The latter half of the summer was dominated by two big projects around the house – fixing the lawn, and getting some new furniture. I realize that neither of these is all too exciting for anyone except me, but these updates can’t all be bubonic plague/gall bladder-ectomy/divorce/pneumonia/TV appearances.
A little history behind the backyard lawn: Initially, when we moved into the house, Margaret wanted to go ape and replace the entire backyard with garden/flower bed stuff. I wanted grass. Acres and acres of nice, green grass. We ended up with a compromise – Margaret planted some substantial flower beds and I got a small patch of grass in the middle of the yard. Years elapsed and Margaret’s interest in the flower beds waned, especially this past year, when she was understandably concerned with finishing up the divorce and moving out. So by the time summer rolled around, I faced the daunting task of bringing under control a sorely neglected yard, half of which was literally waist-high with weeds. I knew my pathetic little push-mower (with the spinny blade) wasn’t going to cut it, and I made the first baby-steps toward taming the mess when I bought my co-worker's Craftsman 4.5 HP mower in July.
Halfway through the summer, I signed up for an extra trash can removal service from my trash pickup company. Relatively small fee, and they give you an additional 96-gallon trash can for grass clipping, leaves, and any other yard waste. This was a good idea, and I spent the first half of the summer filling up the can every week just with waist-high stalks from the backyard. Slow, steady progress, one can at a time.
In getting rid of some of the horticultural atrocities in the backyard, I found some of the burial grounds for Margaret’s house projects. For instance, more than one project of hers involved tearing up parts of the driveway. (Don’t get me started…) Well, the asphalt bits had to go somewhere once they were removed from the driveway, and I discovered to my dismay that a particularly large bed of weeds was built on a mass grave of sorts for thousands of dead asphalt bits. Oh, the cursing and swearing that followed THAT discovery.
Halfway through August, one grand experiment marked the turning point in my liberation of the backyard. Through my trash service, I had my usual 64-gallon can, plus the additional 96-gallon can for yard waste. That’s a lot of potential trash to be removed every week, and I decided to try my luck on one particularly fateful week. Early on a Saturday morning, I wheeled the empty 64-gallon can to the asphalt graveyard in the backyard, and began excavating. Several hours later, I’d completely filled the can with broken asphalt bits that I’d dug out of the ground. I didn’t even make a dent on the asphalt graveyard, but I’d completely filled the can. Now, assuming that the density of broken asphalt bits is similar to that of water, 8.34 pounds/gallon, my 64-gallon trash barrel weighed about 530 pounds. I noticed as I was topping off the can that there was a little warning on the top of the can that cautioned against putting more than 200 pounds in the can. Oh dear.
First order of business was moving the can from the grassy backyard onto my concrete patio. Two thick plastic handles, two thick plastic wheels, one big plastic can, and none of it all too happy that I’d filled it with 530 pounds of asphalt. Imagine, if you will, the difficulty I faced when trying to tilt the can back onto the wheels. Me, at 140 pounds, versus huge pile of rocks almost four times my size. The unspeakable torque required to tip up the can on the two wheels was bad. The careful balance required to keep the can upright on the two wheels without tipping too far and crushing me – also bad. The fits and starts required to wheel the cart from the asphalt graveyard all the way to the edge of the concrete patio – also bad; I’d get a few inches and then the two plastic wheels would dig into the lawn, like a pair of pizza cutters in the hands of Luciano Pavarotti. After about a half hour of sweat and strain, I reached the edge of the concrete patio, with two jagged trenches carved out by the wheels extending all the way across the lawn.
I dare say that moving the can across the yard was relatively easy compared to what followed. A breeze. A piece of cake. A walk in the park. A day at the races. A night at the opera. Mere animal crackers, compared to actually getting the can over the 1-inch ledge between the grass and the concrete at the edge of the patio. I will remind you that my 140-pound frame is not optimal for weightlifting, and the 530-pound trash can on wheels couldn’t care less about being anything other than dead weight.
It took over a half-hour to get the trash can up over the 1-inch lip, during which I contemplated steroid use (“…some kind of fish paralyzer…”), theorized about how much milk I’d have to drink so that my bones wouldn’t be crushed into a fine powder, and made crude jokes to myself about the difficulties one would face if one were to simultaneously dispose of all five Spice Girls. Somehow, as if God himself leaned in and gave a shove to the Cosmic Pinball Machine, I got the damn thing onto the patio. And there it sat until Thursday night when I had to wheel it out to the curb – no easy task, but mere coconuts compared to the 1-inch lip.
Friday morning, I just happened to be home awaiting the delivery of some furniture when I heard the trash pickup truck making the rounds in the neighborhood. I was worried, genuinely worried. I had a vision in my head of the hydraulic arm from the truck grabbing the 530-pound can, then making the most hideous noise in the universe, then breaking clear off the truck right in front of my house. Or worse, tipping over the whole truck right in front of my house. Or still worse, the bottom falling out of the plastic can, spilling 530 pounds of asphalt bits right in front of my house. You see my cause for concern.
The truck eventually made its way down the block to my house. I watched from safe inside my living room, hiding behind the curtain. The truck first emptied the 96-gallon yard waste container, which wasn’t very heavy at all. No problem. Then moved over to the 64-gallon gravel-fest. Oh dear – I wondered if my insurance covered having everything on my property completely destroyed by an angry garbageman. The hydraulic arm grabbed the container, picked it up, dumped it in the truck like nothing was wrong, set it back down on the ground, and the truck drove on to the next house, apparently unaware that some severe damage was supposed to have been inflicted on it.
Well, this marked a true epiphany. Apparently, I could now throw out literally anything I wanted. If I found a mound of anti-matter buried in the corner of the yard, I could just put in the can, and Friday morning my trash guys would carry it off like nothing was wrong. So I spent the next month-and-a-half digging up and throwing out the various asphalt bits, homemade paving stones, bricks, and tree logs. (Ooh! Got to use the chain saw to cut them down to manageable size! Good times!) Trash night became workout night, and slowly but surely over the course of a whole summer, I managed to clear the mountain of debris out of the backyard.
There was a sizeable patch of little gravel rocks in middle of the backyard, which I didn’t really like. Now, a few years back, we’d ordered 9 cubic yards of little gravel rocks for the yard, and while I still like the look of them in the front of the house, I wanted them out of the backyard. And in hindsight, I can say with certainty that laying down rocks is far, far easier than getting rid of them. So I moved a huge pile of them from the middle of the yard to the edge of the house, and they looked mighty fine once they were moved. But the rest were mixed in with dirt, wood chips, and other flotsam that rendered them ugly and useless. Those rocks ended up in the 64-gallon trash can, which remained ON the concrete patio while I delivered the rocks to it one shovelful at a time. What a pain.
Then, once all that could be removed was removed, I rented a roto-tiller. Have you ever played with a roto-tiller before? It’s probably about 100 pounds, and is about the size of a lawn mover. Most of the weight is way at the front, and is directly above the slowly-spinning blades, which dig up the ground with remarkable efficiency. The difficulty in using a roto-tiller is making it go along a desired path. Once it starts to lean, you have to use every morsel of strength to get it back on track. It’s some serious work. And after about two hours of completely destroying the remnants of the unwanted flower beds in the backyard, I broke the roto-tiller. (The drive belt fell off – the guy at the rental place knew it might be an issue beforehand and gave me ample warning.) I only had a few square feet to go, but I was tired, the sun was going down, and the rental place was closing. And somehow, I had to get the thing back into my trunk to drive it home. So I left the few square feet undone, and I’ll tackle it again next spring.
I’ve since compared notes with other people who have used roto-tillers, including a guy who inadvertently roto-tilled his way up a substantial portion of the chain-link fence in his backyard. (Bolt-cutters…) People have compared it to the exertion you need for Motocross. I’d say it was far and away the most physically demanding thing I’ve done in years. Keep in mind that I manually roto-tilled about half of the backyard in my ¼-acre lot, which is far more than most people roto-till. My upper body strength is pretty minimal to begin with, and while destroying the yard was as immensely rewarding as the Dumpster Incident from months past, I was unspeakably sore for a week. The calluses on my hands lasted for over a month. But it was certainly worth it – if this is the grand symbolic gesture I need to reclaim the house and the yard, then so be it.
I put down grass seed the next weekend, and now it looks mighty fine by all accounts. The neighbor in the house behind me congratulated me on how supa-fly the lawn looks. It’s still not 100%, and I haven’t even attempted to control the creeping charlie that owns the front yard, but it’s a step in the right direction. After 7-1/2 years in the house, I finally have a nice, green lawn in the backyard.
Now, for all of you physics professors that read this, there are some fine freshman-level homework problems from that we can take from the gravel-removing experience. I will now flesh some of these out numerically, with some real dimensions.
The trash can’s exterior dimensions are 23 inches deep by 29 inches wide by 41 inches tall. The can isn’t a true rectangle (or it would hold 118 gallons), and it tapers from top to bottom so that trash doesn’t get stuck when the can is inverted, but we can assume it’s rectangular for some simple calculations. The handles are at the top corner, the wheels are directly beneath the handles in the bottom corner, and we’ll assume an infinitely small radius for the wheels. The can itself weighs about 50 pounds. Assuming that the center of mass of the gravel is at the true center of the can, and that the can is rectangular with the above dimensions and pivots about the infinitely small wheels at the bottom corner, the torque about the wheels required to barely get the can up onto its wheels is (23/2 inches) * (530 pounds + 50 pounds) = 6670 inch*pounds. Therefore, the horizontal force I’d have to apply to the handles to barely get the can onto its wheels is (6670 inch*pounds) / (41 inches) = 163 pounds, which is more than I weigh. No wonder I worked up a sweat. While I wheeled it, I had to struggle to keep it at an incline of (atan [23 inches/41 inches]) = 29 degrees, so the center of mass stayed directly above the wheels. And if you feel like extra credit, you can assume a wheel diameter of 11.5 inches and try and figure out the minimum instantaneous force you’d need to exert on the handles to get over the 1-inch lip without tipping over. The force is a vector, but we can assume that my little muscles would try to minimize the magnitude of the force, regardless of direction. Actually, that’s a pretty substantial problem, and is “beyond the scope of this paper”. I appeal to my fellow physicists to get back to me with a solution, which I’ll report in the next big life update. If I assume infinitely small wheels, I can do the math, and it appears that I lifted about 400 pounds. Yikes.
(Footnote: FYI, Halliday & Resnick, Chapter 14, Problem 11: What force F applied horizontally at the axle of a wheel is necessary to raise the wheel over an obstacle of height h? Take r as the radius of the wheel and W as its weight. Ans: W*sqrt(h(2r-h))/(r-h). For r = 5.75 inches and h = 1 inch, the force F is about 70% of the weight, or about 400 pounds.)
(Second footnote: Assuming infinitely small wheels, so that the can drags frictionlessly over the corner of the ledge, gives a nice analytical solution. Easy to solve if you set the net forces in x, net forces in y, and net torques about the corner of the ledge all equal to zero. Plugging in numbers shows that if I pull straight up on the handles, essentially lifting the can straight up, I would lift a tiny bit more than the actual weight of the can, which arises from the small torque exerted by the ledge to keep the can oriented upright. At the other extreme, if I lay the can down horizontally – a bad idea, mind you, because the asphalt would spill out on the patio – then I essentially end up holding half the weight of the can, the other half being supported at the other end by the ledge itself. In between these two extremes, the actual force drops fairly monotonically from W to W/2. So apparently, at the very very least, I lifted (580 pounds/2) = 290 pounds, as an instantaneous force on the handles. Ridiculous.)
Believe it or not, other things have happened to me besides the lawn. For instance, I’ve been remembering my dreams lately. Three of them spring to mind, which I’ll describe briefly.
Just last night, I dreamed that I was somewhere unfamiliar. Hotel? Different house? Not sure, not important. My college friend Charles came over late, as if he was arriving on a late train or something like that. It was about 4 AM when he showed up, and he insisted on watching David Letterman. (At 4 AM? I dunno.) We turned on Letterman, and it was the early-‘80s wild-haired Letterman of yore. He was in a bizarre sketch in which he was a giant, and everyone else was incredibly small. The small people were cutting up and carrying away a giant-sized blueberry muffin, and chanting the following, oompa-loompa-style:
Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cake [pause] cake [pause]
[Repeat ad nauseum]
Naturally, I have no idea what it means, but I’ll go along with anything that has giant-sized food and chanting about said giant-sized food.
I had a dream back in mid-August, where for some reason I was in a funeral home. I don’t think I was there because anyone I knew had died, I was just there. I was standing in a sort of a lobby area, and I noticed a “list of comforting songs” taped to the wall. Naturally, I checked out the list. The only song I remember seeing on the list was George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog”, but I’m sure there were more funk-tastic gems on there. Nice! Comforting to me, anyway.
And at the beginning of August, I had a dream that I was at work here in the law firm. And that I came up with an idea for a “Crap From The Past” show. (This happens all the time in real life. It’s like dreaming that I went bowling and bowled a 130.) So I grabbed a pad at my desk, wrote at the top “March Madness”, underlined it, and then wrote down three song ideas. (Again, this happens all the time – this is how I do most of my programming for the show.) I wrote down “Madness” (British group that had a hit with “Our House”), then “Mpenn” (Michael Penn’s first album was called “March”), then “CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS” (a mid-‘80s hit for Iron Maiden). I figured in my dream that three was enough to get started on the March Madness theme, and I could flesh it out later with songs about insanity, about marching, or about basketball.
Well, I woke up, and scribbled down the Madness madness, and it struck me as odd for two reasons. First, this was a very plausible idea for a theme show, and later that week, I actually did flesh the concept out to 90-minute length and did the complete March Madness theme show, explaining that the idea really did come to me in a dream. Plus, I did the show in August, which is even more Madness!
Second, I was reading and writing very clearly in the dream, which I thought was impossible. Margaret had mentioned that the particular part of your brain that’s supposed to control the recognition of characters and all that is not supposed to be active when you’re dreaming. In my previous dreaming experiences, when I see a sign, like a road sign or something, I’d know that there were characters on the sign, and maybe I’d understand what the sign said, but I couldn’t actually say what the characters were.
I’d heard of other instances where you’re not supposed to be able to read in dreams. Back in college, my old roommate Seth described a dream he’d had. He was out on a little rowboat with some woman named Amy. They separated for some reason, like one of them went out on the boat and one stayed behind. Seth wondered how he would every find Amy again, since he didn’t know her last name. But wait! She sent Seth a letter, and she must have written her last name in the return address on the envelope. Seth pulled out the envelope, and read her full name, “Amy Eeefer”. Eeefer??? In describing the dream, Seth said that he probably came up with Eeefer from the position of the letters on a keyboard, all next to each other for the left hand. Still, that’s a lotta e’s.
Did I ever mention that I used to jokingly rate restaurants on the number of e’s in the restaurant name? McDonald’s – no e’s: unacceptable. Burger King – 1 e: marginal. Greasy Tony’s – also 1 e. Kentucky Fried Chicken – 3 e’s: quite good. Eegee’s (a deli from Tucson) – 4 e’s: outstanding! Best restaurant ever!
So I got a few more pieces of furniture to fill up the house. I’d mentioned that the living room looked really empty, so I would up getting four nice modern-looking chairs from the clearance outlet of “Room And Board”, a respectable furniture place here in town. They’re technically dining-room chairs, so they’re fairly small, but I think they look pretty good. I still need a round cocktail table in the middle of them, then I’ll pretty much be done with the redecorating. I’m still enjoying the big empty spaces in the house, and I think I’ll just leave them as big empty spaces. An IKEA store opened up here in August, and I bought two modern-looking lamps there. They go nicely with the new chairs. You know, it’s really hard to make my new furniture sound interesting…
My little brother, Kenny, was out for a visit in August. I’ve written about him before, and it’s always got something to do with food. We Gerbers eat a LOT. We threw him a barbeque, in which we ate a LOT. Naturally. And in what’s now become a perverse Gerber tradition, I greeted him with a 7-pound can of vanilla pudding. In previous visits, it had been chocolate, but I felt daring. It took the entire weekend, but we polished it off. Initially, when we opened the can, it tasted a little odd. We thought, bad canned pudding? How can this be? So we put plastic over the top and put in the fridge for later. Well, later, it tasted just fine, so we concluded conclusively that cold pudding is the way to go. Room temperature? Not so much.
We threw a poker game while Kenny was here, and came up with what may be the finest new poker game ever: Psychic Poker. It’s 7 card stud, with nothing initially wild. But before every up card is dealt, the player gets to “predict” what it’ll be. If he’s right, then it’s wild for everyone. For instance, before I get dealt a card, I say, “I predict a 7.” And when I magically get dealt a 7, then 7’s are wild for everyone. It’s actually a pretty good game, and one that we’ve incorporated into the regular poker games since then.
My band played our final planned gig in August. We still never settled on a proper name, and wound up playing all our gigs under the name “It Figures”, which also happens to be the name of some women-only gyms here in town. It was a dark and stormy night outside, but the gig was a lot of fun and was received well. We don’t have anything else scheduled, but I’d certainly be up for working the nostalgia circuit playing “It Figures” reunions. After all, if Olivia Newton-John can charge $75 a head at Mystic Lake Casino, why can’t we? We play WAY more songs than she does…
And one day after the gig, I DJed a wedding, pretty much walking distance from my house. Good party, good food, good crowd, great location, but so-so acoustics in the room, which had 30-foot-high ceilings. And then I came up with a brilliant idea – why bother with a photographer, because no one likes posing for pictures. Why not hire a courtroom sketch artist instead? I think a sketch artist would be far cheaper than the photographer, and would probably be more fun. We know that he’d work quickly, since no one in a courtroom pauses so that he can “get the shot”. And I know I would enjoy being sketched, rather than putting up with hokey poses for the photographer. I’m tempted to put in a call to the government offices of Richfield (my suburb of Minneapolis) to see if they have a sketch artist, and to see if there’s any interest in doing weddings. With me as the DJ and a courtroom sketch artist, you’d have a wedding that people would be talking about for years!
I’m currently studying for the Patent Bar Exam. Right now, I’m a Patent Engineer, which is basically an engineer with no formal law training. Once I pass it, I’ll be a Patent Agent, which allows me to correspond directly with the Patent Office, rather than be paired up with an experienced attorney – a good thing. The exam is pretty tough and requires a few months of studying, but I should have it passed by the end of the year. That’ll be nice. After that, the next step would be law school (which would make me a Patent Attorney), but I have no desire to go back to school, and the firm where I work isn’t putting any pressure on me to do that. Nope – I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.
Because the exam is substantial, I thought it best to take a review class in a classroom setting. So I got to go to Chicago for a week at the end of September. 6 days of classes, 46 hours of classroom instruction, and basically a whole semester-long class crammed into a week. It was fun to be back in a classroom environment, but 8 hours a day was a bit taxing.
I knew I’d want to drive around while I was out there, so I drove out from Minneapolis, rather than fly and rent a car. It’s about 420 miles to Chicago, and about 7-1/2 hours in the car. I did my Friday night radio show here in Minneapolis, then left Saturday morning, making a small detour through Rochester, MN, so I could eat lunch at my favorite barbeque place. (Mmm… John Hardy’s…) Before I left, I overinflated the tires by about 3 PSI, just to boost the gas mileage. I averaged about 72 MPH the whole trip, and my car got about 37 miles per gallon! Woo-hoo! Mr. Toyota himself would shake my hand and give me a gold-plated donut!
Chicago itself was fun. I stayed in the hotel where the course was taught, which was in Downers Grove, a dull, distant southwestern suburb of Chicago. The interesting stuff was downtown, and I wound up doing an immense amount of driving back and forth between downtown and the hotel. It was important to me to have excellent Chicago pizza, and the locals recommended “Due” (“two” in Italian, pronounced doo-ay). I got the whole story from the Due staff – Pizzeria Uno was a stand-alone restaurant opened in Chicago in the ‘40s. It was good. They opened a second restaurant in the ‘50s, called “Due”, which was even better, and has pretty much the best deep-dish in town. They then spun off the nationwide chain “Pizzeria Uno” restaurants, which are pretty terrible and are not representative of the first two at all. And I can attest to the pizza – that’s some gooooooood pizza. Although you really can’t compare it to New York pizza, because they’re two different things entirely. New York pizza is flat, and prides itself on its flatitude. You fold it in half to eat it, or pile three slices on top of each other if you’re in a hurry. Mmm… On the other hand. Chicago deep-dish takes a half-hour to cook and is more of a fork-and-knife experience. It’s pretty terrific, but it’s not for those on the go. Also mmm… I think I had pizza three or four times over the course of the week.
Also wandered around downtown Chicago. They have a life-size bronze statue of Bob Newhart sitting on a couch, just sitting there in the middle of a sidewalk. A photo-op if ever there was one, but I didn’t have a camera. I had to just say Hi Bob, and leave it at that. One of my classmates was staying at the Hotel Sofitel in downtown, a super-trendy European hotel, where people tend to speak a lot of French. The first night we were there, the hotel was welcoming members of “The French Government”. Motel 6 it’s not. I got to see the inside of the rooms, and it looks like you’re staying at an IKEA. The last night we were there, we made it to Blue Chicago, a well-known blues club, but the music didn’t start until 10:45, and we all had class the next morning. So instead, we wandered back to the hotel lounge and drank with the Cirque du Soleil, who were also staying there. (Well, technically, we were drinking in the same room as the Cirque du Soleil people, who were also staying there. At least we think it was them – they were speaking French and there were a lot of them. At any rate, “drinking with the Cirque du Soleil” is my story and I’m sticking to it.)
Much like Philly loves their cheese steaks, Chicago has a fascination with the hot dog unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. I had two while I was out there, and they were good, but I just don’t get it. To me, a hot dog requires a baseball game around it.
I tried driving through Evanston, north of downtown Chicago, to go see Northwestern. Unfortunately, it was dark by the time I got out there, and my map was just a little too coarse for the area, and I got horrendously lost in Evanston, then admitted defeat and turned around. I have a friend who grew up in Evanston, and it’s a nice residential neighborhood. But the streets change name every block and I didn’t have the patience to get through it to see Northwestern. Maybe next time.
I got to listen to a few hours of what might be the finest commercial radio station in the country – 93.1 WXRT, a rock station in Chicago. The formula is simple, and it’s amazingly close to what I do every week: pick interesting songs to play and let the DJs talk about the songs themselves. Sure, it seems obvious, but I defy you to show me any other commercial station anywhere that does that. I’ll relate one segment of XRT so you can see what I mean.
First, they ran a movie review of “Shawn Of The Dead” by a guy with the deliberately thickest Chicago accent imaginable. Then, they went right into “All You Zombies” by The Hooters, an overlooked gem from the mid-‘80s. Very nice zombie reference! Then followed with “Hey You” by Pink Floyd. After the Pink Floyd song, the DJ explained that there was a connection between the Hooters and Pink Floyd, in that when Floyd recorded the live version of “The Wall” in the mid-‘80s, the Hooters were one of the performers on the recording. Neat! Nice tidbit, and nice way to make the listener care. Just a little example of why XRT has such a stellar reputation, and I’m glad I got to hear it firsthand.
I also tuned into a little college station at the left end of the dial. During one trip in the car, I heard the Gin Blossoms (yay!), Green Day (yay!), and Debbie Gibson (huh?). The DJ came on, back-announced the songs, and explained that we’re listening to “All G’d Up”, which I suppose consists only of artists that start with G. Silly, but very refreshing, and now I find myself saying all g’d up for no good reason. That’s some fat g’s!
Because of a prior commitment in Minneapolis, I had to leave Chicago right after class on Friday night. And after being conditioned by the class to sit in one place for ludicrous lengths of time, I was able to make it back from Chicago with only one stop for gas and Hostess Sno Balls (a road trip tradition), and no other breaks. 7-1/2 hours after I left, I rolled into the driveway intact but sleepy at 1:30 in the morning. A fine trip, which definitely recharged the batteries. Plus I put over 1000 miles on the car, including 220 just during the time I was in Chicago – that’s a lot of doodling around!
I’ve been seeing someone here in Minneapolis. The first new girlfriend after the divorce is a little awkward, but she’s sweet and she’s been very understanding. Her name is Liz, she’s a nurse at the VA hospital here in town, and we met on the giant rafting trip that I wrote about in the last letter. Since she’s seen me in the Incredible Electric Blue Jumpsuit and wasn’t scared off, I knew she was a keeper.
Liz never knew Margaret, and only knows me and my house in their post-Margaret states. I think she may be the only person in Minnesota who didn’t know Margaret, which is just fine with me, with the fresh start and all. She’s not looking to get married and settle down just yet, and I’m not looking for Mrs. #2 just yet, so we’re just enjoying time together and fielding whatever the world throws at us. So far, so good. I’m discovering that freshly-divorced guys can be a little skittish emotionally, which has caused a hiccup or two in the relationship, but nothing to worry about.Liz has a nice car – a sporty Toyota thing. I am not alone in my car envy, and I let Liz drive as often as she’ll let me. So one day, as she was driving somewhere, she cursed at some other driver on the road. At that point, some primal instinct kicked in and I blurted out, “Bad Margaret!” Followed of course by a dirty look and a sheepish apology, complete with a lame explanation of how the only time I associated Liz with Margaret was in a negative context. “Bad Margaret”; Dumb Ron. No hard feelings, though, and it gives us something to laugh at.
I’m a little older than she is, which made me a little uncomfortable at first. But nobody else seemed to care, including Liz, and I’ve gotten over it. She’s 25, and since I’ll be 36 as of this Friday, we’re both perfect squares. How sweet. And nerdily accurate. I thought my mom would balk at the age difference, foolishly forgetting that there were 13 years between her and Phil, my stepfather. Nah – not an issue, apparently. Even though back when I was a camp counselor, Liz would have been the age of my kids. Even though I started collecting 45 RPM records before she was born. Oh well, it’s just joke fodder at this point, since I routinely complain about my gout and yell at kids to get off my lawn. One cool aspect of being older than she is – for her 25th birthday, I got her a CD copy of the “American Top 40” show that was current the week she was born. Yep, Casey counting down the top 40 hits from the week she was born. A pretty cool birthday present, if I say so myself. For your information, #1 that week was “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer.
I’ll probably send out one more of these letters out before the end of the year. In the meantime, enjoy Halloween and Thanksgiving!
Ron
