"Please don't eat the urinal cakes." - a little sticker in the men's room at the Oak Street Theater, Minneapolis
Hi, all. I know I've been fairly e-silent for the past few months, and I'll just assume that those have been the happiest months of your lives. This is just an e-howdy to let you know what's been going on with Margaret and me.
In March, I got sick. Not just a little-cold sick, but an I-gotta-go-see-a-doctor sick. I hadn't been that sick since my sophomore year of college (anyone remember The Plague from 1988?) The final diagnosis: I tested positive for mono (mono?!? Where on earth did I get mono? I haven't been a college student in years!), along with a mild case of pneumonia and sinusitis (a big sinus infection). I hadn't known that pneumonia shows up on a chest x-ray, but there it was, making my lung things look all fuzzy. They gave me some all-powerful antibiotics, and I started the long trudge down the dirt road to recovery. I spent most of March and quite a bit of April coughing, and I lost 8 pounds. Needless to say, I was a joy to be around.
And yet, I didn't miss a full day of work at all. I put in about a month of partial-days, where my goal was to show up just in time for lunch. Once I got to work I was fine, but the first two hours of the day were killers. Plus, one day after I saw the doctor, I did my radio show - we were in the middle of our fundraising pledge drive, and you can't miss those. I'm pretty sure I got a few sympathy calls, and my personal goal was to be the sickest DJ ever. (I believe I achieved that goal. Life is good.)
So that was March and April. Margaret coughed a bit, but didn't get as sick as I was. I think it was sympathy-coughing, like when the husband puts on the same amount of weight as his pregnant wife. Once I recovered, I started walking to work again. All is well again.
Somewhere in April, I was recruited to be the drummer for the local band Thinland. All these years spent wanting to be a drummer, then all these years with a drum set gathering dust in the basement, and now... the drums are in Jeff's basement, and we rehearse Monday nights. Thinland is a rock band, and we'll be playing a bunch of self-written pop tunes. The two guitarists have written a bunch of songs over the years, and we have more than enough material to keep us busy. The goal is to be able to play 10 songs on stage, and play a gig as the opening act for some other local band by the end of the summer. None of us plan on getting rich or famous; we have realistic expectations, and we just like playing. Life is good indeed.
The radio show bounces along nicely. There have been quite a few people who found some particular obscure song on my playlists (posted at kfai.org), and asked for a copy. I know how hard it is to find some of these songs, so I'm more than happy to send out a copy of "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" or "The Super Bowl Shuffle". (Trust me - they're obscure.) Well, I thought I would rummage around for some songs that I've been looking for, and I noticed that Dr. Demento played one of them about a year ago. I sent off a nice e-note explaining who I was and asking for a copy of The Extras' "Circular Impression". (Again - mighty obscure.) He made a copy for me, and we've sent a few CDs back and forth. He's a bigger music fanatic than I am, and I am duly impressed. Turns out, he grew up in Minneapolis! Who knew? So I made another friend in the music biz, and yet I still toil in obscurity. Seems fair.
Well, I finally cracked and bought the name "crapfromthepast.com". I just got the name last week, and right now it's just a dummy page. I have a friend working on a little web site, and within a month or so, there should be a more impressive dummy page.
We've been attempting a regular poker game out here. As the night wears on and we get a little punchy, we've been inventing games. Some of the better games have been Birthday Poker (your birth month is wild for you), Numerology Poker (add up the digits of your up cards, and that's wild for you), and Prime Poker (all prime numbers are wild). I take great pride in my favorite new game: Bruce Willis Poker (all Bruce Willis Movie numbers are wild: Die Hard 2, Die Hard 3, 4 Rooms, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, The Whole 9 Yards, and 12 Monkeys. That means 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 9s, and Queens are wild!) We've been trying to come up with a way to incorporate dice into the actual games, but haven't thought of anything more creative than rolling a die, and whatever number comes up is wild. Bruce Willis Poker, yet I still toil in obscurity...
For Memorial Day, we went to a barbecue with meat from five different animals. I inadvertently ate half a pan of brownies on top of that, and I felt pretty gruesome afterwards. Isn't that what Memorial Day is all about?
So we've got a bit of travel coming up soon. We got invited to two weddings in NY/NJ, nine days apart, so we'll be spending some time in the Eastern time zone. Here's our sketchy itinerary:
- Thurs, June 15 - fly into NY
- Fri, June 16 - wedding in NJ
- Sat, June 17 - drive down to Washington DC to see family and many museums (Margaret's never seen the art museums, and I think she may just go bezerk...)
- One of the days 6/19 6/20 or 6/21 - We have tickets to see Aimee Mann and Michael Penn in Virginia. I forget which day.
- Fri, June 23 - I have a dentist appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Dr. Wolff rules!
- Sun, June 25 - wedding in NY
- Mon, June 26 - fly back to Minneapolis
So there's quite a bit of unclaimed time in there, and we haven't ironed out the details yet. I'm sure I'll hit Manhattan, but I haven't figured out which day yet. Details to follow.
I will leave you with one final story. One of the big electronics retailers out here, Best Buy, is relocating its headquarters from one of the western suburbs to a neighborhood a few blocks from our house. In the process, they'll be buying out the houses and businesses on the land, then flattening it and starting over. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since our little suburb of Richfield will be making lots of money in property taxes. Anyway, the whole process of buying out property reminded one of my poker buddies of a little story...
My friend Tom used to work at the big IBM site in Tucson. IBM was buying out some of the local homeowners in order to expand the campus, and the process was going smoothly until they came across one particular homeowner that wouldn't sell. His property was valued at about $25,000, and he asked IBM for $400,000. He figured that IBM had to pay him the money, because he wouldn't sell otherwise and IBM would be left with a house in the middle of its campus. IBM said no - too much money. Then the guy tried a new tactic - he started carting in junk onto his property. Old refrigerators, dead cars, big ugly metal things. He figured that IBM wouldn't want an eyesore like that on its campus, and would have to pony up the big money and buy him out. Well, not only did IBM say no again, but they built an enormous hill around his house and built him his own access road. IBM's problem solved: no more eyesore, and at a cost significantly less than $400,000. The last Tom heard, the guy is still stuck in the house with all the junk on the property, because his property value has gone down from the original $25,000 and (oddly enough) he can't find any buyers for the property. There's a moral in there somewhere...
My lone movie review: Gladiator was fair. If given the choice, I'd rent The Insider again instead.
Hope all is well in your respective necks of the woods. And for your July 4th barbecues, remember that you're at the top of the food chain, and it's important to eat as many different animals as possible. (I will now wait for a crazed PETA representative to throw a pie at me...)
Ron & Margaret
