Hi, all. First order of business: I'm still employed by ADC, after a large series of layoffs that have reduced our work force by 40% since last November. Yesterday morning, ADC downsized by 2500 worldwide, and about 800 here in Minnesota. We lost about half the people in our building yesterday, and it's more than a little eerie around here. But they're still paying me, and I'm in no position to complain. (If you're playing along at home, we're in the same business as Lucent and JDSU, and we've had the same problems as them. Now is not a good time to be in telecommunications.)
So here's what we've been up to since April:
My band (Thinland) broke up. Our cellist called it quits from performing, and we never quite recovered. We played a fun but lackluster gig in May and a painful coffeehouse gig in June, then dissolved the band. It was fun while it lasted, and I got to be a big-time rock drummer for a few live shows. Oh well.
Wedding season kicked in, and I DJed a few weddings in June with a few weddings left in the summer. Not really much to report on, except that after 16 years I'm still at the top of my game, and my authentic '70s-era blue denim leisure suit still fits nicely.
We redid our bathroom, which turned out to be a major undertaking. We'd had an inexpensive textured ceiling (sometimes called "popcorn") in the bathroom, and the humidity from showers would cause some of the paint and texture to flake off. I got sick of the falling paint flakes, so one weekend in May, I spent four hours on a stepladder with a putty knife scraping off the ceiling texture. Well, it got out of hand from there. While I was on the ladder, I jostled the old light fixture and knocked loose the wires, so we now had an excuse to replace the light fixture (one of Margaret's projects that she's been saving). All in all, we replaced the mirror with a medicine cabinet, put in new light fixtures, repainted, and replaced the shower curtain rod with an industrial-strength closet rod (in case I want to do chin-ups in the bath). Margaret did the bulk of the work, and it came out pretty fine-looking.
We did learn a bit about wiring up something with a switch, though. After we unhooked the old fixture, we wired up the new fixture with all the white wires connected together, and all the black wires together. Wrong! It was pretty entertaining, though. We wired everything up, set the switch to OFF, then ran downstairs to turn on the breaker. When we came upstairs to the bathroom, the light was ON, and the switch was OFF. Unsure of what to do at this point, I turned the switch to ON, which promptly shut off the light and tripped the breaker. After a great deal of wire-following, we figured out how it should be hooked up, which involves one connection of black wire to white wire. So now OFF is OFF, ON is ON, and all is well.
July 4th fell on a Wednesday, which didn't give any of us a 4-day weekend. Fooey, as you know. "Crap From The Past" had its own July 4th celebration, and rather than celebrate the usual Happy Birthday America, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Bicentennial. After all, isn't the real Spirit of '76 rooted in custom quarters and the metric system? The show turned out to be a high point in my radio "career", and over the course of the two-hour show, we played seven different versions of a spoken-word piece from 1974 called "The Americans". Absurd on every level, and pure radio gold. (I will assume that my Pulitzer, Nobel, and Grammy awards all got lost in the mail.)
So the weekend after July 4th, my brother Kenny came out for a visit. I'd set the bar pretty high for Kenny, and had endlessly recounted the stories of mass food consumption, including the eating-the-entire-seven-pound-can-of-chocolate-pudding-over-the-course-of-one-Sunday story and the Kenny-and-his-friends-ordering-one-of-every-menu-item-from-Taco-Bell. Kenny was a legend here in Minneapolis, and he'd never even met most of my friends.
Friday afternoon, we brought him to a Twins game. Kenny and I ate massive amounts of Metrodome food, I spilled mustard on my best jeans, the Twins beat Cincinnati, and Margaret even had a good time. Isn't Cincinnati in the wrong league? Why are these two teams playing each other? Who screwed up baseball without telling me?
We just happened to go to a game on one of those special give-away days. The first 10,000 people get a Rod Carew bobble-head doll. We didn't show up four hours early like the first 10,000 people did, so we were bobble-headless. Until... they flashed some additional winning ticket numbers up on the big screen, and lo and behold, Margaret won one! She's the most unlucky person I know (heck - she's married to ME! That's some bad luck...), and she got the big prize of the evening. The doll was a pretty elaborate hand-painted ceramic thing, and now lives in one of our display cabinets of priceless stuff.
We introduced Kenny to a few friends at the house, and they were genuinely impressed, even considering the enormous hype beforehand. He still eats a LOT (although I eat more than he does, just don't mention it to him). Ah, sweet food...
So at the end of Kenny's weekend with us, we dropped him at the airport, then hit the road for a road trip to Denver to visit Margaret's family. It's about 950 miles from Minneapolis to Denver. Unless you're superhuman and can drive it straight through, that's an easy two-day drive each way, so we took our time noodling westward across Nebraska. We drove through Oxford and Cambridge, and felt all the smarter having passed through such studious towns. We also passed a sign for a highway that would take you to two towns, Max and Benkelman. "Max Benkelman, Private Eye"! But all pales in comparison with indescribably small Funk, Nebraska. I don't think Funk is incorporated, so it doesn't appear on maps. We took pictures of us in front of the Funk water tower, and in front of a little utility building labeled "Funk Utilities". The pictures didn't turn out too hot, mostly because the disposable camera got too hot and humid. (Sorry, that's a "single-use" camera; your pictures don't turn out too well if you just throw out the camera.) We'll know for next time.
The visit was fun - we saw family for a few days, I hit my favorite record store in the world (Don's Discs), and we got to drive up into the mountains west of Denver, which I'd never seen before. Gorgeous terrain, and all new to me.
Man, Denver radio is even more screwed up than Minneapolis radio. I heard 95.7 KISS-FM, right next to 96.1 KISS-FM, with nearly identical formats. How can this be? I'm guessing that one of those is from a nearby city other than Denver, but you wouldn't know which one by listening to them. Plus there are two stations using "Today's Best Music". Shouldn't one of them be "Today's Second-Best Music"? Makes no sense to my little brain...
On the way back, we spent a few days with Margaret's mom in Yuma, Colorado, the tiny farm town where Margaret grew up. (Margaret grew up on a farm, and got to show me cows, corn and combines up close. Woo-hoo!) At the farm, we noticed the tiniest baby bunny we'd ever seen, sitting on the edge of the driveway. We stood around and watched it for a little while, then grew alarmed at (1) the fact that it wasn't running away, and (2) it appeared to have a tick stuck on its ear. Over the course of the next two days, we noticed that the baby bunny was actively shunned by an adult rabbit, and was driven away from nests and any other rabbit shelter by the adult. We surmised that the bunny was diseased, and was exiled from the rest of the herd. Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that "that bunny ain't right". Interesting...
Well, to make matters more interesting, the weekly Yuma newspaper reported an outbreak of bubonic plague among a prairie dog colony out there, and advised people to avoid contact with rodents like rabbits and mice. Oh! Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that baby bunny had THE PLAGUE, and didn't want the rest of the herd infected! Interesting...
Well, to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, I got bitten by a tick while I was out in Yuma. I don't know squat about ticks, except that this one just came right off with a tissue, so it didn't get much of a chance to do whatever burrowing biting gnawing thing that ticks do. It just left a little dot on my leg where I plucked him off - a tickey hickey.
So we drove back, and had a pretty uneventful drive at that. I found out that Margaret's little Civic gets around 38 MPG with the air conditioning at full blast if you keep it below 70 MPH, but beyond that one piece of information, I can't remember much else about the drive home. Oh yeah, we ate at Arby's. Mmmmm...Arby's...
After a week out of town and 2000 miles on the car, we arrived home on Saturday afternoon (7/14), unpacked, and enjoyed the air conditioning and the incredibly affectionate cats.
Sunday morning, I felt kinda sick. Fever, headache, sore throat, chills, random aches-other-than-headache, and some other symptoms that I can't remember. A simple Tylenol wasn't cutting it. So... (yes, you knew this was inevitable) a trip to the emergency room! It was early on a Sunday morning and nothing else was open, so by default we had to go to the good-ol' ER and get my frequent-patient card stamped. I'm now beating Margaret in the emergency room battle of 2001, one to nothing.
So we told the ER people all the facts: I'd been bitten by a tick about three days earlier, I felt fine the night before, and oh yes, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the county where I got the tick bite. Although all of these were perfectly true, they must have sounded ridiculous to the ER staff, and I'd like to think I made their day. Some wacko coming in claiming to have a medieval disease...
So my fever was 101.3 when I checked in, 102.8 about an hour and a half later when a nurse checked me into an examination room, and was probably around 104 by the time they got an IV in me to bring the fever down. I wasn't quite delirious (too bad - I was looking forward to seeing things), but I was pretty shaky and irritable. They took blood - lots of blood - and left bruises on both hands and both arms as they tried to find a cooperative vein. From the tests they ran, I found out that (1) I wasn't pregnant, (2) I didn't have strep throat, and (3) they didn't know what was causing the fever. They said that the bubonic plague test took a week, and they would have to have it sent out to the department of health (no joke).
My prescribed treatment: If it was a virus, then it would run its course (or I would die). Either way, you can't treat it. If it was a bacteria bug, then they would kill it to death with the most head-blastin' antibiotics known to mankind. They prescribed me three weeks' worth of doxycycline - big blue pills that make you pukey, kill your appetite, and make you extremely sensitive to sun exposure. These things are what they use to treat lyme disease, and will easily kill off the bubonic plague. So I have a few days left on the Big Pills, and I'll be glad when it's over.
All in all, I missed three days of work (a rarity for me - I didn't miss any full work days even when I had pneumonia last year), and I missed a Crap From The Past show (an even greater rarity - I'd never missed a show due to illness in almost 15 years of radio). I was SIKK! I lost 8 pounds, and my pants don't fit right anymore. I'm sure I'll bulk up to normal after I'm done with the Big Pills, and I can't wait.
Most importantly, I'm beating Margaret this year - one emergency room visit to zero.
We had one of the wettest springs on record out here, with one of the rainiest Mays. There was some serious flooding on the rivers out here, and some of the bridges around Shakopee (where I work) were closed for about 6 weeks. What a mess!
Then, it got hot. We had the driest 1st-two-weeks-of-July on record, ever. It was 110 with the heat index two days ago, and as I'm sure you've heard, Korey Stringer, one of the Minnesota Vikings, died from heatstroke complications yesterday! My oh my! And boy did we pick the right year to get a new furnace, complete with central A/C. The greatest invention ever, except for maybe the dehumidifier in the basement. That's good too.
I got a new logo for Crap From The Past, and I'll probably be making bumper stickers and T-shirts. Did you know that white T-shirts are cheaper than all the other colors? Why does everyone know that except me?
The CFTP website got a major upgrade, and you music geeks can keep yourselves entertained for hours with this page: www.crapfromthepast.com/favorites
Apparently, the CFTP site is now one of the world's leading authorities on Milli Vanilli. If you go to Google and search on Girl You Know It's True, Baby Don't Forget My Number, or any other Milli Vanilli hits, my site comes up first! I rule!
Finally, I'll wrap this up with more music geekery. There was a legendary live recording from 1974 of the band Steely Dan. The song "Bodhisattva" began with a 2-1/2 minute-long rambling introduction by a thoroughly-inebriated Jerome Aniton, who eventually introduced the band as Mr. Steely Dan.
I suggested to my friend Chuck, "Jerome Aniton ordering lunch in the cafeteria". He came up with this:
"Well, look at all the fine people here....haaa....I think we're in for one....damn fine lunch here today....haaa....you can tell all your friends...hell you can tell 'em over in Watts.....haaa....that they missed out on a....damn good lunch. And all you...little....little pretty ones....haaa...can have lunch too...I don't know...whatever. Because in this here cafeteria right now....Mister...whatever...is gonna fix up a sandwich and chip combo plate that's gonna make you say that....haaa...this cafeteria in Santamonnica....haaa....is def-nitly....on fi-ya...."
Nicely done, Chuck.
That's all from our end. Hope all is well, and we'll talk to you soon!
Ron & Margaret
Thursday, August 2, 2001
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