The Oppenheimer Report

Today is a reality check. Last week, Tuesday the 13th was a very strange day up here in Armour Township. It was as if the Grim Reaper came for a brief visit and randomly plucked two residents from the earth. First, the father of the designer who works in our builder’s office died suddenly that morning as he was about to go to work. Then, last Tuesday at the end of the day, as I was preparing our dinner, all of a sudden, I noticed a lot of cars pulling up to the house across the street. Within minutes there was an ambulance and a lot of people running around back and forth, and a lot of (presumably) first responders going into and out of the house. Then a police car showed up. From their body English, I could see the mother who lived in the apartment looking visibly upset, holding her head, pacing back and forth, crying. I saw children hugging the mother, and finally, I saw paramedics wheel a man out of the house on a gurney, pumping his chest as they rushed him to the ambulance. He was the ex husband, and he simply keeled over. I understand he later died in the hospital.

Last week, I watched the video and reports from Burma of the Mayanmar typhoon disaster which has so far claimed around 100,000 lives and left countless others homeless and in peril of dying. I saw coverage about that big earthquake in China that killed so many thousands of victims and caused so much destruction. Closer to home, I heard about the tornadoes in the Midwest which had cut a deadly swath through so many communities. As de-sensitized as I have become to the human tragedy, watching so much of it unfold before me on television, somehow, watching the paramedics pumping that man’s chest really stabbed me in the heart.

Hillary is down for the count. She has that Al Gore never-say-die attitude. Put a bullet in the ol’ Winchester (figuratively speaking); time to put that old grey mare (in a pant suit) out of our misery. By the way, congratulations Hillary, you won most of the blue collar vote in West Virginia. You may even, if you can claw Obama’s numbers back a little and turn a few not-so-super delegates, have a cold chance in hell of winning the Democratic nod. So then what? Your party is divided, and you will go down in history as the candidate deemed so pre-occupied with her own lust for power, that she inadvertently hobbled her party’s chances of winning what should have been a shoe-in for the Democratic nominee. I can’t wait to see how this one plays out. Now she flip flops and wants the votes in Florida and Michigan to count, because now those votes might work in her favor?! Atta girl.

Our little Jasper turned three last Sunday and we rented “Shrek” at her request. She loves Shrek. She also loves the old Benji-like dog across the street and I believe wants to have a tryst with him. She has a thing for older men. Iron Man made $150Million in its first few weeks. Dimitri Medevev is Putin’s new stooge in Russia, and the Penguins are in the Stanley Cup Finals. Too bad Canada lost that nail biter to the Russians, but they gave it the old college try. One penalty in overtime cost them the game. Not much progress on the house this past week; everyone was sick, including Shauna and I.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5/12/08

My friend Bob bought me an IPod Touch portable music device last year as a gift, and I can’t believe how much I use that thing. It is now my main source of music and I have stored about 10 gigs of my musical collection on it. The great thing about it is that I can move from one location to another, and take a good deal of my record collection with me. For those of you unfamiliar with the amount of music 10 gigs represents, I have well over three hundred albums on that little machine, and it is about the size of a deck of cards. Yes, I concede, I have reluctantly shaken hands with the Great Satan which is downloadable music.

One of the great things about digital technology, and one of the things I thought I’d never embrace, is the ability to go online and shop for single songs and out-of-print albums. No longer am I forced to buy an entire album in order to buy the song I want; almost any song I desire is available through ITunes for the nominal fee of 99 cents. I’ve been having a ball, racking my brain for all the esoteric pop hits I’d love to add to my collection. Take for instance “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham and the Pharos, or “All Right Now” by the 70’s band Free … or “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley. Indeed there are some strange pop songs in my collection, but each one of those songs conjures up a memory from my distant past, and I cherish those memories. In many cases, the bands were “one hit wonders”, and I have no interest in listening to their other songs. I believe back in the 60’s, songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker (the guy who wrote “Mr. Bojangles”) was in a band called Circus Maximus for a nanosecond. Despite its obviously botched studio recording, there is a song on that album entitled “The Wind” which I have always loved. I’ve had a scratchy tape-recorded analog copy of the song for twenty-five years, but the other day I was able to download a clean copy of the song from ITunes. The rest of the Circus Maximus album (I’m guessing they only put out the one album) is absolutely awful, but “The Wind” is a haunting, rambling, jazz-influenced piece that has always moved me with its beautiful melody. I can remember listening to a guy named Jim Santella back in the late Sixties on Buffalo’s only real FM alternative music radio station, and he used to play that song a lot. I have at least one hundred pop songs in mind that I’d love to add to my collection. As an amateur songwriter myself, I try to extract what it is about these songs that hooked me, hoping one day to incorporate some of that musical magnetism into one of my songs.

Time to go. Today, we will hopefully put in our slate order, and we have plumbing issues with which to deal as well. Let’s see, what might get me in the mood … think I’ll put on “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burden and War … there are two versions of the song, but the best copy was produced with War. And, by the way, the Cisco Kid was not a friend of mine.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5/6/08

Notes from the past month …
4/15/08 - I was watching my new favorite reality television program tonight – CNN’s “Little Polygamist on the Prairie” – and I must give CNN credit. As members of the Democratic Party gnaw off their own limbs to extricate themselves from their own rhetorical excrement, CNN has chosen to cover the bigger story: some Americans live in sin. This Mormon scandal dealing with the FLDS sect in Texas has shone a spotlight on all those fornicating polygamists. Is it religious persecution, or is it a felony … and what about the children?! Egads! Look for the spinoffs: “Desperate Sister Housewives”, “Cheaper by the Village”, and “Swapping Multiple Wives”.

4/28/08 – Up here in the Great White North, the recent warm weather caused the Magnetawan River to overflow her banks, flooding much of the surrounding land. The water level on Little Doe Lake (where our house is being built) rose several feet and the subsequent movement of ice in the lake took out our retractable dock. Indeed Nature can be a mother, just ask the residents of New Brunswick, who were recently plagued by devastating floods. Luckily, our new home is on high ground, but there has been significant water erosion and damage in the near vicinity. To rub salt into the wound, as Shauna and I returned from Toronto last Wednesday, we encountered a whiteout snowstorm on Hwy 11 north of Gravenhurst. I thought April Fool’s Day was at the beginning of the month.

5/5/08 – Watching “Market Call” this morning as we got ready to drive over to the construction site, I noticed a little blurb in the lower right corner of that too-much-news-to-digest channel, and it read “4000 killed in typhoon, 3000 more missing”. I didn’t catch the location, but it’s somewhere in Burma.Yikes! By the end of the day, the death toll was up to 20,000. That little tragedy probably won’t even make the front page of the papers in America, but I guarantee you this … if Reverend Wright puts forth any more of his creative opinions on racial division in America, we will hear about those ad nauseam.

Our house is progressing, slowly but surely, and many of the major decisions have now been made. We passed the one year point a week or two ago, but I’m not disappointed or surprised that the house has taken longer than anticipated to construct. As a custom build, this house has provided many surprises along the way, but we feel that the builder has been more than cooperative and successful in achieving the vision of our (largely Shauna’s) design. There were several last minute alterations to the floor plan which, of course, gives any builder fits. In all cases, we’ve made alterations before frame walls were constructed, and, while mildly inconvenient, our changes have been relatively minor. In the original plan, there was an entire log truss which was to be covered by a frame wall, and that seemed absurd. We went to great pains to reveal as much log as we could in this house, keeping in mind that wiring and plumbing must be hidden in some kind of frame structure. Our objective has always been to show as much of the architectural beauty of the log structure as possible. To that end, I think we have succeeded. Pictures cannot adequately describe the emotional lift we feel every time we walk into this house. It offers lake views from almost any vantage point, it captures the western lodge look we so strove to achieve, and it may very well be the best built house in the entire area. There is absolutely no drywall in this house. It has always seemed odd to Shauna and me that so many round log homes incorporate drywall, because, not only does that look incongruous, but when the building shrinks, as all log houses invariably do, the walls separate from the log, leaving clearly visible gaps. While this problem can be addressed with moldings, after the movement has occurred, we felt it was much less apparent when wood wall coverings are used. While there may be a thing or two we’d have changed in the original conception of the house, I don’t think either of us are the least bit disappointed in the way our home is shaping up. Quite the contrary, we are delighted that so much has turned out exactly as we had hoped.

If Shauna ever lets me near the computer, I’ll resume my duties as your twisted correspondent. As of today, there are still plenty of loose ends to be tied up and, in many cases, our mode of communication is email. Thank heavens for high speed … when we move in to the new house, we’ll be back to the molasses of dial up.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED