Things to do today:

Sometimes it seems absurd to make the list. I could be adding salt to the water softener and I’m making a list instead? I have a flock of goldfinches impatiently tapping their feet while they wait for thistle seed in the feeders and I’m making a list? Should I put the trip to the library to return the overdue books on the list, or just return the darn things?

If you have a list you can prioritize. If you have a list you can take pleasure in crossing stuff out. On the other hand, if you decide to work from a list you could all too easily spiral down into the infinite loop of deconstruction of tasks. “Paint the porch” becomes

• get cleaning agent
• clean the rails
• clean the deck
• get brushes
• get roller
• get paint
• get thinner
• get step-ladder
• …

Does getting the paint require a trip to the store? Add it to the list! Does cleaning the deck require a mop and broom? Don’t forget to add them to the list!

A while back the cool kids were talking about “getting things done.” (This was, I believe, a reaction to excessive amounts Adderall in their diet, but I could be wrong.) One enterprising fellow, David Allen, staked out a claim as self-help productivity guru and actually trademarked the phrase.

…add to “things that me smile” list: Jessica Hagy’s blog, “Indexed.”

I wish I had nice raised beds and as fine a crew of helpers as Michelle Obama.

As it happens, I’m already much recovered from my earlier confusion at the UW Hospital elevator, but I still need both hands on the wheel. I’ve always been elevator savvy. When I want to go down, I push the down button. When the elevator arrives, I watch the buttons and if the light on the down button goes off, well… that means it’s my ride. Today, I was staring at the arrows above the door. The down-arrow was illuminated. The up-arrow was not. I confused the arrows with the buttons and just stood there. A random guy helped me sort it out. “We’re going down,” he said. “Oh great,” I thought. If I can’t even understand elevator signals, how will I drive?

In fairness to myself, I had just watched Beth being wheeled away to the operating room where she is even now having her hip replaced. The surgeon suggested I come back in six hours or so. I was feeling a little adrift, drifty.

And, in a burst of synchronicity, I just got the call from the operating room nurse. They’ve finished the surgery. Beth is fine and she’ll be wide awake and in her own room in an hour or two. I’m off to the hospital again, quite sure I’ll be able to figure out the elevators this time, and not even a little miffed that my knowledge of the state soil was wasted this morning when the radio host had to show off her own knowledge and spoil the game by blathering, “Oh, I know that! It’s Antigo silt loam.”

Too hip.

It was a great day filled with lots of “what-does-it-take” chores. A “what-does-it-take” chore is just what it sounds like, something that needs doing, that can be done in a short time and with little effort, something that’s so obvious and likely so easy that it gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list again and again. Trimming the clematis is a what-does-it-take chore. And what would it take to trim back that mock orange in the south lawn hedge? And cleaning up the peonies in what we laughingly call the “formal garden”… what would it take? It was a day for picking a few dozen daffodils to display around the house, a day for using up that roasted chicken in a pot of home made chicken noodle soup. What would it take to finish resetting the lannonstone wall at the back of the center lawn flower bed? It took more than I had in me, as it happened. There are still 12 humongous stones that need to be dug out and re-set. What would we do without root pressure from weed trees and the annual upset of frost heave? It would all be too easy.

What would it take to throw tennis balls for the dogs? Call me an enabler. They’ve got a tennis ball habit and I feed it. Didn’t expect the sunshine today. It was a pleasant surprise! What, I asked myself, would it take to get outdoors and use that sunlight?

Earlier in the week I saw a Facebook posting suggesting that people avoid a counter-rally and work locally to gather petition signatures to recall the six remaining Republican senators. Good advice, I think, but there will be lots of people who can’t avoid gawking at a train wreck.

I’ve already missed opening day at the farmer’s market so if there was any asparagus on hand, I missed it. As for La Palin, I’m not missing a thing, although I’ve heard that if I can avoid vomiting, I can see her live around 1:30 on this link: http://www.channel3000.com/localvideo/?v=live

In the middle of the front lawn is an enormous pile of oak leaves recently raked from the flower bed at the west end of the round-about. The lannon stone wall has suffered from frost heave and root pressure of a fierce encroachment of hollyhocks and mulberry seedlings. There’s some work to do out there to get it all back into shape for spring.

The white trim on the house needs repainting and the woodlot needs to be cleaned up.

There’s a machine shed full of small internal combustion engines and the machines they power just waiting for annual maintenance, and–in the case of the larger tiller and the brush cutter–major repair.

I have a couple of GB of memory I need to install on the older Dell in the office. I’ve successfully procrastinated around this simple task for almost a year. Work on the farm is never done!

So this blog has suffered while I’ve watched streaming Netflix–you can devour an entire season of MI5 in an evening if you put your mind to it–and read trash novels, good novels, and minor treasures of fun writing like the books of Sarah Vowell. What do I mean by “this blog has suffered?” Well, the writing around here hasn’t improved much, and the coverage of exciting political events fell off, and fewer cat pictures have been published, and the list goes on. I’ve finally fixed the RSS feed though. You can again subscribe to Listics and/or to Listics’ comments and feel assured that what’s being posted will find its way into your feed reader. So let’s see what happens next.

When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull. That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain.
— Ray Kroc

Beth took me out to eat last night, a birthday celebration. We went to Ruth’s Chris in Middleton. The steaks there are ridiculously delicious, absurdly huge. Today we have half of my USDA prime New York strip nestled in the refrigerator next to the remains of Beth’s rib eye, the makings of at least one more dinner. Ruth’s Chris is an upscale chain that caters to a privileged clientele. Its regular customers are people who make at least twice as much as we do. Even so, the maitre d’s question put me off a little.

“Is this your first time at Ruth’s Chris?” he asked.

We had been talking about this in the car. It was definitely our first time at the Middleton Ruth’s Chris. It’s an odd name, “Ruth’s Chris.” We wondered about its provenance again last night. Wikipedia says,

The chain was founded by Ruth Fertel, a single mother of two, in 1965, after she bought the existing Chris Steak House in New Orleans. In buying the restaurant, Fertel had to agree that the restaurant keep the “Chris” name for a specified period of time. After the original location sustained a kitchen fire, she relocated the restaurant about one-half mile (0.9 km) to the west on Broad Street and renamed the rebuilt establishment “Ruth’s Chris.” Under the purchase agreement, the name “Chris Steak House” could not be used at any other location, and she did not want to lose customers already familiar with the Chris name. Fertel started to franchise the restaurant in the 1970s to locations throughout the United States and the world.

Ten years ago or so, Matt introduced us to the Beverly Hills location. We were baffled by the name then, thought maybe it was named after a favorite nephew or something. I’m glad Wikipedia has since emerged to resolve these bar-bet issues. Following that celebration of Matt’s graduation in Los Angeles, we didn’t find our way to another Ruth’s Chris for five years or so. That was in Kansas City, on the Plaza, another special occasion with Ben and Katie. Finally, Beth had enjoyed a night out at the King of Prussia, PA location across the mall from her hotel on a business trip a few years ago. That was the extent of our Ruth’s Chris experience.

So, yes–last night was our first visit to our local Ruth’s Chris Steak House. We had tried to eat there a few years ago, but in the welter of retail construction that is Middleton, we weren’t able to find it. I forget where we celebrated that night on the town. Later, we applied our amazing Google skillz and found the place, but it took a birthday to motivate us to make reservations.

The maitre d’s question had made me wonder if he thought he’d seen me stash my shopping cart and recyclable aluminum before we came in. Maybe he suspected me of pulling some of the longer butts from the ashtray, saving them for later. But, I was wearing a nice sweater, slacks, an overcoat, decent shoes… surely it’s a question he asks everyone he doesn’t know by sight, an icebreaker. I let it go. I enjoyed the meal, and topped it off with a delicious crème brulée, compliments of the house because it was my birthday. Ruth’s Chris: upscale franchise food, conveniently adjacent to the Verizon retail outlet, just across the boulevard from the Costco Wholesale Warehouse, and a hop, skip and a jump down the road from at least half a dozen retail cosmetic surgery clinics. Liposuction? You’ll need it after dining at Ruth’s Chris!

That damn FDA, founded a hundred years ago, just to make sure the milk bottles you got were full of milk and not white paint and rat shit.
— Jon Stewart

Corporate shills and Senatorial obstructionists have taken a last whack at the Food Safety bill. Filthy conditions in food plants will continue unabated if the bill isn’t separated from the moribund omnibus spending bill. That bill became a grab bag for end of year business, and then, faced with obstructionist challenges, it was quietly killed. The Food Safety bill may have died with it.

Not everybody in these parts thought that the legislation was a good idea. Small organic operations reacted warily, as did the guys who recently shipped a billion eggs contaminated with salmonella. An amendment that addressed the organic local producers’ concerns was added to the bill and it passed. People were generally satisfied that locavore and small farm concerns had been addressed. Then came the oopsie. The Senate bill required a return trip to the House because of some spending provision. Back it went. The House worked their magic and sent it back to the Senate. The Senate, now requiring one more kick at it because the House had touched it, bundled it into the omnibus spending bill and there it remains.

What I liked about the bill was its nod to the role of government in our society. When you sell Gordon Gekko a meat packing plant, you know that there will be some overhead issues. This bill was designed to reduce the number of people poisoned by the greedy, rapacious whackos in charge of corporate food. Tom Harkin currently has the bill on life support in the Senate cloak room. It’s anybody’s guess whether his resuscitative efforts will succeed before the lame duck session of congress expires.

I had the insane urge to make a joke, something like, “Glad I left the weaponized anthrax at home.”

Imagine the ramifications…

“Say what?” says the TSA guy.

“That’s a joke.” I reply. And then, with a compulsive urge to fill the stony silence, I continue, “I didn’t leave it at home.”

The TSA guy raises an eyebrow.

“I mean I have no WMDs of any kind. Really. Just got my sense of humor twisted by Earth The Book. It’s a little dark, this book. I’m reading….”

“Step over here, sir.” In my mind the guy is already snapping on the rubber gloves for the cavity search. I have the good sense to just keep my mouth shut.

I bought the book as a backgrounder. I lost my Library of Congress library card so I had to resort to the free market alternative for my research.
* * *
Yesterday was a long day, but it’s a bright and beautiful Friday morning here in College Park, Maryland. Today, I’m having second thoughts about this Jon Stewart guy. I think I’ll get on the Metro and head to the Mall to see what’s happening.

What was it they said, “It’s a good day to… what, dig garlic maybe?” That’s next.