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Steve Hoy was the best man at our wedding. But before that he was my college roommate, back when they were randomly assigned without any profiling or preferences being stated.

I coasted through high school and had a great time but I was a terrible student, learning only what I needed to get by. I was determined to turn over a new leaf in college and planned on applying myself. That idea went out the window when Steve showed up. The first thing I remember him saying was, “Is it ok to put one of my stereo speakers on your desk?” He was already a junior. He had a car, a white Barracuda. We had a good time.

We rented a small, coal-heated house the next year and I eventually dropped out but before I did, Steve wrote an English paper for me. I think the assignment was to make something up and that was too much for me. Steve’s paper got me an A-/B+, one of the best grades I received. Steve, a sci-fi buff, entitled the essay “The Fourth Dimension.”

“My boarding house”, as my mother-in-law calls her senior living facility in Rochester, has one of the best restaurants in town. I love it out here. We ate at “Le Petite Bistro” tonight and I ordered the mussels with Calamata olives in a delicious garlic broth as my appetizer. It was out of this world or at least European. I overheard this guy at another table talking about Sister Bridget and looked over and thought this must be a different Sister Bridget than the one I had in first grade at St. John the Evangelist on Humboldt Road in the city. This guy looked so old. But the woman he was talking to said something about the Sisters of Mercy so I figured it could be the same one. I remember her as being so comfortable. That’s a pretty vague description but it was an important quality for me at that age. i stood up and asked if this could possibly be the same Sister Bridget and they confirmed that she had taught there.

My second grade teacher was a miserable nun and maybe that’s why I remember Sister Bridget so fondly. I remember that one asking for a show of hands on who still believed in Santa Claus. And then there seemed to be a endless parade of kooks who told tall tales with twisted moral underpinnings and seemed to delight in torturing the kids that called her bluff. But I still feel that this Catholic education had its merits. And for me they are best expressed in Buñuel and Felini movies.

We watched “The Reader” last night and I couldn’t figure out the guy. I understood him as a boy getting it on with the woman and I dug the woman but I never could figure out the guy as a man. What was his problem? I really dug the woman’s prison room too. It was so cozy. I completely understood her not wanting to leave it. It was smaller than my dorm room in Shea Hall at Indiana University but it was all her own. As a freshman in college I had the room to myself for three days before the other guy whose name was on our door showed up. I had already called home and told my parents that I thought I had an Asian roommate based on his name, “Hoy”, but when Steve pulled up in a Baracuda and asked for help unloading the stereo equipment I knew I was not going to be able to control my situation. I was determined to turn over a new leaf in college. I was going to study and read my assignments instead of coasting like I did all through high school. But I could not resist Steve’s “Cream”, “Paul Butterfield” and “Led Led Zeppelin” eight tracks. Steve wasn’t Asian at all but 100% Hoosier and he was damn good at coasting so there went my plans. I was thinking of Steve tonight when I mopped up the garlic broth from my mussels. Peggi saw me and asked, “what was that phrase that Steve had for cleaning your plate with your bread? That was “Walloping your dodger.”

click photo for dramatic footage

Peggi and I celebrated an anniversary of sorts yesterday. Our first date was an outing to the Kentucky Derby. We rode in the back of Steve Hoy‘s van from Bloomington, Indiana to Louisville. Voice over talent extraordinaire, Joe Barrett was in the front seat. Secretariat won the race.

We make a point to tune in to the race every year and this time we watched it at Bill and Geri’s house. We were invited there to help take down a few Arborvitae trees that had grown out of control. The shrubs were probably planted there when the house was built and they were now taller than the house. Bill had one of his trees fall on a neighbor’s property many years ago and he bought a chain saw to clean up the mess. His saw has been on permanent loan to us and we really couldn’t live without it. I did most of the cutting but Bill stepped in for this dramatic footage while I grabbed a movie.

Dow down -504.48(-4.42%). That’s no big deal is it? I talked to Steve Hoy, our unofficial financial guy, and he thought some more banks would fall next. I was thinking we were at the bottom. Our official financial guy called from Merrill Lynch to “touch base”. Merrill was bought today by Bank of America so he wasn’t very reassuring. Maybe we should be panicking but I don’t really care enough to panic. I sticking with the “buying opportunity” picture.

I was up the ladder the other day when Bank of America called again “about our account”. How many times do you have to hang up on these guys before they leave you alone? Our home line is on the “Do not call” registry but those laws are apparently meaningless in India. I told this guy, “We don’t have an account with Bank of America and we don’t want one. What are you calling about?” And all he could say was, “Oh, I see what you mean”.

Today is Steve Hoy’s birthday. It is a big one for him. There is a six involved. We called him this morning but he didn’t answer. He was at the Indianapolis 500 yesterday and and may not be able to hear his phone ringing today. In the late sixties he proposed that we just kill ourselves when we turned thirty. I was uncertain but Steve felt like that was just too old and everyone he knew that was that old was a creep. It is old. Sixty is older.

I worked so hard on our landscaping job on Friday that I couldn’t paint Saturday morning. I stood in front of my easel like a zombie and then decided to just go out and work in the yard some more. Painting is hard work, harder than landscaping. I need to be physically ready or I make a mess of it. We turned in early and I was in good shape today. I finished a really strong painting before Peggi got back with her mom. We cooked chicken in the back yard.

I called our nephew in NYC to see if he could handle manual labor when he gets up here. He’s taking the train up tomorrow. I plan on borrowing my neighbor’s truck and picking up a load of 3/4 inch gravel to put in the French drain out back. It’s $5 a load at the quarry in Penfield. Our nephew is up for it.

Kevin Patrick is building a site that dedicated to 45s. He has just started but it promises to be brilliant. He tried blogspot yesterday and Tumblr today. He’s looking for an easy way to embed music in the blog software. It’s called So Many Records, So Little Time and it reunites packaging with digital music files. It promises to a juke box in the sky or record store showroom where you can’t buy anything but you can browse as long as you like. There’ll be plenty of personal anecdotes as well.

Steve Hoy called this morning from South Carolina wondering what I thought about the market. Steve has a good bit of his investments in margin accounts and he is always getting calls from his broker. This morning he felt like he was backed into a corner with his Washington Mutual holding. He sold 500 shares at $9 a share while I was on the phone with him. If he didn’t, he feared he would lose it all. And of course as soon as he confirmed the sale he said, “I probably just sold at the bottom”. I don’t understand the strategy of margin accounts and I am the last person to ask for financial advice but it was good to hear his voice.

Steve is worried that the credit crisis will force people to put more on their charge cards and then eventually default on their credit card bills which will collapse the already weakened financial institutions. Steve said he had no confidence in Bush and he laid out his own plan to bail out the market. It was something like lowering the interest rates to 5% and back that with federally insured bonds which would allow people to refinance their homes so their payments were more in line with the value of their home.

Steve was business major at Indiana University when I met him. Maybe he will lay out his plan here in a comment because I have surely mangled the translation.

Sunflowers in Winter

On the front page of our local paper yesterday there was a story about some remarks that either Hillary or Obama made about race. We couldn’t tell from the article who said what or why it was controversial. But the headline made it sound as if it was newsworthy. The article came from the Associated Press and it was probably so heavily edited by one of the few full time Gannett staffers that it came out incoherent.

Which brings me to the comment that Steve Hoy made on the “Send Us Your Problems” entry. Steve bailed me out when I was a freshman and we were roommates. I had a paper due the next morning and I was grumbling about it and Steve said, “Let me write it”. He banged it off and called it “Time, The Fourth Dimension”. I had my doubts but turned it in anyway and got an “A” along with a comment addressed to “Mr. Dodd” with an explanation point after it. And I work for a small company named 4D.

My nephew who is a senior in high school and one year younger than I was when Steve wrote that paper for me is in San Francisco for MacWorld. I’ve been following their adventures on his blog, The iLife. He and his friend got in line yesterday for today’s keynote address by Steve Jobs. They were first in line and were interviewed by Justine from iJustine.tv. I love the “MacWorld Overnight” video she just posted.