So when I assembled the whole thing, the only part of the old Gateway I reused was the CD-ROM drive. Tried to power the machine up and got nothing, but soon found a power supply switch hidden under the front grill, and that did the trick. Put Ubuntu Linux in the CD-ROM drive, which chugged for a while, reporting disk errors. So I pulled the Gateway drive out and replaced it with a Lite-On DVD-ROM drive from the new Intel/Vista machine. That booted Ubuntu fine, then I did the install painlessly. Booted the machine from the hard drive. It found the internet and loaded upgrades to 138 packages. I then scrounged around for a few things that Ubuntu doesn't normally think to install, like emacs, apache, php, and mysql. Set up the printer. Machine works fine. In the end I took the DVD-ROM out, although I'll probably add one at some future point.

So my project to rebuild the Gateway failed. Instead, I built a perfectly workable low-end Linux computer for $330, not counting the borrowed DVD-ROM and the monitor, keyboard and mouse, which I share through an IOGear KVM switch. Had I planned on building a low-end computer from scratch in the first place, I would have shopped more carefully for the case and power supply. There are a number of comparable alternatives in the $50-60 range, with some dropping down to $30. I'd also pick up a $30 DVD burner. (I've bought a Sony OEM drive for that.) The only other weak spot in the system is the onboard video, which limits screen resolution to 1024x768. Newegg lists more than 50 PCIx16 video cards ranging from $33-50 that would solve that problem. The power supply I got only has one SATA connector and no PCIx16, so if you need more that's something to look out for; on the other hand, it's easy enough to find adapters. The rest of what I picked out is very solid. With a $50 video card, it would probably benchmark out about the same as a $1000 computer three years ago. That may be inadequate for running Windows these days, but works fine for Linux.

I had a decent daily run going in July until yesterday, although most of the posts have been book quotes, and it helped that I had started to build up a backlog of them. Felt sick yesterday; spent most of the day in bed. Doesn't look like anything serious -- may have been something I ate. Does give me more time to read. I'm half way through Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, which seemed like the logical successor to Tom Segev's 1967. The latter provided a lot of useful detail about how Israelis viewed the war, but failed to provide much context, either in terms of what others -- notably Arabs and Russians -- were actually thinking and doing or in terms of what the war's legacy actually turned out to be. It's as if the idea is that since Israelis are so schizophrenic, not to mention voluble, that one can cover all sides of issues by only examining the numerous Israeli variants. Tolan covers the same ground in 20 pages or so, including a Palestinian viewpoint that Segev omits. Still, I have a lot of remarkable quotes marked in Segev's book. Despite my critique, I came out wanting to read his 1949, but held back figuring I have the big picture anyway. I'm trying to gear my reading toward writing, and there are few subjects I feel I've researched more adequately than Israel. (My books section currently lists 29 books on Israel, plus there are a few others listed under Middle East, etc. An idea for a future post would be a short annotation of each book on the list.)

As it is, I'm mostly muddling through. The default activity is to listen to music and write notes about it. As I write this, I have 20 jazz prospecting notes ready to post, and the database rated count for the week is +21. Both numbers are close to long term norms, but certainly aren't banner weeks. Recycled Goods for August is pretty much written. Jazz Consumer Guide is up in the air, with no clear plan to close -- although there's something to be said for trying to knock it off quickly. I'm reading about as much as usual -- the Segev book that took me all week is 585 pages, but I've always been a slow reader. But I've fallen far short of keeping up with my usual web sources -- I have several TomDispatch articles open in tabs, but can't recall looking at Juan Cole or Helena Cobban in the last 2-3 weeks. I'm not making any progress on my book. I have been making fairly steady progress on many house projects. Also way behind on some website work; e.g., for Robert Christgau, who's 4-5 Consumer Guides ahead of me, plus I barely know what else. The big recent advance is that the Vista computer is finally running. Once I plug speakers into it I will be able to download music and play DVDs, which I haven't been able to do since February. The next big push is to get to where the piles of stuff all around me are shelved somewhat sensibly. I have both short- and long-term plans for that, which is good because short-term solutions never work.

The weather has finally gotten hot around here. Don't think we've officially had a 100-degree day yet, which may be some kind of record, but it's been well in the 90s for a couple of weeks now, and more humid than usual. All the rain pretty much ruined the wheat crop -- I've seen figures 30-40% down from norms. Most of the global warming models predict drought, but a pretty sure rule of thumb is that more heat means more rain somewhere. Even if the models are fallible, that doesn't mean the outcome is going to be favorable.

I'm rambling here, but wanted to get a post in. Jazz Prospecting tomorrow, then more book posts.

I don't write much about personal stuff here. I remember when the '70s were christened the Me Decade. While that phrase has gone out of fashion, that's probably because subsequent decades have demanded more intensely self-referential, self-obsessive, self-worshipful adjectives, and I can't think of any catchy enough. Perhaps this can be solved with a little math: the '80s as the Me² Decade, the '90s as the Me³ Decade, and so forth -- although thus far the '00s are simply the Bush Decade, a continuation of the trend only if you happen to be George W. Bush.

But after a couple of disruptive, unsettling days, I feel like indulging myself a bit. I have a lot of projects. I'm actually pretty good at planning projects, and I'm not bad at managing fairly complex projects, but I do seem to have a lot of trouble getting work done myself. Aside from the intellectual exercises in trying to save the world, or more commonly understand our doom and gloom, an unreasonable compulsion to try to review every shred of music I can get my hands on, and a few website projects, I've had a few domestic homeowner projects, which grew dramatically following the Feb. 25 events.

My father had quite a reputation as a handyman. After much reflection, I'm not sure I'd credit him much further than that. His carpentry was solid and functional, but he didn't care all that much about finish -- the worst was the time he repainted the '49 Ford with a brush. As an electrician he was flat out dangerous. But he could fix almost anything, and convert the most worthless junk into semi-worthless curiosities. He bought a house before I was born and lived in it until he died, but he bought a couple more along the way for something to work on. When I was young, he expanded our house by 40%: he contracted out the foundation and framing, then finished it all himself. I've seen him hack usable rooms out of attic spaces. Any time we needed a new piece of furniture, we'd go down to the lumber yard, or the junk store.

That all seemed normal at the time, and while I wasn't nearly as good at following in his footsteps as my brother was, I did pick up a few things along the way. When I moved out on my own, I started buying tools like I knew what I was doing, and for a brief period I went through a period where I built a dozen or more pieces of furniture. I always figured that when I had my own house I'd rebuild it like he did. I always imagined him helping, but my first house was far away in Boston, and by the time I moved back to Wichita he wasn't much able to help. The upshot is that I've had this frustration building up of all the things I've wanted to do to a house but never got around to doing. So now we've decided to put some money into the house, which has set me off and turned me into something of a loose cannon.

One thing I've long wanted to do is to network the house: to put in a structured wiring system to centrally manage low power wiring to every room in the house. So that became part of the plan, even though in a 1920-vintage house it's much easier said than done. I want to be able to see the entire front porch, so decided by install some surveillance cameras. And I want to be able to communicate without opening the door, which means an intercom system. Also wanted new, stronger doors. All of this took a long time to shop for. Only now are we getting some of it installed -- Wednesday was D-Day for the doors, which also took most of Thursday, and I still have some mess to clean up, while we're still awaiting parts that they forgot about. The wiring is started but not operational yet -- the front door has the new intercom button, but it's not plugged in yet. I hope to get at least the first phase -- intercom and cameras -- working next week, but it's been a long, slow ordeal.

I also had to replace two computers, so I figured I'd buy a bunch of pieces and build them. I worried a lot about what would be my main Linux system, so I went with a conservative AMD X2 system, ASUS motherboard, 2GB RAM, RAID-mirrored 320 GB hard drives, GeForce 7600 GT video card. It came together without a hitch. The other system would run Microsoft Windows, which I need to deal with some media formats. I figured that everything there would be supported, so ordered a little more cutting edge system: Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel motherboard, 2GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, GeForce 7950 GT video card, Vista 64 Bit Ultimate Edition. It's been a nightmare. The Antec power supply was evidently DOA. The EVGA video card had a broken capacitor. I took it to a local repair shop, who replaced the power supply and pronounced the machine (except for the video card) fit. EVGA never acknowledged my RMA request, so I returned the board to Newegg, who refunded my money. I bought another video card, plugged it in, and tried to load Vista. It doesn't work -- says there's "a hardware problem" but not what. Sounds like a Microsoft problem to me, but I'm stuck and aggravated, and not sure what to do next.

Eventually I hope to move the router down to the structured wiring cabinet in the basement. Also run the phones and cable through there, and eventually the music as well. I want to build a gateway server down there to beef up the router, and add audio and video archives to tap into from anywhere in the house. To do that I need to get wiring upstairs, and to do that I've started to work on access through the attic. Thus far I've managed to build up a cache of lumber to go into the attic, and to clean up a bit around the entrance, but that's another slow project.

Longer term I want to install vinyl siding and soffits on the upstairs -- first floor is mostly brick. I've been shopping that job off and on for years. Like many such jobs, it's more than I can do, but within the grasp of my imagination. Plus, like my father, I'm picky about it. Thus far I've seen siding estimates for everything from $3800 to $17000. I came close to settling on one before last winter closed in and other problems knocked its priority down.

Longer term than that would be remodelling the kitchen: I hate the self-suffocating stove -- a fancy KitchenAid gas unit where the oven sucks so much air away from the burners that they fail to light, or if lit burn so unevenly that the igniters kick in -- and the counter tops are crap. The rest is more/less tolerable, but I really need a vent, and more storage would be better. Decor is something we haven't touched since moving in, other than by covering almost every wall with book or CD shelving. The latter would be improved with more built-ins. My niece fancies a career in interior design, so I'm looking to her for ideas. The only other big thing on the drawing board would be to carve a second bathroom out of the larger bedroom. That might be the biggest functional improvement, but it's also the most separable and the least necessary -- for now, the easiest to postpone.

I bought a home design software package to run on the Windows box when/if I get it running. I should then be able to build a 3D model of the entire house, inside and out. No telling how much mischief that will get me into, but for now, at least, it doesn't work. In theory it should help. In practice it will most likely be another weird and buggy piece of software that will irritate me to no end. Maybe it will inspire another endless project: a paper design for a free software replacement.

When these projects go right you feel like you're able to understand and take some measure of control over your world. When they don't, you feel like a hopeless idiot, blinded by the hubristic notion that you think you can have it all your way. As it is, I keep getting bounced back and forth between these poles, ultimately making me think that the real expertise I'm developing is a finer understanding of how and why so many things go wrong. But that's something I've been doing all my life, so it may just be the paradox of the thinking human condition.

This week's jazz got interrupted by the door ordeal, so I've fallen a bit behind, but should recover for the June deadline. Recycled Goods shouldn't be too bad. Got a gratifying note from Randy Haecker at Legacy, concluding "You review more music than anybody!" He should know, because he send me more than anyone. I got a request from the Voice to write something for the June Jazz Supplement, but figured I had too much else looming, so turned it down. In some sense, that's an admission that I don't see much of a future in jazz writing, but it's a good sign that they wanted a piece.

Also interrupted was the blog, but after skipping two days, I write three pieces today. Started working on a book post yesterday, pulling quotes from Ira Chernus' Monsters to Destroy. I have so many books like that to thumb back through, that will probably be my fallback mode over the next few weeks. On the other hand, I haven't gotten back to a scratch file entry I started at least a month ago: the idea was to raise the question of whether it would be worthwhile to try to hack the notebook and other writings into a chronology of the Bush era. I don't know, but it seems possible. One thing there's plenty of is volume.

Just a few more pages to go in Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, with many more books awaiting my attention. Thought I'd take a break yesterday and cook dinner. Tried to make chicken biryani and screwed it up several ways. It's a dish I've had bad luck with in the past, but I figured I knew better by now -- another case of overreach. But everything else, especially the brinjal bartha (eggplant, tomatoes, onions, spices), came out fine. So it's been going; so it seems always to go. I'm feeling fortunate. For one thing, I know it could be much worse.

Aside from a note ducking Jazz Prospecting this week, I haven't posted anything to the blog since March 28. Posts have been spotty before then, too, although I did manage a burst in mid-March, partly fueled by book reports. I thought it might be time to offer a status report. Aside from the physical and mental stresses, the robbery five weeks ago resulted in a long list of things to do which I have been moving through rather slowly. For instance, we have a plan for various home improvements -- mostly relating to security, but that's also scratched a long-time itch for better network wiring. So I've been chasing down information, talking to contractors, trying to figure it out, and all that takes a lot of time. We've installed some lighting that still has some problems, ordered some doors that haven't arrived yet, and are getting close to settling on other bits and pieces.

Even worse has been the computer problems. Two machines that I bought in late 2005 were stolen and needed to be replaced: a Linux box that I was doing most of my work on, and a Windows box that I sometimes had to resort to for their proprietary file crap. In the meantime, I've fallen back on two older machines, which are slow and increasingly crash-prone. I've limped along with them, but one effect is that I've cut way back on my news browsing -- hence, I've lacked the stimuli that kick off most of my posts. I've been slow replacing them because the technology has moved on quite a bit in two years: dual core 64-bit hacks (AMD 64, Intel's EMT64) are now standard in my price category, DDR2 memory is up to 800 MHz, PCI Express x16 has obsoleted AGP, SATA has reduced PATA down to one connector/two devices on most motherboards, video cards compete more and more on things like hardware shading, TV tuners have become commodity-priced, and the political economy of operating systems has shifted. The latter has been particularly annoying: I've noticed that it's become much harder to find compatibility information on Linux than it used to be. To some extent this may have been because Linux support has become routinized, especially if you're willing to compromise and use closed source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA. But it may also be that since DOJ caved in on the Microsoft antitrust suit, Microsoft has been able to muscle the hardware companies away from public support of Linux. In the end, I wound up just throwing my hands up in the air and ordering a bunch of hardware with no real guarantee of support. It may be that it will all run out of the box fine, but if so that will be a first in my experience, and I've never felt more alone. We'll see: I have parts on order for an AMD X2 2.8GHz, ASUS motherboard, 2GB RAM, 2 320GB disks, NVIDIA 7600GT video card, DVD-ROM and DVD burner. Will know more next week.

As for the Windows system, I'm still researching that. Everyone says the Intel Core 2 Duo processors are much faster than AMD X2s, but the LGA 775 motherboards look less impressive -- especially the ones with Intel P965 chipsets. (On the other hand, the rule of thumb with Intel processors is to go with Intel motherboards, so you see my quandry.) Then there's the new, no doubt buggy, Windows Vista vs. the old, still buggy, Windows XP. And within that the question of 64-bit vs. 32-bit. I think the answer for my needs is to go with Vista 64-bit and ride it out. It's not a critical machine for me, so I figure I should look forward. But it winds up being a more expensive machine for less utility, so, well, my ingrained sense of cost-effectiveness is taking a beating. That's true on all these shopping issues, but we're feeling lucky to still be here.

I'm close to figuring this out, at least well enough to order. I'm not worried about Windows compatibility, since that's what everyone builds to, so the Windows machine will be more advanced. Also, given $200 for Vista, more expensive. But eventually Linux will run on it too, and in a better world that would be sooner. The other shopping issues are also coming to a head, although as David Owen points out, you never really want home projects to end -- otherwise, you'll have to think of something new. I still want new siding and a better kitchen and maybe a second bath upstairs, so I have fallback options.

On the writing front, the April Recycled Goods is done but as I understand it won't be posted until this weekend. I'll post on that when it happens. Only started jazz prospecting yesterday, so next week will be short but at least there'll be something. Most of the website-related work I've been doing has been in the Books section. I'm going through all the old notebook entries and pulling out scraps I've written on books since 2001. I've found over 100, so next update there'll be a lot more there. In doing so, I've skimmed through and started to think that it might be possible to edit that stuff down to a useful and interesting chronicle of the Bush era. I'll write more about that and the book project(s) when I finish scrounging.

For those readers in Kansas, KSN has shot a "Crimestoppers" sequence on our incident. This will air on Sunday, and I guess will be on their website later on. There's been little or no progress on finding the criminals, so the police hope this will generate some fresh leads. I dodged the thing, but Laura talks off camera, and they took a lot of video of the inside of our car trunk. I'm not optimistic about what they've done, but it's not our place to tell them how to do their jobs.

Weather has been weird here in Kansas. Had three weeks with overcast skies and rain almost every day, followed by a little sun and an explosion of pollen and histamines. Temperature got up into the 80s, with everything bright and green, then yesterday it got cold, clouded up, and snowed. Very strange to see white snow on top of so much green.

Otherwise, we keep on keeping on, and some of these problems will get worked out before too long.

Here's another article on the events I referred to yesterday.

I haven't decided what to do about March Recycled Goods yet. It will either be a week or so late or I'll skip the month. I was able to finish the editing on Jazz Consumer Guide, so it will appear as scheduled on or around March 7.