Don’t tell my Dad, but I’m not at school today. BG&E cut the power to our block to work on the treeline that runs parallel to our poles, so I’m at the local Panera taking advantage of free wireless and warm coffee. It’s not the same thing as sitting at my own desk and an orange cat curled up in the corner, but it’s not bad either. Unfortunately, I can’t send out e-mail from my main account (something to do with the DNS lookups here, grumble grumble) but otherwise I’m online.

If I ever get paid, and actually have money in the bank (gasp), this is a partial list of Stuff I’d Like To Buy:

• The birthday present I have picked out for my wife
• Life insurance
• A pair of dress chinos so that I don’t look like a bumbling hick on our client meeting next week
• A new pair of dress shoes to replace the 5-year-old Steve Madden knockoffs I currently own
• A pair of prescription sunglasses to replace the ones I lost in the taxi on the way to our hotel in Rome two years ago
• A set of iPod headphones to replace the ones I’ve got, which are fraying, cracked, and dynamically mismatched
• The ability to finally subscribe to satellite radio, putting the unit we’ve had since December to use
• Extra RAM, a new battery, and a CD-burner for the Thinkpad, which needs to be backed up

Supposedly, there’s a FedEx package on its way with my name on it. If it ever does arrive, I’ll be able to pay 1/2 my upcoming tax bill, the August mortgage, and at least some of my outstanding bills.

Most microbusiness owners lack health insurance at some point. No shit, Sherlock. You had to do a study to find that out?

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association has endorsed a proposal requiring individuals who make at least $49,000 a year to purchase a minimum level of health insurance.

Which only goes to show just how far up their ass the AMA has their heads. We have a “minimum” of health insurance, which translates to a sky-high deductible and no prescription coverage, in case we get hit by a bus or actually are crazy enough to try and procreate. I’d guess somebody at the AMA is being lobbied heavily by the insurance industry, who seem to think that the lower middle class/small business owners of American don’t have enough bullshit to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Hopefully, whatever stupid small business association lobbying group is supposedly representing my interests in Washington gets this particular “proposal” shot down, and quick.

How about the AMA decides to bite the hand who’s obviously handing them Milk-Bones and start going after the insurance industry for jacking up malpractice insurance rates? (That’s right, I live in one of the more doctor-unfriendly states, which is why our G.P. recently decamped to Delaware for “Family Reasons”.)

nearly a third of those who responded to the poll said they couldn’t find simple, easy-to-read information about their health care options.

Amen, brother. Doing the preliminary research for our little family unit was like reading a Yugoslavian owner’s manual at the bottom of a dark well. And I’d have to add that the “options” are pretty spare. There was one plan that looked fantastic until we got to the part about pregnancy, and realized it was written for sterile people.

I’ll be thinking about that particular article the next time we fork out $120 on three months’ worth of birth control pills.

This morning, laying in bed clearing the sleep from my eyes, I decided to begin a daily bike ride I’ve been planning since August of 2004. Last weekend, I pulled both my bikes out of the basement and inflated the tires, checked the chains, and tested the brakes. They’re now hanging out in the garage on hooks, where they should get more use and will be easier to access.

This morning’s ride took me southward to the edge of the Patapsco Valley State park, which is walking distance from the house here. The weather has been unseasonably cool and dry for June in Maryland, cool enough that I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of it two weeks ago. Come August, I’m going to be getting up at 5:30 to get in a half-hour’s ride before I melt into a puddle of slag in the bike lane.

I used to be a pretty avid rider when I lived in the city and worked for Johns Hopkins—not a spandex peacock riding a $3,000 carbon-fiber spaceship, but an avid rider who biked to work every day and got in at least two mountain-bike rides a week at my peak. I haunted the local bike shops for used parts to upgrade my rides. I had a set of city wheels for my beater bike, and got to where I was pulling as much crap off the frame to lighten the bike as I could. I used to have rider’s legs and a decent cardiovascular system, which meant I could climb the hill from the Harbor to Eutaw Place without feeling winded, and I could hold my own on the hilly singletrack of Avalon. When I quit Hopkins and started working outside the city, my riding dropped off dramatically, and in the last two years I’ve been on my bikes a total of five times.

Today it felt like coming home, even though I was on my mountain bike for what is really a road bike’s ride. The air was crisp and fresh, the birds were out, and I explored a section of the park I’ve not seen yet. Along the way, I stopped to read a park map and spied a whitetailed deer and her foal creeping through the woods not 50 feet away. We stopped and looked at each other, and in the blink of an eye both were gone as quietly as they’d come. The ride back home is just right for someone as out-of-shape as me; lots of climbing with landings in between to catch one’s breath.

Along the way, I happened upon the only other running Scout I’ve seen in the area, a tan ’78 not unlike ours, parked in a driveway nearer the park, chocked with a 2×4′. If the time comes when I’m ready to give up Chewbacca, I know who to approach for a good home.

* * *

In other news, I got an email from a fellow who publishes an online magazine, asking if he could use some of my Bimini photos to accompany a story he wrote about the island. He also mentioned that the Compleat Angler, a bar/hotel we drank at while we were there, and a historic landmark of the island (Hemmingway preferred to stay there when he was on the island), burned down in January. I can’t tell you how sad this news is, and how devastating this must be for the local economy—there aren’t more than five bars we saw for tourists to visit on the south end of the island, and the Angler was hands-down the one with the most style and panache. On the heels of the plane crash last December, this is just awful news.

I’m here. Just very busy juggling various projects. Be back soon.

I have these reoccurring dreams every couple of weeks, where I’m in a house that doesn’t look like my house, but I know it’s my house, and in order to get to the bedrooms upstairs, I have to crawl through incredibly convoluted passageways and tunnels that get progressively smaller and tighter. It’s kind of fun in a spelunking, let’s-explore-the-house kind of way, but also unnerving in a claustrophobic, poking-at-the-latent-fear sort of way. I don’t know what it means, or what my subconscious is trying to tell me, but I found myself living the dream at Port Discovery this weekend while following two preschool boys through a three-story jungle gym.

The chick at the front desk says that they encourage adults to explore with the kids (which makes sense, because the jungle gym spits out in different places on multiple floors, making it difficult to keep tabs on one’s children) but I suspect the guy who designed the jungle gym didn’t get that memo. Once you’ve crawled your 35-year-old body into the bowels of the gym—and let’s not kid ourselves here, the gym is the first thing you see after entering, sort of like a three story child vacuum—the twists and turns get progressively smaller and tighter, to the point where you’re simultaneously trying to keep up with your child, twist your body upside-down, avoid kicking somebody else’s kid who’s crawling directly behind your ass, and hoist yourself up through a hole the size of a toilet seat. Not for the faint of heart or weak of spine. The capper is that once your child has made it up two stories of vertebra-twisting rope and maze, there’s a freaking slide which ends up back down on the main floor. Jen and I quickly made the decision to play a zone defense, with her stationed at the bottom of the slide with the camera, and me in the second story of the gym to make sure our charges didn’t veer off to other sections of the building. (This was after two attempts at wedgie suicide following the boys down the slide.) This strategy proved wise, and we used it for the rest of the afternoon in various patterns—so successful, in fact, Jen helped another kid find his parents (who were still using obsolete man-to-man coverage and trapped somewhere in the cattle chute on Floor 2.)

Don’t get me wrong—it was fun, and that place is a good way to kill the better part of a morning until an hour and a half after naptime; I’m just saying from a personal-injury standpoint, there are a few places in the Gaping Maw Of Ropes And Piping that could be optimized for us parental units (or, stand-in parental units, as in our case.) Also, because it’s right outside the front door, you will not be able to get past the McDonald’s without a Happy Meal before you leave. They’ve got you coming and going, I’m afraid.

On the whole, our experience as stand-ins went very well. So well, in fact, that we wore those kids down to tired, cranky, crying nubbins by Saturday evening [puffs out chest.] A walk to the park, Port Discovery, a nap, some kite-flying in the park, and a trip to Opie’s for ice cream made it an all-American weekend. Plus, the boys got a younger brother in the bargain.

Sunday we contented ourselves with quiet, peaceful outdoor activities; Jen hit the garden and I started rehabbing the windows on the south side of the house, followed by Easter dinner on the grill and some cold beers. I can’t remember the last time I slept more soundly. And, I didn’t have any dreams about climbing in confined spaces, which was good.

I stumbled on this site this morning, a blog dedicated to all sorts of awesome old things that I like (cameras, musical instruments (weighted towards keyboards) and robots. This sort of dovetails with the MAKE: blog, with links to all kinds of interesting projects.

Speaking of projects, I have a line on the paper for our light tent, and the lumber is downstairs waiting to be cut. I think I’m going to have to get started on the construction this week while we wait for the supplies to arrive.