Spoilers abound.  Read at your peril.

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You’ve just received a birthday present from your mother via UPS, but your birthday isn’t until tomorrow.  Do you open the present right away, or do you wait?

Some days are destined to be expensive.  This, alas, is one of them.  I knew it was bound to be, because I had my appointment with Mike the blinds guy, but it didn’t quite go like I expected.

The morning began with $200 worth of dentistry, for a cleaning and exam plus a genuinely awful full-mouth set of x-rays.  This was followed by $450 worth of tires.  My rear-passenger side tire had developed a slow leak, which fact I failed to notice until much too late, due to my failure to approach the car from the passenger side, like, ever.  The result was that I stupidly ran on the tire while it was all but flat, resulting in severe damage to the sidewall.  I knew that I was going to need to replace at least two of the tires because of this, but thought it likely that I’d need all four.  I’m glad I prepared myself for the worst-case scenario here; the car only has 47,000 miles on it, but it’s seven years old (yes, I never drive anywhere at all), and the Firestones that came as original equipment on the car were showing their age.  The tire guy showed me significant crackage between the steel belt and the sidewall, and told me that Firestones have a bad tendency toward tread separation as they age.  I don’t drive an SUV, but would still prefer to drive with the treads attached to my tires; ergo, four new ones.

And all this was before the financial main event of the day, the visit from Mike the blinds guy.  I’ve been putting off getting the windows in the living room/dining room taken care of, but the heat of the last month (and, of course, an imminent visit from my parents, who will no doubt be horrified that I haven’t gotten my windows treated after six months) finally pressed me into action.  A couple of decisions, a little internet research, and a phone call later, and I had an appointment with Mike.  He arrived with a kit full of samples, and I thorougly surprised myself by actually liking the polywood better than the real wood, in the shade I wanted.  The polywood (a PVC/wood blend) is heavier, but super-durable, and 50% less expensive.  And honestly, from a distance of greater than a foot away, I’d have been hard pressed to tell that the sample wasn’t actually wood.  I’m hoping I haven’t let the expensiveness of my day affect my choice here, and I’m hoping that what was true of the sample turns out to be true of the finished blinds, but at the moment, at least, I’m feeling pretty confident about my choice.  And astonishingly, Mike the blinds guy is only charging me just under $700 for the nine windows I’m having him cover—and that includes installation.

Today, I really needed to be surprised by the lowness of a price.  Thanks, Mike.

Sitting in the club lounge in HNL, waiting for a flight that is still hours away.  The last day in Hawaii is always hard, not least because your flight never leaves until late evening, but your hotel boots you out in the early afternoon.  And the thought of leaving is always so depressing that all you can do is get to the airport and get settled quickly enough that you can begin to forget you were ever in paradise at all.

We get to LAX at something like 5 am, after which we get to retrieve luggage and vehicle and make the trek eastward into the desert.  And after that, we fully plan on collapsing for most of the morning.

And then begins the last mad week of summer, in which we try both to enjoy our last bits of freedom and prepare for the onslaught ahead.  This is the point every summer when I suddenly wake up thinking, wasn’t it just May a week or so ago?

Via meg, a new response to the Ivan Tribble column, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,”, this one published as a letter to the editor in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.  Writes David R. Sewell, the Editorial and Technical Manager of the University of Virginia Press’s electronic imprint:

It may be unwise, as the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble suggests, for an academic job seeker to permit too much self-disclosure in a blog that members of hiring committees may read, whether or not the job seeker invites them to do so. And revealing too much on a blog may even be unprofessional.

But at least it is not loathsome. That is an adjective I would reserve for the behavior of a humanities professor hiding behind a pseudonym who assigns mocking epithets to unsuccessful applicants and describes their online publishing activity in sufficient detail that any of them who chance to read “Bloggers Need Not Apply” (Careers, July 8) will surely recognize themselves as the object of the professor’s pitiless scorn.

There’s not been much in the way of posting from here, in part because that trickle of leaky wi-fi has been erratic at best (damn leaky wi-fi!  Be reliable!), and in part because I’ve been too relaxed even to recognize material around me worth blogging.  I haven’t even pulled out either of the cameras once since we got here; for once, I’m experiencing, not recording.

And I also haven’t posted in part because I’ve actually been writing.  Or not really writing.  More pre-writing—the kinds of preliminary work that are necessary before launching on a big new project.  In this case, that preliminary work requires writing, but they’re sentences that no one but me will ever see, so it’s hard for me to think of them as “writing,” per se.

Whatever; the point is I’ve been doing that writing, and not this writing.  This is the other reason I haven’t posted much:  brain is in a pretty comfortable afternoon-nap and mai-tai fog.  I’m starting to look forward to clearing out those cobwebs, to doing a serious de-tox and house-getting-in-order in preparation for the fall.  I know it’s perverse of me to be thinking about that with the ocean in front of me, but… well, it’s par for the course.

This completely useless post brought to you by my next mai-tai.

So last night, we’re flipping through the channels and trying to pretend like we don’t realize that we’re missing the second-to-last Six Feet Under ever, and we stumble across a Japanese-language channel, KBFD, which is apparently airing some kind of soap opera.  Apparently, because while the thing was subtitled, we only saw about thirty seconds’ worth, but those thirty seconds were worth an awful lot.

To wit:  a very good-looking upper-middle class Japanese couple is having a screaming fight.  Or at least she’s screaming; he appears to be in massive retreat.  What we catch of the dialogue is the following:

He:  Okay, okay—and I’ll stop taking the cooking class!

She:  And get rid of your blog right now!

At which point their small child appears, and tearfully asks why mommy and daddy are fighting again.  “It’s okay,” her mother tells her, tears streaming down her own face.  “Mommy’s just very angry.”

I found myself awake much of the night obsessing over this scene.  Had his outside interests really carried him so far away from his familial responsibilities that the benefits of the cooking class were completely overshadowed by the mere fact of his periodic absence from the home?  And what was it about his blog that was so upsetting?  His links to the hot mommy bloggers?  His comment-thread political arguments?  His repeated dissing of the MSM?

Alas, we moved on in our channel-surfing, so I have no idea how it all turned out.  But the speculation is at least 80% of the fun.

Say, for reasons that are absolutely, positively, Nobody’s Fault, you find yourself in one seriously grouchy goddamn mood.  Like fight-picking grouchy.  Fight-picking with total strangers grouchy.  And say, for the sake of argument, that you find yourself in this mood in a place and at a time that are entirely inappropriate and wasteful—during your vacation, for instance, with a view of shockingly blue ocean from your balcony.  Say you want to get out of this mood, and into a more life-affirming and vacation-appreciating one Pee Dee Queue.  What’s your favorite mood changer?

Mine’s usually a hard run.  Just tried it.  Didn’t work.  Damnit.

So my last post garnered me more than one slightly shocked “you brought your laptop to Hawaii?” from my faithful correspondents, which didn’t make me reconsider that decision, but which did make me think through why the choice was, to me, obvious.  It’s not just that the little Powerbook and I have fused, flesh and machine nearly indistinguishable one from the other, though that’s arguably true as well.  It’s that I’ve always done some of my best writing while on vacation with R., and so our trips are nearly always built around such work, to some extent or another.

And again, the time zone thing works in our favor here.  By 10 am, we’ve spent several hours working, had breakfast, worked a bit more, gone to the gym, and are ready to hit the pool or the beach or whatever else appeals.  The trip is far from all-work—we have extended periods of laziness—but the writing is part of the trip’s point.

For me, there’s nothing more head-clearing than going away somewhere, some place with different sights and sounds and tastes, some place where there are no meetings or household chores, where there is no possibility of being caught in the hallway by someone asking you to do something.  In the absence of all that, I can finally sit down with a new project idea and begin to sort out what it is, why I want to do it, and how it’s going to work.  That energy can then be carried back home—where inevitably some portion of it gets dissipated by the meetings and the chores and the million annoying requests, but at least some glimmer, some memory of it remains.  Which is enough for a while.

I’d completely forgotten, since I was last here, that one of my favorite things about Hawaii is its time zone.  Hawaii is to California as California is to the east coast:  three hours earlier.  Coming here, I try to avoid resetting my internal clock, and instead go to bed super-early.  That part’s not the good part, though.  The good part is getting up at 4.00 am and sitting on the lanai with the Powerbook and some caffeine, and getting a good three-hour jump on everyone else around.  It’s hard not to feel productive if you’re up this early, even if you spend some part of the time answering email and reading blogs.

(This post courtesy of the teeny stream of leaky wi-fi I’ve found out here.  Thanks to its provider, wherever you may be.)