Spring's set to arrive in less than half an hour (10:26 PST), and it can't get here fast enough.

Although it's now over a dozen degrees (with a waning gibbous moon), it feels less than that because of the wind. Much less. I'm wearing a charcoal gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood up over a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, socks, boxers, and fuzzy suede slippers, and I can't wait to change into something colorful. Maybe something with orange, something to not only welcome the new season but that will identify me as a Californian.

The trouble is, I'm not convinced it's shorts weather yet.

I'm looking forward to warmer days as well as hoping that "young man's fancy" stuff may roll up its sleeves and get to work. I'm primed, but I'm not sure if the upcoming season has the same effect on women. They can be a fickle lot, demanding and whatnot, but I guess from their POV men can be the same.

But we aren't, not really.

What I'm hoping for this spring is gainful employment. Yeah, that's more up to me than it is the sun and stars, but I think it's a worthy goal. Being a full time writer hasn't gotten me anywhere, nowhere at all lately, and I miss being surrounded by people who consider me wonderful.

Or, I could buy a winning lottery ticket or stumble across a big bag of fifties.

Yesterday I rode to the nearby little market to pick up some much needed supplies (root beer and my favorite hot sauce) and received a free flat tire.

This happens much more frequently on bicycles than it does on cars, and I'm not sure if that's because we're forced to ride in crappy, litter-filled parts of the street or if it's because the components of a bicycle tire are cheap. I've had my share of auto flats, too, and they're no fun, but bicycle flats are easier to fix.

So, this morning I fixed my flat and here it is, two hours later, and the tire's still holding air, the way it's supposed to. I have to admit I'm still unexpectedly thrilled when the results of my labors work out as intended, though I shouldn't be. I've probably repaired twenty or thirty bike flats in my life.

Car flats? Only one. What I most often do is pull off the flat (loosening the lug nuts *before* jacking the car up) and replace it with the spare, then buy a new tire. One way to make sure I can do that is to rotate the tires myself. Those car places seem to take some perverse joy in over-tightening the wheels, far beyond the specifications, with the result that the wrench you find in your trunk is useless.

(By the way, when I had my accident a few years ago, the wheel stayed attached. Everything up to the axle came off.)

Bikes, however, are easier to work on, and not just because you can do it indoors. This latest flat was the first for the rear tire, which is trickier because of the chain, but I was able to patch it. This means my spare inner tube is still in its original box, factory fresh, and waiting for a more serious puncture.

It looks as though I'll survive yet another day of infamy. I wasn't warned about any attacks on my life, which may explain my lack of concern, but once again I sailed through the Ides of March without so much as a bruising fistfight.

In fact, the only attempt on my life was self-inflicted. Throwing caution to the winds, I drank some milk with an expiration date of the fourteenth. Only time will tell if I'll survive. I should remember to check my site statistics to see if there's a dropoff in readers and bots, any one of whom may have been the subject of a more successful attack.

I haven't checked my numbers lately, and for good cause. I haven't been saying much of interest, so I'm writing now, mostly, out of habit. My opinions are common ones, and I'm not an expert on anything I write about. I thought, for a time, that the world should reward me, but I'm not convinced of that any more.

Still, it's been a good day.

Sometimes I consider myself clever because I can figure some things out. Today the cable guy came to clear up dropping channels, and I think it was his first day on the job. His first remark was he'd never seen a TiVo, and I figured that must be what he's taught to say, since it's not Comcast-supplied equipment. To his credit, he didn't blame it for the problem.

The channels that had been dropping, of course, were all coming in fine once he showed up. Still, he had something to do since NBC was coming in with all sorts of pale diagonal lines and ghosts. That, he blamed on the TV.

I objected.

The TV, I reasoned, is on channel three and gets all it's information from the cable box (after being run through the TiVo). I don't think it knows, or cares, if the signal it's receiving is HBO or the Food Network, and this talk of the picture tube crapping out sounded like a reach. If that were the case, I'd figure it to show up on all of the channels, at least occasionally, and not only and always on NBC.

He made some calls, climbed a ladder, and another guy showed up who had to climb the pole out back. In the end, the first guy said they replaced a ground block, the second guy said that wasn't it, but the picture's fine now.

Still, there's less on NBC than there is on Fox News.

But that's not the point.

The guy knows his stuff, sure, and talked about readings and had a great bag filled with tools that made me drool, but he never listened to me. I've been noticing that a lot, lately, that I've lost my charisma or charm or some such thing, and most people when I talk to them cut me off and tell me what they want me to hear instead of hearing me out.

It can be a gracious thing, just a total disregarding of what I was saying, with the other person picking up her end of the conversation as if I hadn't said a thing, or, more likely, I start a anecdote and am met with a look that says "Is there a point to this?" or "Does this story have an end?"

Man, that hurts. I used to be entertaining, or thought I was, and people would come and visit or welcome me and beg me to talk and tell them things. I have a different way of talking or something, I guess, and they'd hang on my every word, enjoying hearing the tale as much as I'd enjoy telling it.

Now, not so much. I must have lost somewhere a connection with the world and what it finds interesting. I'm missing a quart or two of relevance but what's worse is that what I say is no longer of interest, almost as if I've outgrown my welcome.

Maybe I just need to buck it up, drop the cute diversions and personal insights, and act as if I'm talking to Sgt Joe Friday. Maybe that's all people want now, in these hurried times.

This next weekend the swallows are returning to Capistrano (San Juan Capistrano, for the fussy), and if they have any sense at all they'll stop off in Tijuana first and pick up some knock-off North Face Gore-Tex parkas.

Sure, they'll fall apart quickly, but I suspect the weather to change in the next few weeks, and the stitching should hold together that long. Then, they can use the puffy stuff to feather their nests!

There was a hummingbird yesterday trapped in the back hallway, where the washer and dryer and water heater live. It was successfully chased out, but I'm sure it cost the little fellow a month of his life due to stress on his heart. I don't know how long she or he was in there, but I doubt there was anything to eat. I haven't checked the Borax, though.

Which reminds me: I've been told that concerned animal lovers toss their dryer lint outside, where birds can find and use it. Also, I like the line about how, theoretically, if you wash and dry your clothes enough they'll eventually disappear.

But enough of that. The main reason I made this entry was to surprise anyone foolish enough to do a Google search on swallowing Gore-Tex.

I don't have any of those fancy inventions that contain alcohol, mercury, or bi-metal strips that let me see how cold it is, but I have an extension on my Firefox browser that gives me the weather at a place within walking distance that's fairly bristling with weather-related devices: LAX.

This morning, for shits and giggles, after the Formula 1 race concluded and just as the sun was rising I checked it out. The number of degrees listed were five, which is a big number if we're talking about children, but not so big when we're discussing degrees Centigrade.

Later today, browsing around (in both a T-shirt and a long-sleeved, fleece top) I saw that last night's low isn't the coldest it's ever been in Los Angeles. We've got a few degrees to lose before we reach that number, set some time in the mid 1800s.

For the love of all that's good and holy, it's cold here. I'm seriously thinking of ordering more goose down to stuff into my comforter, maybe arranging some combo deal for pate as well.

I prefer it when we're the envy of the nation.

The other night I had a dream where I took a refreshing shower inside an oilcloth contraption on a city bus, but real buses don't have those, not that I've seen.

Here in Los Angeles we don't talk much about public transportation, and that's fine with us. We're all beautiful people here, far removed from the world, and while we're far too hip to ever voice anything unsavory or hurtful, we tackle the underclass by not saying anything about them at all.

We'd prefer not to even think of those who ride buses as the underclass, which is a hateful, derogatory term, but that's who they are here. It's easier to think about oil addiction when we're sealed up in our cars, away from the world we inhabit, than it is to consider those whom we punish by making them ride buses.

There are three or four types of people who ride buses, and none of them are anyone you'd ever want to be. There are the teens who lack the social graces to have friends old enough to drive them around, and they like to demonstrate their rudeness by yelling and treating the world as their oyster. They'll be fine once they get the old enough to buy a car.

Then there are the elderly and infirmed. These are people we refuse to think about except in the abstract ("build more ramps!"), and we're fine with them being on buses since it keeps them out of our way. There's a smaller group of students, kids in their twenties, and others forced to take the bus for a short time, and they're typically nervous when they ride. Most times, they lock themselves into the chosen and directable world of their iPods, and act as if they aren't where they are.

Mostly, though, the buses are full of those people society has left behind. They struggle, like we all do, but are invisible to those of us who've made it. I see them every day, clutching plastic bags of valuable possessions or burdened with the results of meager shopping trips, and it's obvious they never get invited to any of the better parties.

While we depend on these people to raise our children and clean our homes, to serve as security guards and fulfill our demands when it comes to selling or packaging the consumer goods we insist on having, these people, not even worthy of having a car, are beneath us. I'm not sure we want them to suffer, to be punished for not being up to our standards, but that's what we do.

Since we can't, really, kill them and get them off our planet, we take their next most precious resource, their time. Riding the buses is a true example of why government doesn't work, it's a "public service." Those not good enough to soar with the eagles of society are given the opportunity to remain at the end of the pack, where the predators can more easily pick them off, by an inefficient, choiceless system.

It's a matter, as I see it, of salvaging our guilt. We want everyone to be able to get around in theory, just as long as they don't need to show up in our world. The fact that the means we provide them to reach the destinations where we want them to be wastes hours of their time isn't our concern, because our lives are already too filled. We're in a hurry to succeed, but they're so unimportant that we don't mind at all imposing on them wasteful hours.

In fact, we don't even think about it. If they can't pay with the coin of the realm, they'll pay with the hours of their lives, but that's what they deserve. With any luck it will hurt enough that they'll learn the error of their ways, buy a car, and become a fully-vested citizen.

The most difficult part of the day is behind me: I got out of bed.

I sometimes wake up all excited. Not exactly "rarin' to go," but with plans, hopes, and a list of things I wish to accomplish. Often, of course, I get sidetracked, and it's not uncommon for me to take a particularly hopeful scheme and ruin it by execution. Still, I awake and am eager to get busy.

Today, no such luck.

It started, in one sense, last year. Even though I've been careful not to pump up the economy by buying things left and right, I've still managed to accumulate a number of new things. These, mostly, are piled on one of my desks awaiting definitive homes.

Last week, when I was housesitting, I brought along my laptop and, lacking any reasonable plan, installed a new version of FreeBSD on it. I completely overwrote the hard disk, destroyed everything on it, and started off fresh. To my amazement, it worked, first time.

It took a bit of futzing around to get the GUI interface working, but I expected that. Now my laptop, a pitifully outdated machine, has more current versions of the operating system and graphic interface than any other computer I own. It's almost as if I've entered the 21st Century!

The one application I *don't* have is Open Office. In my eagerness to correct that deficiency, I've made several attempts to install that software. Unlike Windows(tm), Apple products, or any of the popular versions of Unix, where you download the program and issue a command or do a click or two, the preferred way of installing this software is through what FreeBSD calls "ports." You can download the port software, then run it and it fetches the program through the Internet.

You guessed it. The laptop can't talk to the Internet, not yet, and my several attempts to fool the laptop or have it build the program have all been utter failures. Whether or not I can get it to use the PC card and work through my router to fetch the necessary software is somewhat worsened by the fact that I've misplaced the dongle. Without the physical connection, addressing and setup concerns are moot.

The thing is, as often happens, I had the dongle in a "special place." It was in the pack I usually use to transport my laptop from place to place, but it's no longer there. Although that's a wonderful and logical place to keep it, I have this vague memory of moving it "somewhere safer." It need hardly be said that I, now, have no idea where that safe place is.

I have a hunch it's buried somwhere on my desktop, under scads of paper that wants filing and leftover Christmas junk. I realized this last night. It was too dark, then, to do anything about it, so I told myself I'd do it today. I should note that I'm very good at telling myself to do things "later," and it's an argument I rarely challenge.

So, this morning I woke up faced with the task of cleaning my desk. I can't recall any recent morning when I've been less inclined to get up and get cracking.

Tonight I dug deep into the pile of DVDs and pulled out one of my earlier purchases, Das Boot. I have to say I like it, though it has its detractors.

Just a note here to say I've uncovered an interesting secret to the creative process. The version that I'm watching is the "director's cut," which means it's longer than the commercial release, which I also saw. In fact, it's the first movie I saw with the woman who'd be my wife, though I didn't know that at the time.

It was a foreign film (still is, for that matter), and she was foreign, so I thought it fitting. I'm not sure if I was conscious of trying to be hip and continental or if I thought it would, for some reason, be enjoyable for her, but we went and talked about hardly at all.

Anyway, the interesting point is these director's cuts. I've yet to see one that was shorter than the commercial release, and that got me to thinking. I think if I ever had one of my novels published and was later asked for a "writer's cut," that it would be shorter. I'm not sure any work is better because it contains more stuff, but I think I'm in the minority there. All these directors who get awards, acclaim, and money, hookers, and blow, have their thumbs on the pulse of art, and their ideas is always for more.

I just find it odd that all these famous writers (none of whose names I can recall right now) say they work and work at paring their works, at trimming the fat, and film directors, given their choice, do the opposite.

There might be something meaningful there, or maybe not.

In other movie news, in what I consider a sure-fire move to create a revolt and guarantee that *I* won't be seeing the movie, the producers of Snakes on a Plane are considering changing the title. This would be a bad move, if only because I can't imagine any title that's more descriptive.

The big thing about this avian flu (H5N1) isn't that we're all gonna die (we all will, regardless), it's what it reveals about us as a species. The phrase "self-obsessed" comes to mind, but I think anthrocentric has a more academic ring to it.

Here's a brief history of bird flu, as I understand it. About ten years ago it cropped up in China, then travelled to Hong Kong, and for that I can hardly blame it. I worked with a guy who'd travel to Hong Kong every chance he could, and it sounds delightful. After taking a few years off and getting fit and tan near the seashore, bird flu packed up and did a whirlwind tour of southeast Asia and ended up on the front pages of Western newspapers.

Now, it's all over Europe, but has yet to cross the Atlantic. Give it time, I say.
What I'm finding incredible is all these health experts going on about the flu evolving or mutating to a strain that can more easily jump from birds to man and, ultimately, from one human to another. This, they say, is what to watch out for.


I'm no scientist, but that doesn't prevent me from asking questions. Why humans? Maybe this flu is real smart and has looked at the web of life pyramid, and set its sights on the top of the chain. Why strike the middle of the chain when you can lop off the head, right?

Still, it disturbs me that all that anyone's concerned about is the flu jumping to humans, as if that's all we have to worry about. What if the disease mutates to be transferred from birds to, say, lizards? Or octopi? Why is no one keeping an eye on the flu to see if it turns into something that attacks prairie dogs, with prairie dog to prairie dog infection? Are these flus something only humans and birds can get, or are we just being selfish here?

Also, I'm not sure if "ironic" is the right word, but it's the one I'm going to use. I find it ironic that after all the west's industrialization and modernization, after turning up our noses on the progress that permits us to feed a planet of six and a half billion humans and hoping to return the genie to the bottle and reward the ancient methods of raising livestock, that the fowl raised in chicken factories may fare much better than the free range birds. How odd.

There may be something to those antisceptic, unnatural environments after all. It's those damn chickens scratching in God's earth, staring at bright blue skies, who are the only ones at risk. Their cyborg cousins in the Tyson mills will be just fine, thank you, since they don't allow visitors.

When I began Crenellated Flotsam I had a few rules, some of which I'm only now discovering.

It was my intent, originally, to post a plithy little entry every day, one that would entertain those who sought it out and that would so delight those who stumbled onto it that they'd, of course, become regular readers and cheering fans. I had this notion that if I ever skipped a day's entry that I'd receive hundreds of e-mails, inquiring about my health or wondering what's going on.

Over the years I'm proud to say that I've gotten more than one such e-mail.

The important part of that rule wasn't the rabidity of my fans but the "daily entry" idea. You see, I've been trying to stick to one entry a day, because (for some reason) I think that's the right way to do it. The thing is, I never check that on the other sites I visit, especially if I'm not a daily visitor. I just read the top entry then go down until I see something that looks familiar.

Why Crenellated Flotsam should be subject to rules I neither notice, nor particularly care about, on other sites just goes to show you how forgiving I am of others and how hard I am on myself.

Anyway, beginning today, I'm not promising daily entries, but I am willing to try something new: I'm entertaining the possibility of multiple daily entries. Yes, that's right, even though it looks as if I can't even be bothered to add an entry every day, I will now permit myself to make more than one entry on any given day.

This should help.

One of the challenges of daily entries was waiting until I came up with the burning issue of the day. I'd have a perfectly fine rant at eleven in the morning, but I'd have to hold off on posting it until later that night, when I'd either forget it or come up with some more wrenching topic. Frequently I'd try to work a whole day's worth of rants into one entry, and the results are not pleasant.

So, if I can create one entry that deals with my thoughts on the avian flu pandemic, then I won't have to worry about segueing carefully into that from an entry that's ostensibly about my dental program.

In fact, I'm going to try this out in just a minute, with a second entry that's short and that stays on topic!