I’ve only been at the Jack Daniels for 3 days now, and I’ve already settled into a routine.

Every night at 11:00 p.m. I watch The West Wing re-runs on Bravo (which, by the way, is a much less Anton Kuerti-focused channel here in America). Then I go to sleep.

The alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., and I turn on the TV to a station that plays the modern I’ve Got a Secret until 8:00 a.m. Today’s guest was Charro, who, believe it or not, is much as she was in the 1970s; her secret was that she speaks fluent Japanese (in addition to 4 other languages). Who knew? The panelists this week have been Terri Garr, that annoying campy guy who played the “ambiguously gay neighbour” on several sitcoms in the 70s and 80s, that guy who played the district attorney several seasons ago on The Practice and a fourth I can’t recall. As my friend Sherin remarked today: without The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, cable game shows like this are the only refuge for the once-a-B-list crowd.

I’ve benefitted from several lavish spreads at Yankee this week: on Tuesday there was a breakfast potluck to celebrate the on-sale date of the 2004 edition of the Yankee Magazine Travel Guide to New England (which is actually quite a useful tool for planning a New England vacation). Today there was an afternoon tea (complete with linen and china!) to celebrate the move of the magazine’s distribution to a new fulfilment house (complete with all the data conversion you might imagine that entails). In other words, I’m eating like a king.

Tomorrow I break the routine to fly out to Phoenix to hook up with Brother Mike who, word has it, is burning up the mid- and south-west U.S. with his blockbuster vacation. It will be hard for me to keep up.

Gotta run: West Wing starts in 40 minutes!

Fence fines could come this summer, reports the CBC:

… farmers who don’t comply could face fines of up to $300,000.

I’m all for keeping cattle out of streams. I would also go to the barricades to support any farm family that was fined the crazy amount of $300,000 for violating cattle-in-streams rules.

Doesn’t it strike anyone that $300,000 is an absurd amount, so absurd, indeed, as to make it ineffective as a deterrent?

For the cattle operations I know, $300,000 isn’t a “slap on the wrist” or a “woah, we’ll never do that again,” it’s a “shut down the business and be in debt for the rest of our lives.”

There’s an amount for fines that says clearly “this is a serious problem and you need to pay attention.” Then there’s an amount like this that says “that is so crazy that they can’t possibly mean it.”

I have been getting money from the ATM at the Dublin General Store for almost 10 years. Yesterday I went down the hill to the store for lunch, took my ATM card out of its wallet, went to stick it into the machine. And the machine wasn’t there.

The store is undergoing spring renovations, and part of this is a new, smaller, private-label ATM machine inside the store, which replaces the old outdoor Granite Bank model out on the porch.

I’m not sure I’m reacting well to this change.

I did have a very nice short stack of blueberry pancakes this morning, and I went all out and upped for the “pure” maple syrup, which costs an extra $1.25 more than the “generic” maple syrup. Was there ever any question?

The Jack Daniels Motor Inn, where I’m staying this week, is under new management. The most obvious evidence is that they now have 79 channels on the cable TV, and they offer a free sample of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste to all guests. Otherwise, alas, the place still feels like it was constructed as a temporary shelter for the road crew 15 years ago.

It’s chilly here, but in a spring kind of way.

Here’s a shot up Wall St. in New York showing the GMC 4x4 pickups they use as mobile road blocks. The construction debris in the foreground is just that (i.e. it’s not some tricky terrorist obstacle course). The New York Stock Exchange is the building at the very back on the left.

I’m sitting in the back room of the LimoLiner, the “luxury” bus from New York to Boston. Here’s a shot of me talking to Steven via AIM:

And here’s me, my iBook, and the Bronx:

The “luxury” on the bus is mitigated somewhat by the inevitable bump, bump, bump of the bus. This makes typing on the iBook something of an extreme sport.

The WiFi connection, which uses some sort of voodoo to get to the Internet, isn’t exactly broadband. It claims to range from double the speed of dial-up to DSL, depending on location, but I’m getting something near dial-up speeds, and it does fade in and out, although now that we’re out on the highway it’s pretty solid.

The bus itself is a little rough around the edges: there was no water in the washroom sink (apparently you have to wait awhile after the toilet flushes); there a lot of crosstalk on the onboard sound system (I can hear engine noise, and, from time to time, AM radio, through my headphones); and the snack offered was more like Air Canada circa-1990 than “executive class.”

But the seats are comfortable, we seem to be making good time, and the downtown to downtown (rather than downtown to airport, through security, to airplane, to airport, to downtown that the flight would take) is nice. Boarding took all of 2 minutes, which was nice.

I’ll write more when the trip is over.

Hey, it’s April 5, 2004 and I’m in New York State. On April 5, 1966 I was also in New York State, being born. Thanks, Mom. And Dad.

I saw my first “starts Friday in New York and Los Angeles” film tonight, The United States of Leland.

Summary: think American Pie plus American Beauty and a touch of Life as a House. It works in parts, but there are about 200% too many “pained looks” shots, and the plot just never ties together in a way that makes it all feel coherent.

Depending on your point of view, I am either in the safest or most dangerous place on earth.

As I lie here in my hotel room bed, I can look out my window down the street and see the New York Stock Exchange.

It is surrounded by a pointy metal fence — it looks like souped up version of the Victorian fence my Auntie Fran had around her apartment house in Brantford, Ontario in the 1970s.

On the street between me and there is a phalanx of extended cab GMC 4x4 pickup trucks. This truck seems to be the model of choice in the neigbourhood for mobile roadblocking. All the trucks look new. Their engines are running. And I imagine their odometers read less than 100 miles apiece.

You can’t actually walk up to the New York Stock Exchange because only members and invited guests are allowed through the security fence. You can’t use the subway entrance beneath the New York Stock Exchange because it is closed.

The street is lit up almost brighter than daylight. It would be hard to get up to no good.

I didn’t feel queasy about walking from the Wall St. subway station to my hotel tonight at 10:00 p.m. because I knew I had at least 10 pairs of uniformed eyes on me at any one time.

At the same time, the notion that I’m 300 feet from a target worthy of such an obvious show of force makes me pause.

Off to the terrorist-free woods of southern New Hampshire tomorrow.

It’s April 4, 2004. And you thought it was difficult telling the difference between year, month and day before! I haven’t had this much fun since 01-10-00, the date Oliver was born.

Halfway through More, the Yeardley Smith one-woman show I saw tonight at the Union Square Theatre, I become listless and disappointed. But the last half won me over. The play is slightly unpolished, the timing is a bit off (the laughs and the applause fit into the wrong wells), but overall it is more than the sum of its parts, and I walked away satisfied and confused. Which is a pretty good feeling.