Finally...

Wednesday afternoon, New Year's Eve, brought another envelope in the mailbox.

"If you're not busy, stop by and ring in the New Year with us. We have a new fondue recipe, and we plan on toasting the New Year with Sahara Highballs and Andre Cold Duck. We'd love it if you could join us.

It's been a non-stop party over here since Christmas. We put a couple more Polaroids in the envelope so you could see what you've been missing."

And there they were. More Polaroids:


We kept the blinds down and the lights off on the side of the house facing the neighbors that night. I nursed my nagging cold with champagne and stuffed mushrooms that my bride thoughtfully prepared for me. We huddled together and watched Death Race, Blades of Glory and What Happens In Vegas, all the while nervous that the neighbors might knock on the door looking for us if they saw the flickering blue light of the TV set through the blinds. Fortunately, we were left alone and greeted the new year in a subdued but comfortable fashion.

We saw no sign of them on New Year's Day.

This morning my bride returned to work, and I took the girls for chicken and waffles at Kitsch'n after I got a haircut. When we got home a realtor was hammering a "for sale" sign into the neighbor's front yard. The house was obviously and suddenly vacant. There were a few black plastic trash bags by the back porch, waiting to be carried out to the curb. I noticed a couple pieces of paper blowing across my driveway; on closer examination they were nothing but unused Polaroid backing papers.


Our long holiday season nightmare was over.

Happy New Year

2008: Did nothing, accomplished nothing. Alternated between loafing and treading water.

2009: Full of promise.

Woo hoo.

New Year Random Ten , looking back at 2007

Let's start with my first random ten of the new year. One of my resolutions this year is to learn some mad computer skillz so I can actually post music samples and not just these crappy song titles. But for now, crappy song titles is all you're getting:

Why Can't You Be Nicer To Me?--The White Stripes

Sal's Got a Sugarlip—Johnny Horton

Break On Through—The Doors

Terror Couple Kill Colonel—Bauhaus

No Time To Cry—The Sisters of Mercy

One Way Ticket—Bobby Lumpkin & the Kapers

The Pontiac—Tom Waits

You're Gone But I'm Left—Tyrone Schmidling

My Love is a Flower—Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers

Cypress Grove—Tav Falco

_____________________

Now on to other matters.

I tried this out last year after stealing the idea from my sister-in-law Kate.

Here’s how it works:

You take the first couple of lines from the first and last post for each month. You can edit as much as you want. Or you can just invent stuff that you never posted in the first place. And then you have it, your blog year in review.

2007

The Year in Review

January: Experts say all signs point to a massive attack by man-eating sharks some time in the new year.

Ever get stuck next to someone on a train, bus or airplane, and that person just really bugs you? Thanks to the wonders of forwarded email, here's a way of dealing with them.

February: Lulu recently posted a YouTube clip that purports to be the worst video ever. I won't dispute that claim.

Pissed off or depressed? I haven't decided which just yet.

March: DHL Import Express: One Invoice, One Currency, One Company, One Liver and Part of a Human Head.

I was looking through my clown collection for something disturbing to kick off the weekend. This is what I came up with:

April: I've been tagged by both Katie Schwartz and Johnny Yen, and if it's rude to ignore a tag, how rude would it be to ignore two? I had no choice but to comply:

Ask any of my close friends or family and they will tell you I am a model of rectitude and decorum, and would not normally even say the proper term for the female pudenda. But now that's changed.

May: Be proud, fellow midwesterners: it all started here in Chicago on May 1, 1886. The start of the 8-hour day movement...

There are three freaks this week. Let's have a little contest, shall we?

June: Here's a few tips if you're thinking about committing a robbery:

1) Don't get drunk before you commit your robbery

That's the nice thing about the Random Ten--it requires nothing but the push of the "shuffle" button and a little copying and pasting.

July: I had a bright idea the other day (at least I thought it was bright at the time, we'll see how it works out) of starting a blog to post pictures and descriptions of stuff I want to get rid of.

Sometimes I think about how my job has changed me. We all change over time, no doubt about it. After almost 19 years of doing the same job it gets hard to tell if the changes you see in yourself are a result of time, or a result of how you’ve been living your life.

August: Yes indeedy, it's Weenie-Waver Wednesday!

Today's story works on so many levels. It's got:

-Drugs
-Booze
-Driving while (partly) naked
-Christian radio personalities

I know you're all expecting to see another sex fiend for Weenie Waver Wednesday.

September: This man was, without a doubt, the best of all of us. There were no signs of depression that we could see, and he was literally the last person any of us would have thought to be at risk.

Beckeye and Coaster Punchman have sent me off on an 80's nostalgia trip. There are worse things.

October: Can't afford that Standing Rib Roast for the holidays? Here's an entree with all the panache, at a fraction of the price! Yes, it's a Wiener Tiara Bake

My friend Dena sent this, and I think it's a swell last minute costume idea: Make your own Christopher Walken mask.

November: It's hard to say goodbye to Halloween. Once again I'm having that post-Halloween letdown.

I just finished my last training run, a quick 3 miler. The starting temperature was 29, and what kind of Chicagoan would I be if I didn't throw in the wind chill factor, huh? That made it feel like 19.

December: A journey of 13.1 miles starts with a single step.

"I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it. Unless I'm thirsty."

A toast

"I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it. Unless I'm thirsty."


--Madame Lilly Bollinger, on champagne




But that's not the toast referred to in the title of this post. No. Here's the toast I'll be saying tonight:


"Here's to a kidney stone of a year: painful as hell, and we're glad it's passed."


Happy New Year. I hope tonight finds you surrounded by people you love, and who love you back.

Back to normal

Yep.

The tiki bar outing was splendid, and it's a good thing that people far more articulate and entertaining than I am memorialized it for the ages. People like Coaster Punchman, Johnny Yen (great pictures!) and GKL of Two Minutes in the Box.

Because once I returned to work the next day, it was back to normal. Oh yeah. Normal.

The parents of the girl who decided to casually mention that she was raped as she went off to the psych hospital after a domestic with her parents (she claimed she was raped by her boyfriend, and then went to the mall and walked around with him after they showered together, and decided to report it 2 weeks later when her parents got mad at her) no longer want us to investigate. Believe it or not, we have another, similar, case from about 2 weeks ago, and that victim has not contacted us either (she also disclosed her assault on the way to the psych ward after a domestic disturbance with her mom).

Another sexual assault investigation, involving a 90 year old dementia patient, continues, and hopefully we'll make some progress with it this week. What started as a great lead in an armed robbery we were investigating (a person matching the description of our robber checked into a nearby hotel 20 minutes after the robbery, paid cash for the room, and was on parole for robbery) ended with me yanking the guy off a toilet, naked after he sat there pretending to take a shit as he flushed the dope we didn't care about in the first place, and then realizing he had nothing to do with our robbery. The idiot informed us he had hepatitis C after coughing all over us during the encounter. And did I mention he wasn't our robber?

I spent a good part of this evening standing in a room at a local SRO hotel with the body of a 39 year old man who died some time after Christmas. He was kinda blue-ish and marbly-looking, but not ripe enough to burst yet. We were lucky enough to leave before he had to be transported, so if he popped and oozed when they bagged him, at least we weren't around for it. I got to inform his estranged wife that he had died--he'd been living in this flophouse since they separated pending a divorce. I felt bad for her--she had to break the news to their kids. A little while later I had to reach out to another agency, and some poor cop got sent to his parents' house to tell them their son had died. At least I remembered to wear my raid jacket to the death scene, so I didn't have to go home with my winter jacket smelling of human decomposition.

_____________________

One of the things I do, in between the other stuff, is to look at the crazy letters that come to the department. Some of them are anonymous, some are not. You know the letter is crazy when it arrives--I don't know how to describe this, but the crazy letters just look different. Sometimes it's the extra-tiny handwriting, sometimes it's the typewritten address with no return address on the envelope. It depends.

So, you get one of these letters, and if there's a name or return address you check it out, try and determine if the person poses any threat to anyone or is just one of the legions of the harmless crazy obsessed.

Here's the latest. It was a handwritten screed about an encounter at a local restaurant that somehow seemed to trigger an attack of blisters and boils in the armpits of the writer. He thoughtfully included copies of a typewritten letter he wrote to another police agency 10 years ago by way of reference. Just so we'd understand the severity of this new incident. He also attached photocopies of two photographs. They appeared to be self-taken photos of a man wearing some type of bra. The flash in the mirror, and the poor quality of the photocopy prevented me from figuring out exactly what I was looking at.

Read on:








So, readers, what do you think? Should we go out and meet this "magic dancer" or just file the letter and do nothing else with it? I'm leaning toward filing it.

Well, it's Monday now. First day of the week, last day of the year. Oh boy.