It was a quiet weekend in Lake Woebegone (to paraphrase a program I stopped listening to years back). The weather was mild for July hereabouts. On Saturday I made a full frontal assault on my renter’s door latch and finally got it working properly. On my uncle Orvis’ advice, I took my Dremel tool to the hole in the striker plate. After some work I discovered that the hole needed to be extended, not sideways, but up. I wore down a grinder head (they made those old striker plates strong back in 1929. Nowadays they’re thin brass. I think this one must have been cast iron), but I prevailed in the end.

Another crisis met and mastered.

On Sunday I actually went to a museum to look at paintings, something I never do.

It came about in this fashion: My friend Chip called me some time back and said he had tickets to this exhibit of Scandinavian landscape paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (the link includes a slide show featuring some of the artworks, in case you’re interested).

I took it for granted he’d gotten the tickets from somebody, didn’t want them, and was trying to give them away. Most anything Scandinavian is fascinating to me (except for their furniture and their politics), but I wasn’t keen to drive around looking for parking in that particular “vibrant, diverse” neighborhood. And anyway, I had no one to use the second ticket. So I told him no.

Then he explained, and I comprehended at length, that he actually wanted to go himself, and was planning to go, and just wanted company. So I agreed.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. The sorrow and pity of the thing was that as the exhibition went on (it was more or less chronologically arranged), the paintings got less interesting to me. I loved the earlier, realistic, Romantic pictures with ships at sail and big storms and bent trees. As the fashion grew more impressionistic and abstract, it all became more and more about the artists and their own states of mind (usually depression). Yes, I’m a Philistine, and I’m proud of it.

Still, it was all interesting. I can look at art with a small trace of comprehension, because I used to draw myself. A lot.

When I was a kid, my life plan was to be some kind of artist. Not a fine artist, but either a commercial artist or a cartoonist. I drew obsessively. Whenever I run into an old classmate, I can count on them asking me, “Are you still drawing?”

My subject matter was a “dead” giveaway. I liked guns. I liked swords. I liked fighting and battles. If were a school kid today, they’d ship me off to a psychologist for counseling (which wouldn’t be a bad thing, come to think of it). My chief subject was the Civil War, until I discovered Vikings. Then I drew Viking battles. Two recurring characters in those old Viking pictures eventually became Erling Skjalgsson (as I think of him) and Lemming, both familiar if you’ve read The Year of the Warrior.

And then, toward the end of high school, I started writing. I think the catalyst for the change may have been my learning to type. I’d always been frustrated with my drawing. What ended up on paper was never exactly what I’d been shooting for, and I always felt I was hammering at the brick wall of my talent limitations. When I started making stories, that frustration vanished, or at least was greatly reduced. I felt I had (or would be able to attain) real mastery of this medium.

So I stopped drawing, pretty much unconsciously. It was some time before I even noticed I’d given it up.

But it’s still enjoyable to look at well-done painting.

There were a couple Edvard Munch’s (the Scream guy’s) works in the collection, but give me J. C. Dahl, for my money.

Where do you like to read? Favorite chair? In the tub? Down on the ccean floor? I have a chair in my house which is cursed with a sleeping hex, I suspect. Whenever I try to read in it, I have to fight off sleep.

In which each player lists eight facts/habits about themselves, the rules of the game being posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed, eight people tagged at the end of the post, listing their names. The player then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read his blog.

In this post, I am to list eight facts/habits about myself, and I’m tempted to list such banal observations as my possession of ten fingers and two ears. No matter what you think about me, I do in fact have ten fingers and, though I can’t see them at the moment, I also have two ears. What else is there to know about me?

1. Here’s a deep one. Though I believe a newish pair of khakis shrunk an inch in the wash, I still wear them. I look silly in them sometimes, but I am silly sometimes so maybe it fits me perfectly.
2. Like Lars, I have read The Lord of the Rings aloud to my wife, children, and sister-in-law–The Hobbit and part of The Silmarillion too.
3. I also read The Man Who Was Thursday off the Internet to my fabulous wife, and my oldest girl, who was three or four, heard part of it and asked to hear it again a little later. She is so cute.
4. I wear size 11.5 shoes and currently own two pair of ECCO brand. They have been great, comfortable shoes, but when they wear out, I think I’ll buy something cheap. Maybe a penny-loafer.
5. I am in the habit of rising promptly with my morning alarm and falling asleep in a chair a few minutes later, sometimes bending over in such a way that my arms or legs go to sleep too. I’m trying to break that habit.
6. I work as an in-house graphic designer for CBMC.
7. Sometime this year, I hope to start a fight in the steel cage at iStockphoto. I don’t have the skills for it yet. The photo editing I did a little while back–kid’s stuff.
8. In college, a friend and I wrote a little murder mystery for our friends to role-play. It didn’t come off the way I wanted, but it was fun, so I supposed we succeeded in our first time at role-playing a story. My co-writer got herself murdered because she knew who the real criminal was and wanted to see all of the action, so she pursued him, not thinking she could easily become a victim.

Tags: Jared of Thinklings (and whatever other blogs he plants)

Philip of Thinklings

Mark Bertrand

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard

Kevin of Collected Miscellany

Scott, who is the nameless warrior

Amy of Books, Words, and Writing

and You. Leave a comment to let me know where you post your list. (Most links removed because they ain’t good no longer.)

Listening to talk show host Laura Ingraham in the mornings doesn’t usually lower my spirits, but today was just depressing.

She made a comment about guys who don’t know how to kiss. “They’re the worst,” she said, if I remember correctly.

Cut me to the quick, that one did.

Now I know how liberals feel, getting personally attacked on talk radio.

The issue never actually came up in my life, social phobic that I am, until the time I played Tony in “You Can’t Take It With You,” (Jimmie Stewart played him in the movie version, because I was unavailable [that is, not yet born] at the time). I’d always assumed that the thing must be fairly easy, but the mechanics gave me unexpected trouble. I’d never realized that you had to do something about The Nose In the Way Problem.

I’m sure the woman who played Alice thought I was a complete dork.

I’m also sure she was right.

But as far as Laura Ingraham is concerned, I now begin to see the logic behind the Fairness Doctrine. If that rule were in place, maybe I could go on the air and offer a spirited defense of socially handicapped dorks everywhere. Call for a federal program or something.

In closing, I offer this link to a brilliant recent post on the Iowahawk blog. I’ve been meaning to share it for several days, and it’s as good a way as any to close out this embarrassing post.