friday night 10pm.

I have not blogged for a while. We got back from vacation in Arizona on Monday night. After a long trip we pulled into the driveway and discovered that the garage door would not open. As I entered the house through the front door I discovered that the power was out. A neighbor left a note informing us that our side of the street had been without power since 11:30 the night before. Last July 4h we endured a 36 hour outage. I'm not sure what's going on, I'm 37 and in all the other places I've lived I never remember the power being out longer than 2 hours and now two extensive outages in the last nine months.

Back in the realm of pizza delivery there was an article in the Indianapolis star about a disturbing incident that occured while I was away.

Pizza deliveryman could be charged in death

Apparently someone tried to rob a pizza deliveryman who was armed with a handgun. The assailant's weapon was not loaded but the pizza-man's gun was. The would be robber was fatally shot 10-15 times. The deliveryman was later fired from his job for carrying a firearm which is against Pizza Hut policy. The newspaper article provided one the stranger quotes I've seen in a while. The pizza man when interviewed said:

"I'm a pretty down-to-earth kind of person. With everything that's transpired since 9/11, killing these days almost seems a necessity if it means your life or theirs."

I had no idea there was a connection between delivering pizzas and the War on Terror.

sunday night 10pm.

I spent Friday and Saturday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Friday was a work party, Saturday to run a gift shop for Canine Companions for Independence. On one trip to the restroom I saw some graphitti that read "In Wotan we trust." I thought it was fairly amusing coming from the track crowd. On Saturday we saw a fight break out in front of our shop. Two guys in jeans, no shirt and one with a bloody nose. About 20 law enforcement officers from 5 different departments descended on the scene. Both miscreants were hauled away in electric carts most likely ending up at the county jail.

I started reading "Middlesex", I think I'm going to enjoy this book. Part of it takes place in Asia Minor in 1922 as the forces of Kemal Ataturk are driving the Greeks out of modern day Turkey. I'd been to Izmir formerly Smyrna, back in 1988 but did not know much of its long history and nothing about the massacre that took place there in 1922. The book will soon move on to Detroit, a city I last visited in 1980.

movie/book ideas.

Somehow I've got the idea in my head to do some sort of project revolving around pizza delivery. Just off the top of my head:

# quit your job and find work delivering pizzas. It could be one of those "embedded journalism" projects like when Ted Conover the writer became a prison guard at Sing-Sing to write "New Jack". I'd get a job delivering pizzas in Marin or Westchester counties so there'd be a social commentary about it. Low wage worker delivers pizzas to the rich. Along with the social economic aspect, I could research the history of delivery. How were things delivered in the mideaval ages? Who ordered the first delivery pizza?, who came up with the whole idea?
Why can't you order a pizza for delivery in Europe?
Also one could explore the science of delivery and the algorithms that are used to determine fastest delivery routes. Are two left turns and one right turn over 1 mile quicker than making 3 right turns in 1.2 miles. A "fantasy" table of contents would be

1. Delivery Daze: How I traded in my mousepad for the world of pizza delivery.
2. Using the method of least squares and Kalman filtering to approximate optimized delivery routes in suburban Atlanta.
3. John P. Domino, the man who launched 1000 pizzas.

I got other more fictional ideas as well but this is enough "outside of the box" thinking for now.

I was at work today listening to some Led Zeppelin songs. I had the sudden urge to play Risk, Monopoly or some other Milton Brothers board game. I remember growing up and my older brother and his friends would always play these board games and listen to Led Zeppelin on the record player. "Houses of the Holy" was an all time favorite and I can remember many times attacking Kamatchka or Irustuk while listening to the "Rain Song". I was only 10 or 11 at the time and didn't really like Led Zeppelin. These gaming sessions did pay off because when I entered the 8th grade four years later at a new school and hardly knew anyone I fell in with a crowd who were Zep fans. My familiarity with the tunes paid off as it helped me win some new friends and by this time I actually liked the music. It's just like classical, an aquired taste.
For some reason I referred to "Dazed & Confused" as "the Truck Driving song". Perhaps because it went on for so long that I found it had some relation to driving a truck cross country. Kids say the darndest things.

Monday morning almost 8 am

I had it all figured out last night. Arise at 6 am make a cup of tea, drink tea while watching C-Span, head downstairs meditate then take the dog for a long walk.
Contrary to these plans I arose at 7 to the sound of the "lawnmower man" cutting the neighbors yard across the street. Throughout the spring and summer months he'll show up every Monday morning with his riding lawnmower to cut grass. It's an indication of the start of spring the first Monday he shows up in April.

Yesterday we had a visitor from out of town. We went down to the canal walk, as we're heading down Meridian St, we get to 34th street and I pointed out Shortridge Middle School, Kurt Vonnegut's high school. Whenever I pass that building with someone from out of town, I'll point that out. It's been years since I've read any of his books but its one of those "Indy fun facts" that I never fail to mention.

Tuesday night, it's getting dark outside.

I have in front of me a copy of Die Pulfer von Rüeggisberg it's a family history of my paternal grandmother's lineage in Switzerland. It's a little over 110 pages long and goes back to about 1530 to trace the history of the Pulfers. My grandmother is mentioned in one sentence as is her marriage to my grandfather. That's the end of the line as they only cover paternal lines. It's in German and I have some trouble reading it but I did find that my great-great grandfather was a milker who had about 15 kids and whose grandfather was a wainwright who had 17 kids. I think his wife had 17 kids, her first when she was 17 the last at age 45, all but two surviving until adulthood. I'll need to go back and read the document a little more carefully. Today if you meet someone with 4 kids it's seems like a lot.

I've also been reading the Dante Club by Matthew Pearl for my book club at work. It's been a chore. The prose is wooden, the characters talking in "19th century talk". It's fiction but based on historical characters, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell among others. It's a bit much, there's a brief encounter with Emerson, they employ the assistance of the famous geologist Aggasiz. I almost expect Napoleon III to come crashing into the plot in a hot air balloon errantly blown in from France. I've also been getting this bizarre imagery of the Monty Python cast playing the characters, Michael Palin as Longfellow, John Cleese as Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have trouble with the mixing of fact and fiction as someone might have trouble with mixing of foods on the dinner plate. Still, I like the idea of reading a novel a month as otherwise I would endlessly read news articles from Yahoo!News, New York Times and the Washington Post.

It's Saturday night and a bit rainy outside.
I went and took the dog out for a walk. We usually head out after dark and "patrol" the dark, sidewalk free streets of my neighborhood. Tonight as we headed south we saw an uncommon site for my area. It was a kids birthday party just ending so there were about 15 kids bouncing around in the driveway as mini-vans and SUVs were pulling up to get their children. One kid was literally bouncing on the driveway as he jumped up and down on a pogo stick. Other kids were pushing each other down the drive on a cart. One bunch almost ran into me and the hound as we strolled by.

There aren't many children in my area so the sight of so many in one driveway at once was suprising. I live within the bounds of a large urban school district so most people with kids live in the 'burbs. On my street there are only two school age children and I believe they attend parochial schools. In four years of living here I don't think I've met one person in the neighborhood who send their kids to public schools.

To change themes, I'm a big train buff and was checking out some of my favorite rail sites.
Erik's rail news is a good source of up to date rail information. Where I live there are no passenger trains to speak of so I must get by train fix through cyberspace. Swiss Gotthard Project Details the new Gotthard tunnel being built in Switzerland. It will go beneath the existing Gotthard tunnel and speed up transit times between northern and southern Europe.