Happy mid-January from Minnesota! We had 34 inches of snow in December, and not much since then. (We also had Super Bowl dreams until the Giants beat us 41-0, but we won't talk about that.)
First off, I'm leaving my job at Seagate. I had a good 3-1/2 years at the company, but it's time to get back to optics. I'll be starting work at ADC Telecommunications at the end of February (fiber optics and such). The site is about 20 minutes from the house, so I won't have to move or anything. The best way to get in touch with me is still ron@crapfromthepast.com, which gets forwarded to the house. (By the way, the crapfromthepast.com site now has a huge section on Milli Vanilli. Someone had to...)
We ditched cable and got a satellite dish, then got a new couch. Margaret and I are well on our way to becoming true potatoes.
So Margaret and I both made quick trips to Florida recently. First, she flew to Tampa to help her sister move into a new house. While she was gone... I was single again! Woo-hoo! So I did the most single-guy thing I could think of - I invited my friend John over, and we got the worst frozen pizza we could find, the worst beer we could find, and watched the worst movies we could find! The details: The frozen pizzas produced some surprises - the Totino's party pizza turned out to be the best of the bunch. The little cubes of artificial pizza meat are a world away from real pizza, but the Totino's was actually quite yummy in an all-artificial way, much like Taco Bell (no one would mistake it for real Mexican food, but it hits the spot nonetheless). Other less successful pizzas included Tony's and Cub Foods' own, which tastes like a rubbery ham-and-cheese sandwich on a bad crust. All in all, we tallied up the numbers for what we actually ate: 1680 calories per person, 83 grams of fat per person. Big woo-hoo! Although I didn't sleep very well that night.
The beer: My friend John walked into Edina Liquors and asked the clerk for the worst beer in the store. The cheapest? No, the WORST. Once the clerks understood that what we wanted was bad beer, not necessarily cheap beer, they got into a serious discussion amongst themselves. Two out of the three clerks agreed: Olympia Beer is the worst. John got a 12-pack for $5. The slogan on the can appears in quotes: "It's the water." As if it were the answer to the question, "My God, what is wrong with this beer?" "It's the water." John and I agree - Olympia is probably the worst beer we've ever had, and that includes my experience with generic white-label beer (made by Perle) a few years back. Bleh! I still have ten cans in the fridge, just in case.
The movie: "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians", featuring an eight-year-old Pia Zadora. After that, we watched most of "Time Of The Apes", a bad Japanese "Planet Of The Apes" knock-off directed by Sandy "light and get away" Frank.
Margaret came back and literally found pizza boxes and beer cans all over the house. I was beaming with pride, having gotten in touch with my XY chromosomes for the first time in a long time.
A few days after Margaret got back into town, I flew down to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate Grandma's 90th birthday. I think I spent more time traveling than I did in Florida, and it was probably the shortest trip anywhere ever. On the first leg of the trip (Minneapolis to Atlanta), I sat next to two high school kids, a brother and sister on their way to a wedding in Florida. Nice kids. I got to see the sunset from the air, which is also terrific. On the next leg (Atlanta to Ft. Lauderdale), I sat next to a 50-year-old alcoholic woman, whose exact words were, "I've been looking for a light beer since 8:30 this morning." She might have been only 30, but she looked 50+. A charmer.
The 36 hours I spent in Florida with Grandma and my mom were very nice. I guess the maternal instinct is to feed your kids until something bad happens - this is a good instinct, and my brother and I freely welcome the feeding part. Well, imagine two generations of maternal instincts raining down on you, and that's how much food I ate in my short visit. Yikes indeed!
I always got a kick out of the little jobs that family members save up for you. One of them was to buy furnace filters and a new smoke detector at the local Home Depot. So Saturday morning, as I made the pilgrimage to the Big Orange, I noticed that Home Depot ran sort of a kids' camp in the parking lot, where they get to hammer and sand some wood scraps together. It was pretty cute, actually, and I can see how Margaret's childhood (which consisted of 90% hammering and 10% plotting the demise of her siblings) was pretty enjoyable.
So on the trip back, from Atlanta to Minneapolis, I wound up sitting next to the same two high school kids! What are the odds? I booked my flight online, and I picked out the seats myself, and I would assume that their parents also picked out the flights and seats at random! Weird! I'll probably run into them again the next time I fly somewhere...
Geeky aside: What if banks set up savings accounts with a complex interest rate, like 0.05i per year? So after a year, 5% of your balance would be turned into imaginary dollars, then negative dollars the year after, then negative imaginary dollars, and finally real dollars after four years. You could hide your assets from The Tax Man by turning them into imaginary dollars! Why has nobody done this before?
My band, Thinland, has been doing pretty well lately. Right before I left for Florida, we played a gig at one of the local Minneapolis bars. We got the whole show on CD, and the CD sounds much better than the actual show (where the audience told us we sounded like mud). I blame the bar's sound guy, but I can't complain too much because the CD doesn't sound too bad. We actually sound like a band, which is pretty cool to me. (We're not just a bunch of guys banging away; we're a cohesive pop/rock band. Neato.) The CD turned out to be 64 minutes long, which is TWICE as long as one of the greatest live recordings of all time, 1962's "James Brown Live At The Apollo". We're TWICE as LONG! A whole factor of 2, is what we are. And we rock as hard as one could expect from a band with a cello.
I have to lug six boxes of books from my office back to my house this afternoon, which sounds like more fun than I can handle. I'm gonna need an Olympia tonight...
So kick back, relax, peruse www.crapfromthepast.com/millivanilli/, and enjoy the rest of winter. Margaret and I will be enjoying the four weeks or so that I have off between jobs, until she gets sick of me, hits me with a frying pan, and sends me back to work at the end of February. Should be fun. I'll send off new contact info once I have a new office. (By the way, let me know if you don't want any more of these periodic Ron updates. I won't be offended in the least, but Margaret may come after you with a frying pan...)
Take care, and may all your Millis be Vanilli,
Ron G
