Ron's Big Life Update - June 2001

"Well, we need the rain." - sarcastic remark made by Minnesotan; we clearly do not need the rain, and June has been about twice as rainy as it should be.

Well, howdy-do, boys and girls. (Written at beginning of June): The past weekend was the busiest I've had in a long time, and I'm still a little sleepy. Saturday: up at 6 (!) to get myself to a record show, where I was a vendor for a change. (These happen every two months, and vendors show up with crates of records and CDs from all over the midwest. They're more common out east, where I'd been going to these since I was in high school.) I sold a few LPs for a buck each, and spent the profits on new acquisitions, the vendor admission fee, and lunch. It all evens out, and I got rid of some of the fat in the record collection. After that, it was back home to pick up Margaret and rush off to a barbeque. (Four species of meat! Woo-hoo!) Margaret made rice pudding for dessert, which was a big hit. (It was indeed yummy, but rice pudding? Who'da thought?) I then left the barbeque early to go play a gig with the band at a coffeehouse in St. Paul. Eventually, I made it home and got to sleep well after midnight. Sunday: I spent a good 4 hours on a stepladder scraping the texturing off our bathroom ceiling. We had a popcorn ceiling, which is like a stucco finish, only it's very cheap to install and is not really the best quality available. It had been flaking off in the bathroom every time we shower, and I just got fed up with it. Now, we have a nice flat bathroom ceiling in need of a painting, and my right arm is sore. What a weekend! (Since then, Margaret has been repainting the walls and adding a new light fixture. Should look pretty nice when it's done...)

Since the last time I wrote, we had a large tree cut down in the backyard. It was hanging over the power lines, and was heading straight for the house. (Granted, trees don't move very fast, but the house moves even slower, and it's not well-equipped to "duck".) We paid some professional guys to cut the thing down, and they showed up with an amazing array of cutting/shredding/scooping equipment. They cut down all the branches and turned them into wood chips right there in the backyard. Woo-hoo! We saved about one-fourth of the wood chips, which they left on the driveway in a pile about the size of our car. No exaggeration - we had many many many wood chips, which Margaret eventually redistributed all over the backyard. And now, we have a stump in the backyard that's about 2-3 feet in diameter, and a lot more sun on the west side of our house. We planted some eensy little trees to make up for the big one we lost, but they're only about a foot tall right now. In due time...

We bought a new couch a few months ago, and had the darndest time trying to get rid of the old one. Even the "free" sign at the curb didn't do it, and it's been sitting in the garage for months. Finally, Margaret ripped it apart, attached some new slats to the hard maple frame, and turned it into a bench that lives on our patio. Recycling indeed!

The weather has been nuts out here. There was some serious flooding along the Minnesota river at the end of winter. Our house is many miles from the river and well above the water level, but I have to cross the Minnesota to get to work. For a while, it was pretty ugly. There is one particular frontage road that lies pretty close to the river, and you can see it very clearly from the highway on my morning commute. First, I was surprised to see water at all on the road (which was closed before the flooding started). Then, over the next two weeks, I watched the water level rise and rise, until most of a yellow right-turn road sign was under water. That's got to be at least 6 feet of water on the road, and for a few days some of the big highways were closed near the river. The water level has since receded, but I don't think the benchmark frontage road is open yet. And I don't know the status of some of the small river towns that got flooded. Presumably, they're cleaning up, but it's not making headlines anymore.

The flooding situation seems to be getting worse as a trend. We've had "hundred-year" floods three times in the last ten years, and my guess is that it's from all the man-made flood controls they've put in. If you go out of your way to contain the river at your town, then you make things worse for all the towns downstream. Or at least that's my naive way of seeing it.

We also had back-to-back days of 94 degrees in mid-May, which is insane, followed by a few days of record lows only a week later. Nutzy!

In other news, "Crap From The Past" has been getting more ambitious lately. To celebrate Cinco De Mayo, I did an all-Spanish show, in which both the music and my talk breaks were entirely in Spanish. I haven't spoken any Spanish since high school 15 years ago, and I was terrified for the whole show. It sounded pretty good, but I won't be doing any foreign-language shows again for some time. The website also got a major upgrade, with the addition of 600 new files, including 100+ audio clips and 300+ pictures! Woo-hoo! (www.crapfromthepast.com) Most of this will appeal to the hardest-of-the-hardcore music geeks, but I have some quaint odds and ends that may interest you. For example, I scanned in the stub from my very first concert - The Thompson Twins with O.M.D. from 1985. Such minutia!

My band, Thinland, broke up. We lost our cello player and never really recovered, so we all agreed that we had a good run, and we'll move on to other projects. The drums now move back into my basement. Oh well...

Our building at work is walking distance from ValleyFair, an amusement park. From our windows in the cafeteria, we can see The Wild Thing, a giant green roller coaster, and we can hear the screams from our parking lot. There's something indescribably wonderful about hearing shrieks of panic during the work day!

Ron & Margaret "Don't look back in Angora" Gerber