Yesterday, I had an experience I hadn’t entirely anticipated having at this stage of my life: I got fingerprinted by the Cambridge Police Department.

The biotech company where I work part-time is planning to start selling products that require them to have a particularly lethal neurotoxin on premises, as well as some other chemicals that can be used in the creation of narcotics. Those substances will be kept in a secure area, but anyone who has to have access to said area has had to go through a security clearance process that includes having fingerprints on file with the FBI’s bioterrorism unit. As one of the IT guys, I will have to have access to the Chamber Of Death, so off I went to the Cambridge PD at lunchtime. There, in a small room, a young woman firmly took each of my fingers, rolled them on an inkpad, and pressed them onto a pair of cards to be sent to the Feds.

I remarked to her that I was surprised that the process had not gone digital. Digital fingerprinting is actually pretty common these days. She informed me that they do, in fact, have a digital system in the booking area where arrestees are processed because it’s faster and easier, which is key when dealing with uncooperative people, but the traditional ink print is still preferred. The room where she fingerprinted me was only just around the corner from the front entrance of what is a fairly large building, so it must be a common enough procedure to do non-arrest-related prints.

As I alluded to above, I also had to have a basic criminal background check, the result of which is that I now have some clearance number from the FBI that I can use if I go to another job that requires such things. I assume the same holds true of the prints — once they’re on file I doubt they ever have to be done again. Now that I’m marked man, though, whatever madcap crime spree I may or may not have been planning will be all that easier to foil. Curses!

Since last summer, I’ve been dividing my time between my personal business providing at-home tech support to a clientele that is primarily senior citizens and a part-time job doing much the same thing for a biotech company. It’s a little schizophrenic going back and forth between an office environment and the homes of my clients, but at least the basic tasks are largely the same. The biggest difference is the level of appreciation I get from my clients and my co-workers. Not that my co-workers don’t appreciate the things I do for them, but the response I get from my clients is more like this, without quite so much Jello salad.

Back in the summer of 2010, we made a little weekend getaway to South Deerfield, Massachusetts to visit the Yankee Candle factory store and see Old Deerfield. As things turned out, the visit to the historic village got washed out by rain, but we did spend an afternoon at the candle store, and one of the highlights of that was when Bridget had a wax casting made of her hand (as you can see above).

After Bridget was done, Charlotte wanted to give it a try, too, but as soon as she stuck her hand in the molten wax she had a change of heart. We tried to convince her it was okay and that she should go through with it, but I guess we must have left a lasting impression on the guy running the activity, because I read this post at the funny Not Always Right.com blog the other day, and it sounds SO MUCH like my charming wife that it HAS to be about us.

Through the magic of Netflix, Charlotte has recently discovered those sitcom evergreens of my childhood, “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”. Growing up in the 1970s, I mostly missed the afternoon kid’s TV blight of animated advertising like GI Joe, He-Man, and Transformers and instead spent my afterschool hours watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and re-runs of 1960s sitcoms. Forty years later, the animated advertising is still there, sorry to say, but the chestnuts of television comedy aren’t — they’ve been relegated to night-time cable channels like TV Land, where people my age continue to watch them. The cultural disconnect is huge because the shared vocabulary of knowledge of our shared past is lost. I know much much more about life and pop culture of the generation ahead of me because I spent hours watching their leftovers. Charlotte has very little reference to life in the 1970s or 80s and no tie at all to those older times. So I was more than a little bit pleased that not only did she watch those two shows, she *loved* them. She devoured both series, watching every single episode of both of them over the period of the last couple of weeks.

Meanwhile…with Christmas on the way, we’ve been trying to find a “big” gift item for her, but frankly have been left cold by the idea of buying another electronic gadget or pointlessly excessive toy. Every time we have a purge of unwanted/broken/outgrown stuff around here, it feels like we would have been just as well served to make a pile of dollar bills and light them on fire for the warmth. Then, last weekend, as I was scouring Boston.com looking for things we could do for amusement on Sunday, I noticed that the Broadway adaptation of “The Addams Family” is coming to Boston in February. As is usually the case with recent Broadway shows that tour, the tickets aren’t cheap, but as soon as I saw that I knew it would be the perfect “big” Christmas gift. We all love to go to live performances, Charlotte has never seen a real Broadway show, it will be a big night out for all of us, and, I hope, an evening to remember. Plus, the timing of having it be “The Addams Family” is just perfect. The only downside will be having to wait seven or eight weeks to actually go.

So, while all that is going on, the scuttlebutt from Hollywood is that the guy who wrote and produced the show “Pushing Daisies” a couple of seasons ago has been given the greenlight by NBC to do a “reboot” of “The Munsters”. Of course, there has to be a modern twist, so the advance word is that the show will be an “edgy” one-hour drama, no doubt to cash in on the popularity of the fairy-tale drama “Once Upon A Time” and the slightly more horror-tinged “Grimm”. Which is too bad, because it means the whole thing will be a complete and utter failure; if it even makes it out of pilot season, it will die a horrible death after two episodes in prime time, because everyone LOVES the goofy antics of Herman and Grandpa, and will be completely put off by some gothic monster story. The reason there even IS a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family” is because the several Hollywood film versions of it stuck very very close to the cherished shtick of the sitcom. “The Munsters” rebooted should embrace Fred Gwynne’s mincing Herman and Al Lewis’s New York-inflected Grandpa and find a way to make that work for an audience that loves nothing better than to reconnect with well-loved characters. Next thing you know, there’ll be a reboot of “Gilligan’s Island” that tries to be like “Lost”. I think Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take on it is probably the wisest: stop with all the remakes and find an original idea already.

(post “after the jump”)

The pictures above are, in fact, of two separate kitties. The one on the top is Digit, and the one on the bottom is Norm. Norm and Digit joined us over the summer, not very long after we lost Harry and Murray. They are brothers and came to us from the Northeast Animal Shelter in nearby Salem.

I was devastated to lose Harry and Murray, and I still find myself bursting into tears once in a while, but in the wake of their loss I felt like I did not want to have a big empty space where they used to be, making me feel all the worse. So we checked into a couple of shelters and one evening went over to Salem to see the cats they had for adoption. The cats we’d seen on their website were not as appealing in person, and the shelter wanted more money for kittens than we could swing, but all three of us liked these two guys. Their original family called them “Pirate” and “Scar”, and their shelter names were “Bettencourt” and “Bromley”. They’d only been at the shelter for about a week, but they looked like they were ready to be someplace else.

They’re about the same age that Murray was, so they’re still basically juveniles. They are brothers, and it is very difficult to tell which is which unless you can notice some of the details. The one crucial difference is that Digit is polydactyl and has great big “thumbs” on his front paws. After thinking on names for a few days, it was ultimately the thumbs that led me to decide on “Digit” as a name. As for the other cat, his paws are normal, and so we agreed on “Norm”. There are other differences that become noticeable once you get to know them — Digit is bulkier and heavier than Norm, and Norm has a very triangular head that I think makes him look like one of the Gremlins from the same-named movie. Norm is kind of neurotic and doesn’t settle down easily, while Digit is a meatloaf who loves to cuddle up and purr. They have a couple of less-appealing defining characteristics as well: Norm has a loud and grating meow and is constantly making noise. He even talks to himself, making all sorts of little cat “mrow” and “prut” and “mrph” sounds all the time. Digit has a problem with flatulence, and could make your hair curl with his powerful stink. I’ve gotten them to switch over to a diet of mostly canned food, which has helped to reduce the frequency and stinkiness of the gas, but he can still clear a room with one now and then.

Because they’re juveniles, they’re still prone to some craziness and engage in some destructive behaviors. The toilet paper has to be kept well-hidden at all times, we’ve had to remove anything breakable from the tops of the bookcases, and a squirt bottle is kept filled with water and ready for action in our bedroom for middle-of-the-night cat-scapades. Lately they’ve figured out that it is fun to tip over the water container on the back of their drinking fountain and watch the water glug out all over the kitchen floor. Charming. The day will come when they don’t do any of that stuff anymore, obviously, and we’ll probably miss it when they do, but for now it sometimes is annoying as all get out.

Norm and Digit are the first cats I have ever had who did not come into my life as kittens, and I feel the difference in my bond with them. I like them, but I don’t feel like I’ll ever love them as deeply as I did Harry or Murray or Esmé. Time may prove otherwise, but for now it just isn’t the same. When we were looking at adult cats at the shelter, my reaction to most of them was “this is someone else’s cat”. Many of the older cats were animals that had to be given up by elderly people who could no longer care for a pet or had been compelled to leave their homes and couldn’t keep them. Some were straight-up abandoned. By adopting cats that were only about a year old, I felt, the feeling that I was just taking care of someone else’s pet might not be so great — my in-laws adopted their current dog a couple of years ago, and she was already five or six years old and very much the product of someone else’s rearing, and I did not want that sort of experience at all. So far, it has worked out pretty well. Once they adjusted to being here, Digit and Norm settled in well and everybody gets along nicely. As I’m writing this on Sunday morning, Digit is sitting with me in my recliner, and Norm is snoozing on the desk chair a couple of feet away. They’re pretty good cats.

I waited a while to talk about them online, because of the ambivalence I had about them, and because I still feel the loss of the other cats so much. Every time I watch Norm and Digit sitting in a window looking wistfully at the outside, knowing as I do that they’ll never be able to enjoy what should be a cat’s natural space, and knowing exactly why, it wounds me all over again. So many compromises have had to be made, so many losses endured, and even the simple business of having cats is now part of that diabolical calculus. I hope that sharing a little bit of them with you will make everything a little brighter.

Writing at The Awl, Brent Cox considers the enduring appeal of the mighty steak dinner, following in the footsteps of former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl, who wrote a classic piece on New York steakhouses almost 20 years ago.

A steak dinner for one at a fancy-schmancy Manhattan steak house will set you back anywhere from $50-$100 these days, depending a bit on the place, the sides, etc. The steakhouses remain the province of the One-Percenter Wannabes — the overpaid, overprivileged, overfed middle-aged white men who still really run things in this country — and the menus (and prices) reflect that.

A number of years ago, back when the wolf was not always figuratively, and literally, at the door, Bridget and I indulged ourselves with a dinner at one of Midtown’s long-standing steakhouses, Morton’s. The service and the shtick were worth the price of admission: the waiter actually wheels out a cart full of meat and does a show-and-tell for you so you can pick your own steak*. The dark-paneled walls, the Frank Sinatra on the stereo, the preponderance of older men in very expensive suits, it’s all there like scene in a movie. Whenever I have had one of these moments in life — encountering some situation so stereotypical it CAN’T BE real, and yet there it is right before my eyes — I’ve had all I could do not to laugh out loud, and that evening was undoubtedly one of those moments.

(* Those of you who will recall that Bridget does not eat beef will want to know that they even had some non-steak items on the menu, and, if I recall correctly, she had fish. Alas, they did not bring out a cart full of whole fish for her to choose from, more’s the pity.)

It’s a Paul Frank air filter. We’ve already bought virtually everything at Target that has Julius the monkey on it.

Why, yes, that is a recirculating ketchup fountain. Thank you for noticing.

First, there’s Iris, whom you and I have known for so many years as “Beta” on her father’s blog that I’d almost convinced myself that was her real name. (Which reminds me of the time Mig sent me to a cello-maker’s house to scout a carbon-fiber cello for him and I learned his real name from that guy’s wife…another story, but your secret is safe with me as long as you keep the payments regular, “Mig”) Annnnnnyway, Beta has been spending the last few weeks tramping around India with what seems to be a somewhat variable group of young people. The blog is called “meinasia”, which was supposed to be a sort of bilingual word-play being both “me in asia” for the English-speakers and “mein asia” for the German-speakers (The Family Von Mig lives in Austria, where they make dirndl skirts and sell watery beer to gullible American tourists). Apparently, though, the German part of it doesn’t really work. Whatev. The blog reads like a behind-the-scenes look at an episode of “The Amazing Race”, with train stations, airports, weird border crossings, and scary encounters with pushy souvenir peddlers. Because the trip is only six weeks long, the posting won’t last much longer, so be sure to have a look before it ends.

Meanwhile, my old friend Tony‘s oldest daughter, Lindsay (who, to the best of my knowledge has never had a cool Internet secret name) got on an airplane during the middle of Hurricane Irene and headed off for an entire semester in Uganda. Pretty ballsy, I think. She also fired up a blog as she was on her way. It’s called “Lindsay Leaves Home”, which doesn’t leave a lot of mystery, but at least there aren’t a bunch of people in Austria scratching their heads over some possible double entendre. When most of us think about a semester abroad, we tend to think about kicking around Paris or Rome, learning how to drink too much wine, smoke nasty cigarettes, and hookup with oversexed Eurotrash. There’s not a lot of glamour and romance in Uganda, I’m afraid, but not many Americans have even the slightest comprehension about life in a Third World nation, so the learning opportunity seems a bit more valuable than the typical 16-week European holiday semester. Lindsay is a pretty intense person anyway, so that’s fair. She’s only been in-country for a couple of days, so the stories haven’t had time to go too far yet. I hope she sticks with it for the whole time.

The thing that’s fascinating about blogs like these is that you get to learn about the authors as they are learning about themselves. Old geezers like me and Mig and Tony, we are fully-formed creatures for the most part, and if our blogs are revelatory, it’s usually because we carefully choose what we want people to see. Soon enough these young women will be vastly different people than they are right now, and the journeys they have set upon will be the agents of a great deal of that change.

I don’t know if anyone will be blogging at all another decade from now, when Charlotte is old enough to set out on such an adventure. And I genuinely despair that the world will not offer itself up so readily for her then. But even if she doesn’t get to see some exotic far-off place, I know she will find other agents of change that will shape her life, and I hope I get to see it through her eyes just like this.

Don’t feel obliged to buy me the top of the line; my dick doesn’t need to be THAT sharp.

Mmmm…slow-roasted flavor.

I always get food in my keyboard…so why not get a keyboard made out of food? S’mores, even!

I probably have enough random crap, so you could skip this

A new rubber duckie would be fun

Nothing says “Happy Birthday” like a box of rabid possums!

And don’t forget the cake…I want mine with a Chicago-style stuffed pizza inside