A friend of my wife is visiting us from Lisbon. Because of the really, ahem, skewed exchange rate between the dollar and euro (or between the dollar and every other currency), our friend has been tagged by her other friends in Portugal as a mule to bring cheap goods back from the New World.

Packages have been arriving each day from all corners: cameras and fancy lenses, hard drives, SD cards, iPods, not to mention the goods that our visitor will purchase for herself before she leaves. I’ve no doubt hoarded my own loot onto international flights in years past, but it’s been purchases specific to the country of travel, like Havaianas in Brazil or wine from France, not general consumer goods. So as each package piles up in our house destined for export, it’s a visual reminder of the sad state of the US economy.

We’ve been busy the last seven weeks, so I forgot to tell you.

Now for something far more interesting.

Our house was burglarized last week sometime within a two-hour window from the time I left and Susana came home. While I’ve been the victim of nearly every other type of property crime—four cars broken into, lawnmowers, grills and bicycles stolen—this one is the most disturbing. It’s not that we had much that the bad guys could make away with, it’s the thought of being home when someone kicks down the door.

Feelings of, “we’re moving out of this house,” quickly turned to, “were not going to let this happen again,” and thoughts of midieval booby traps and razor wire danced in my head. We settled on more practical measures—doors have been reinforced, a security system is nearly place, and sadly, we now have less that a burglar would want. The most valuable item was a laptop. Fortunately I keep all my data on a file server (if that had been stolen, good lord…)

When I came upstairs that night and saw the LEDs on the wireless hub, I got to wondering if there was some way to see if the burglar was in range and still using the connection. Chances were slim that it was someone living within 500ft of our house since I know and trust most of my immediate neighbors. I’m not enough of a hacker to figure that out anyway. Then it occurred to me what I should have done.

If I had set my browser to automatically load my homepage with a secret code, say, http://contactsheet.org/?k38sj2, every time it started up, I could trace my way back to the thief’s physical location. I could wait until that code appeared in my site’s logs, trace their IP address and get a subpoena for their ISP to provide the name and address of the user connecting via that IP address at that particular time. The computer would, in effect, send a beacon back to its owner after being stolen.

I don’t know how difficult it would be to carry out the legal work (proving to authorities that your method is 99.9% likely to find the right person), and may require a lawyer, but the plan seems like it could catch most crooks. What amateur burglar—someone desperate enough to risk time behind bars, or in this country, the wrath of an armed homeowner—is going to be keen enough to go to the trouble of reformatting your laptop’s harddrive before its very first use?

Other homing pigeon software could be made to automatically connect to a web site or web service every time it finds a connection to the Internet, like a lo-jack for your laptop (lapjack?), even before the user is prompted for a password (my plan above would require no username/password login). There’s a good chance the laptop would be in someone else’s hands by the time it actually connected to the Internet, but then you’d at least get the computer back, and have a starting point in which to catch the thief, or catch someone trafficking in stolen goods.

Driving around southern Portugal in the province of Alentejo, the land is sparsely populated and full of cork trees.

In the 17th century Dom Pérignon was the first to use cork in glass bottles for sealing wine.

Two-thirds of the world’s cork comes from these fields.

It takes 40 years for a cork tree to to grow bark thick enough for harvest. Its useful life lasts another 150-200 years, harvesting the bark every 9 years.

Farmers write the year of the last harvest on each tree, so they can quickly scour the countryside for any ripe bark.

I became a vegetarian twelve years ago, on July 11, 1991. In this time I’ve noticed a thing or two about vegetarians and their vegetarianism. There seems to be a cycle that many vegetarians go through in their attitudes towards their chosen lifestyle. For those who stick with it over the long haul, it goes something like this:

1. Victims of the Totalitarian Regime — Once the vegetarian finally makes the commitment he is immediately repulsed by anyone who eats meat, for they are all part of the fascist machine. Vegetarian forgets he was eating meat just three weeks ago. This is a touchy period where the vegetarian contantly and combatively reassures himself that his decision was worth it.
2. Thanks, But No Thanks — Vegetarian grows more comfortable with his choice, but could do without the special treatment, as if he were a down with a case of gout, on a restricted diet fighting for life when family members point out on restaurant menus, with the best of intentions, “Oh, look, here’s something that you can eat. Did you see the Bombay Burrito? It’s vegetarian.” The vegetarian gently reminds all present for the 45th time that he can eat anything he likes, but chooses not to, thank you very much.
3. Porq: The Other Fake Meat — Vegetarian misses the old days and acts on sentimental childhood memories of the State Fair. Attend barbecues with fake animal parts. Buys vegetarian quorn dogs. Naysayers point out the hipocrisy; vegetarian eats what he wants, like everyone else.
4. Politically Tired — Vegetarian grows tired of engaging in political discussions regarding his choice, regarding it as a personal matter. “But God designed us to eat meat” prodding no longer elicits a two hour argument from the vegetarian [see #1].
5. Long Haul — Vegetarian finds peace with his decision. He fine tunes his outlook, somewhere between veganism and meat-eating, no longer a vegetarian to upholding principles or forge an identity by choosing particular foods over others. Vegetarian may be accepting of chicken stock, picking the pepperoni off the pizza, as long as the food doesn’t taste like meat. Other middle ground includes eating seafood (merely insects of the deep, after all) and becoming a Vegequarian or a Catholic Vegetarian. Strict vegans point out the hypocrisy; vegetarian eats what he wants, like everyone else.

We just returned from a tromp through the Midwest paying visits to friends and relatives sorely missed. Our final evening treated us with a fierce thunderstorm — blowing down trees and knocking out power lines — that put the fireworks displays to shame.

The trip was a reminder of how distant I am from the place I grew up, from the thick humidity and stifling temperature extremes, ridiculously large trucks, smeared fireflies on windshields and the constant chirping of locusts that you forget are there until they’re not. Also, the ham that comes on a “vegetarian” pizza (how charming), the mass dumping of perfectly good drinking water on imported grass to keep it green, chatty waitressing, and especially, the wide open landscapes of the great plains that make you feel claustrophobic when you return to the Northwest, where there’s a tree sticking in your face every time you turn around. I miss it all, but would never want it back.

My, what a three day weekend away from electricity can do for a guy.

Last night I went to the Crocodile to see Hello From Waveland. During the beginning of their set, four 50-something couples, the men dressed in beige blazers, the women dressed in nice evening clothes, walked in, lit up smokes and started shaking their hips. I realized they weren’t from around here when one approached the bar and said, “Two beer. How much?”

Their otherness stood out like a turd in a punchbowl — their attire, their age, their sophistication, mostly their comfortableness with all this distance. I heard later they were Spanish, and their chain smoking confirmed it. Did they read about the Crocodile in a tourism book as somewhere young, hip and not-to-miss? I couldn’t stop watching them — they were having fun — they watched the entire set and took pictures of themselves dancing and gesturing in front of the band. I found myself culturally jealous. The members of my Seattle culture were dressed in black with arms crossed wearing self-conscious scowls on their pale faces. The Spaniards were there to have fun.

I rebuilt the fence that blew over on Christmas Day. Merry Christmas.

Now all those snot-nosed BRATS will stay off MY LAND.

STITCHES did amazing things for me. After using STITCHES for just ten days, my insides are staying in and protected from the elements!

STITCHES come in:

• STAINLESS STEEL WIRE: is inerted and maintains strength for a long time. It does not harbor bacteria.
• SILK: animal protein, relatively inert for human tissue, loses strength over long periods. Silk sutures are multifilament and provide a potential haven for bacteria.
• CATGUT: from the submucosa of the bovine intestine, eventually resorb. It excites considerable inflammatory reaction and tends to potenciate infections. It loses strength rapidly and it’s of little use in modern surgery.
• SYNTHETIC NONABSORBABLE SUTURES: generally inert and retain strength longer than wire. They must usually be knotted at least four times because of their poor handling characteristics, resulting in retained foreign bodies.
• SYNTHETIC ABSORBABLE SUTURES: strong, with predictable rates of loss of tensile strength, incite a minimal inflammatory response and may have special usefulness in gastrointestinal urologic and gynecological surgeries.
• TAPE: skin closure of choice for clean or contaminated wounds, with minimal probability of infections. They cannot be used in actively bleeding or complex surface wounds.

Try STITCHES for your open wounds today!

The wife got a job.

Time to go shopping.

My days as a concert pianist are over.

Last night Susana and I made freshly squeezed orange juice. Hours later, while we were waiting to go out with Christene and Dave, I was washing the dishes and when scrubbing our big Henckel Five-Star chef’s knife of dried orange juice pulp, my hand slipped and the knive sliced open my right-hand index finger. If there’s one thing I learned about first aid, it’s to apply direct pressure to any bleeding. But this thing was deep.

Susana drove me to Swedish medical center in Ballard where we waited for an hour to be looked at, then another hour to be treated. I asked the nurse how the night was going and he said it was all the usual suspects—people have more time on their hands on the weekend to get into trouble. And later there would be a wave of drunks who tripped over curbs. Last night he had a guy get injured getting into the trunk of his car (so you know he was tanked) and the nurse guessed it was a Ford.. the drunk said “how’d you know?” but it was because the nurse could see the “Fo” from the Ford nameplate imprinted on his forehead.

The doctor came in, diagnosed the sitation and said flatly, “Stitches”.

Then he pulled out a 5 inch needle and said “This is gonna hurt. Are you ready?” Luckily Susana was there to make funny faces at me while he stuck this needle in my hand four separate times causing overwhelming pain as I felt it passing through various tendons and muscles.

After that the hand was asleep and we talked as the doctor used his crochet tools on my finger. He started complaining about the state of healthcare—a rightfully contentious issue among doctors—and how 60% of what my insurance will be paying is going to the uninsured patients in the next room, but by law they must evaluate and stabalize everyone who comes in. He was on a roll.. so we got him off of it when he talked about Brazil.

Meanwhile Christene and Dave were making dinner at our house for us..