- In Plymouth, MN, on February 26, “Theft - Someone stole a cheeseburger as it was being handed to the person who ordered it at the drive-through window at Culver's, 6175 Quinwood Lane N. ”
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| This and the other house pictures are all from the realtor's listing. That's the sellers' stuff in the interior pictures. |
We first got the bug in our heads while walking around Lake Nokomis on one of the first nice weekends in March. There was an Open House sign set up by the walking path, so we just wandered over there on a whim. We didn’t buy that house, or even look for others in that neighborhood, but that was the first inkling that we could afford a little upgrade.
One date in July was set in stone: July 9th, which was the closing date for our new house. That was immovable. You can’t miss a house closing. You can’t move a house closing. You plan the rest of your life around the house closing.
Jewish tradition dictates that the bris (circumcision) should be when the baby is eight days old, so Liz and I lived with the fear that the baby would be born eight days before our house closing and we wouldn’t get to go to the bris. Ken and Maria were very accommodating, and scheduled the bris for Friday, July 6th, in New York, knowing that we’d have to fly immediately back to Minnesota to prepare for the house closing.
In case you’re wondering, the ceremony for a bris is small. Usually it’s just family. At least I think they’re usually small; this is not the type of thing I regularly attend. Come to think of it, this is the first bris I’ve attended since my brother himself went through it, when I was six.
The ceremony and the actual circumcision were done by a mohel, who has received a whole lot of religious and medical training specifically to do this one very specialized task. The mohel came in with a small suitcase full of stuff and performed the whole procedure in Ken and Maria’s home. Earlier he’d given them a list of things to have on hand (none of which I can remember), but they weren’t very exotic things.
He came in, he talked to us family members for a few minutes about the religious significance of everything, he explained what he was going to do, and he gave us all specific responsibilities. I don’t remember much about what he said after that, because my responsibility, as uncle, was to securely hold little baby James onto the baby basket for the procedure.
Does this sound terrifying to you? Holding an eight-day-old baby boy in place while he gets circumcised? Oh. My. God.
So they sat me in a sturdy chair, probably a kitchen chair, not a recliner or a rocking chair. The chair was close to the dining room’s overhead light, since lighting was important. I had strict instructions to place my feet firmly on the floor, right angles at my knees. The mohel gave me a little cradle to hold in my lap. The cradle wasn’t really a full cradle, but was more like an old TV tray, padded, with a raised lip that faced my stomach, and a firm, flat working surface facing away from me.
I was instructed to hold the basket very firmly against my lap, which I did. I held it so firmly, I’m surprised that I didn’t snap it into a thousand splinters. Then the mohel put baby James on the old TV tray, and gave me very specific instructions on how to hold his legs. His legs were bent outward, and I was instructed to hold his knees VERY firmly against the TV tray so that he couldn’t wiggle. And so I VERY firmly held him in place, while the mohel took measurements, inspected, and did whatever he needed to do before using the scalpel. He sang a bit in Hebrew, to relax us all a bit and to break the silence. It would have been very silent indeed, otherwise, leaving nothing but the drip, drip, drip of sweat from my forehead.
At this point, my memory becomes a little cloudy. I was seated in a kitchen chair, with a baby on a padded tray in my lap, with strict instructions to hold the baby’s knees against the tray VERY firmly. Which I did. This, however, was a lot to ask from someone as medically squeamish as I am. I found solace by focusing intently on a particular light switch on the wall, while very consciously maintaining as much pressure as I could on James’ knees.
Almost immediately, baby James peed on my shirt. A first for me, but a common occurrence, I’m told.
I honestly don’t know how long the whole thing lasted. Fifteen minutes, maybe? Two hours? Who knows? Time stopped for a while for me. My arms and hands cramped up, but I played through the pain and focused on that light switch. Once I got my hands in place, I never again looked down at my lap—that would have certainly resulted in my unconsciousness and even worse things for baby James. Liz told me afterwards that her task was to hold baby James’ arms during the procedure, but I would have never have known that because I was fixated on the light switch.
And then the mohel was done. The baby got wrapped up and set down. And, in going along with tradition, the first glass of Manischewitz wine was given to me, the uncle, who is the individual in the room who needs it most. I downed it in one giant gulp. Basically, I did a twelve-ounce shot of Manischewitz. Frankly, I don’t think a Big Gulp of the stuff would have been enough to calm my nerves.
Did I mention that a day or two before James was born, here at work I got two patent applications dumped in my lap that needed immediate attention? Both had deadlines that required that they get filed before our New York trip. So I worked an eighteen hour day on Sunday July 1st, followed by three twelve-hour days in a row, including working twelve hours on July 4th. I wrote two complete patent applications in four days, which is really pretty absurd; one single application usually takes a full week. The clients loved them, so it seems that I work well under extreme pressure. Then we left for the bris in New York on July 4th.
We had our house closing on Monday, July 9th. The packers came and packed all our stuff on Tuesday, July 10th. The movers moved everything to the new house on Wednesday, July 11th. So on Wednesday night we slept at the new house, surrounded by furniture and hundreds of cardboard boxes.
The new house is in Minneapolis proper, at the western edge of the city, right at the northeast corner of St. Louis Park. We’re along the west edge of Cedar Lake, and we can see the water from our property. It’s a really great neighborhood.
The house itself is called a Traditional Four Square. It looks like a little cube, with bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, living/dining room, kitchen, and bathroom at ground level, and a TV room, laundry, and some storage in the basement. It was built in 1925, and it was maintained immaculately by the previous owners. We love it. The cats seem to like it, too, even though it doesn’t have some of the ledges and other quirky cat-friendly features of the old house.
Immediately after we closed on the new place, we did three things, all of which I heartily recommend to all homeowners:
- We hired a contractor to make sure all the bedroom doors actually latch, so that when you close the door, the cats can’t just push them open. I don’t know why I never did this in the old house.
- We hired a locksmith to change all the locks on the house and garage to work on one single key. The previous owners gave us five different keys, all for different things. Again, I don’t know why I never did this in the old house.
- The house had an unbelievable amount of recessed lighting, so I bit the bullet and swapped out all the incandescent bulbs in the whole house and garage with LED floodlights or LED candelabra bulbs. I made multiple trips to Costco and Menards for the first week we were in the house, and the final tally came out to about forty-three LED bulbs.
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| For two weeks, I used my professional DJ equipment as the sound system for our TV. Liz ultimately vetoed it. |
From the new house I discovered that I could walk to work! It’s about three miles each way, which takes about fifty to fifty-five minutes. Easy! The walk is entirely along designated bike paths and through a park, so I don’t have to deal with cars at all. I cross literally two streets between the house and the office. Every morning, I get to say hello to the cute little black squirrel that lives at the western edge of Loring Park. When it’s raining, the Plan B is a local bus to and from downtown that has a stop two houses away from mine. Life is very, very good. Although the thirty days this summer when it was over ninety degrees outside made the walks home a little uncomfortable.
Tuesday, September 11th: The walk home was ninety-four degrees. Wednesday, September 12th: The walk home was fifty-seven degrees. I wasn’t properly dressed for either day, which explains why I’m sick now.
We got to meet all our neighbors all at once for National Night Out, which was just a few weeks after we’d moved in. We explained that we bought the little cube house on the corner. Oh—Joan and Gary’s house. Everyone loved Joan and Gary, so we were the newer, less cool Joan and Gary. The neighborhood kids all loved Joan and Gary, too, because they’d had a giant trampoline in the backyard that all the kids were free to use. No, we did not inherit the giant trampoline.
Liz really likes the new house as well. The new kitchen is spectacular and could probably fit the old kitchen in one of its cabinets. Nice kitchen means Liz cooks more in the nice kitchen, which in turn means that I eat more good food. Win win win! The new location also cut Liz’s commute time down to between eight and twelve minutes, none of it on highways. It’s been a really good summer.
We closed on the new house literally about ten days after I had the old one paid off. I’d been in the Richfield house for exactly fifteen years, plus about ten days. And now I have to sell it.
We discovered that buying a house is INFINITELY more fun than selling one. Just three weeks before we moved, the air conditioner died in the old house. I suppose that’s better than having it die with the new owners, but still, three weeks? And just a day or two before we moved, one of the toilet seats broke off at the hinge. Aw, c’mon!!
Our realtor told us that in the current buying environment, you only get one shot to introduce a house onto the market, and the house has to be tip-top perfect for it. So over the past few weeks, we’ve worked with contractors and painters to do all the things I should have done years ago to make the house look good. And it really does look good! Amazing what a good paint job will do! The goal is to have it on the market by the end of the month, and that’ll be that.
Mid-August – Over the years, quite a few of you have asked me if I’d consider turning these Big Life Updates into a book. Well, presto. They’re now a book.
The fun part for me was the back-and-forth with David. He’d suggest that I needed a stronger sentence in a particular paragraph, so I’d type up a stronger sentence and send it along. Or I’d suggest that we take out or add back certain portions of text. And so forth, all in the name of shaping over ninety individually written Big Life Updates into something that reads coherently as a book.
And remarkably, it does read coherently. In working with the portions of text that were written at so many different times in my life, we could actually see an evolution in how I write. Somehow, my writing style has actually matured over the years. Neato! I’m still no Tina Fey when it comes to witty prose, but I could probably write a better patent application than she could. Actually, I’d love to read Tina Fey’s attempt at a patent application.
Initially, David and I talked about including some pictures with the Big Life Update text. That turned out to be impractical for a number of reasons:
- I only started including pictures fairly recently, when I got my first digital camera. There simply aren’t any pictures going back farther than that.
- Pictures take up a lot of real estate in a book. As is, the book is pretty hefty with just the text. Hefty enough, actually, that we had to use a bigger page size than a standard paperback.
- I would have to clear the rights for every picture in the book. It’s one thing to grab a picture off the Internet and reproduce it in a blog post. But it’s quite another to do things properly in a book. It just wasn’t worth it.
- You may not have noticed it over the years, but I deliberately wrote every Big Life Update to read just fine without the pictures. The pictures do add something when you read through the blog posts, but you’d never know they were missing if I removed them.
And, as a really terrific bonus, I’d get a professionally done index, written by Seth, my old college roommate. Seth is professional indexer (yes, such a thing exists), and I told him to go nuts and insert as many in-jokes as he could into the index. It’s actually really fascinating for me to flip through the index; it’s like seeing my entire life, arranged into alphabetical order. A most unnatural way of looking at the world, but one where it’s really easy to find stuff. Seth and I went to great lengths to list both the first and last names of everyone mentioned in the book. If you’ve never been mentioned in a book before, and you’ve been called out by name in one of the Big Life Updates, this may be your best chance to see your name in print.
Once the text was finished, I worked with a graphic-design person to do the interior layout (you need a particular talent to turn a ho-hum MS Word document into something that looks like a book) and the cover. The cover is simple, but is immediately recognizable to music nerds from the ’80s, much like myself. David Wiley came up with the title, which is also immediately recognizable for the same reasons. Overall, I’m pretty proud of the whole thing.
In my very first meeting with David, I told him that I ultimately wanted the book to be a good representation of myself for future family members. I wanted something that a future niece/nephew could read to get a good sense of what her/his uncle was all about. In that context, the book is already a complete success.
So it’s out now. It’s available in paperback (hardcover was too expensive) and in electronic form for Kindles. It’ll be interesting to revisit these words in a few years, when we’ll wonder what a Kindle was. Here in 2012, e-books don’t have indices, since you screw up the page numbers by changing the font size, so the excellent index is only available in the print version. You can get the book through all the obvious online retailers, and I’m trying to figure out how to get it into bricks-and-mortar bookstores here in the Twin Cities. That’s still a mystery to me, but I’ll figure it out.
Normally I’m not one for crass product placement, but David insisted that I at least include a link to the book somewhere in this Update, so you can what it’s all about: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1467943789
Late September – Liz’s parents came to visit for a weekend. They’d visited us before, but they’d always stayed at a hotel. This was new territory for all of us. We outfitted one of the guest bedrooms with a daybed and some bedroom furniture from IKEA, and all went well. Our whole weekend was basically eating out (Brasa, Lucia’s, Mel-O-Glaze donuts), driving around to see stuff, and doing a terrific Segway tour of the Minneapolis riverfront. A very nice weekend overall, and a nice confirmation that our guest bedroom can actually be a guest bedroom.
Early October – Got myself a new job! I’ll be doing the exact same job as a Patent Agent, but with a different firm about three blocks north of my current office. I’ll be starting in mid-October at Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner. I don’t expect that much day-to-day stuff will change for me, except that I’ll have more to do. I’ll still have the same restaurants downtown, and the new office is still walking distance from the house. Overall, I’m pretty excited.
Coincidentally, I learned that 1221 Nicollet Mall, the office building that houses my current office, was sold to the church next door. It will be flattened and turned into low-income housing units, according to today’s paper. Hmm.
Stay autumnal!
Ron and Liz
