Ron's Big Life Update - February 2005

"Walnuts ruin everything." - Chef Boy RG.

Apparently, anywhere you live in the entire country, the weather is screwed up. From disastrous flooding in California to 20+ inches of snow in Boston, Mother Nature is having a field day right now. Which includes Minneapolis, except that the only way to screw up our weather is to make it better; as of last week, there was no snow cover at all. Drive two hours in any direction and you'll find feet of the white stuff, but here in Minneapolis, nothing but scraggly brown grass. The snowmobilers in my office are ticked, but I'm enjoying my snow-free driveway. As of late February, there have been two snowstorms - 6 inches each, and nothing else. No complaints from my end.

Happy holidays (!), a bit late. Let me bring you up to speed, roughly chronologically.

End of October - I got a new toilet in my bathroom. Normally, one wouldn't care about these things, but the brand name is "Gerber", it uses hardly any water, and the tank refills in about ten seconds. I've never been happier.

End of October - My friend Mary got us tickets to a Vikings game, so Liz and I got to see the Vikings get squashed from Mary's company's skybox. It was basically a buffet, with a pleasant view of a football game, conveniently being played right outside our window! Good times indeed.

Early November - Saw a brown UPS van being towed away on a flatbed, with its lights still blinking. I don't know why I find that so funny; maybe it's the vision I have of the hundreds of angry people who won't get their shipments because the UPS van got towed…

Mid November - Saw "Sideways", then sneaked into "The Incredibles", making this the greatest illegal double feature in movie history.

Mid November - My microwave died, leaving me with a choice - to fix or to replace? The thing is essentially built into my cabinets, and I don't have enough skill to mount a new one in the cabinets and have it look good. So rather than pay a guy to install a new one, I'd pay a guy to fix the old one and save some money. Overall, a good decision, but the process was a painful one.

My major goof? I called Sears for repair. I figured that since my Kenmore microwave was built by Sears, it would be a simple repair job for Sears. I was only partially right. The guy came out, ran a few diagnostics, and told me that I'd need a new capacitor. Not a standard item that he carries around on the truck, so he'd have to order a part. It would be at my house in a few days, and he'd come back to install it. So far so good - the guy seemed to know what he was talking about, and I'd have my old microwave up and running in a few days.

It seemed simple, but I didn't account for Sears's incredibly stupid service policy. You see, when a repair job needs parts, they don't ship the parts to the repair guy, they ship them to the customer! So I got a padded envelope in the mail from Sears, which I assumed was my new capacitor. I set it aside in my kitchen. And time elapsed. And my scheduled installation appointment with Mr. Sears came and went. And I got on the phone with Sears: Did I get two parts in the mail? No, I got one, and why didn't my repair guy show up? Oh, well you should have gotten two parts - a new capacitor, and a new fuse (a two-dollar item, which the repair guy has readily available in his truck.), and the repair guy won't come out unless all the parts are there. Great, I'll wait for my $%^&* fuse in the #$%^&* mail.

And more time elapsed. And I eventually got a little padded envelope in the mail, which I assume contained a fuse. I put it with the first padded envelope. And more time elapsed. And I eventually placed an angry call to Sears. It was then that I found out that Sears's full repair policy goes like this:

Step 1. Customer calls and sets up an appointment for repair.
Step 2. Repair guy shows up at customer's house at scheduled time.
Step 3. Repair guy does his thing and figures out what's wrong.
Step 4. If parts are required, repair guy orders them.
Step 5. Parts arrive at customer's house.
Step 6. Once parts arrive at customer's house, CUSTOMER IS SUPPOSED TO CALL SEARS AND LET SEARS KNOW THAT THE PARTS ARRIVED AT THE CUSTOMER'S HOUSE! What kind of asinine policy is this?
Step 7. This step is unknown; no customer has ever been properly informed of step 6, and the process has invariably broken down at this point.

I spent a good fifteen minutes chewing out some Sears customer service rep on the phone, then I cancelled my follow-up appointment and installed the capacitor and fuse myself. When I found out that Sears and K-Mart were merging, I wished a quick and merciful bankruptcy on them both, and surmised that the world would be a better place without them. A week later, I found a message on my answering machine from Sears, asking if my parts had arrived.

Late November - Hosted Thanksgiving at my house, and impressed all with my culinary abilities! Apparently, Margaret did not have a monopoly on the cooking skills. (It's as if the world were surprised at how good the John Oates solo album was! Who knew?) I cooked a turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans almondine (sp?), cranberry sauce, and a French silk pie, all from scratch. Guests brought additional food, and we ate until we felt pretty bad, in the true Gerber tradition. I would repeat essentially the same menu for Christmas, to demonstrate that it wasn't a fluke. I really can cook. I know - I'm just as amazed as you are.

Early December - Took the United States Patent and Trademark Office Bar Exam and got a 69. You need a 70 to pass, so I'll have to take it again. It's disappointing, but not life-threatening. The patent bar is supposedly the hardest of all the bar exams, with a pass rate of about 25%. So in that context, I did better than most! And once you pass, no one cares how many times you took it; it's not like it appears on my permanent record, and it's relatively common to take these exams multiple times. I'll sit for it again at the end of April, which gives me plenty of time to study. And if it doesn't go so well in April, I'll just take it again. La-di-da! Eventually I'll pass…

I got 31 questions wrong out of the 100 on the test, and if I had gotten any one of those right, I would have passed. One question in particular stands out in my mind: They asked about a particular aspect of a patent application, where one set of conditions apply if the applicant is a U.S. citizen or lives in a U.S. territory, and another set of conditions apply if the applicant lives in a foreign country. Well, I knew what was being asked, and I knew the rules that were being tested, but the question said that the applicant lived in Costa Rica, and I thought, "Costa Rica? That's a province, like Puerto Rico, isn't it?" Well, no. Apparently, Costa Rica is its own country. And because of my horrendous geography skills, I got the question wrong and failed my test. Stupid Costa Rica…

End of December - Liz got me the best Christmas/Hannukah/Whateva presents ever! The Marx Brothers DVD set with their first five movies, including "Duck Soup" and "Animal Crackers"! Yay! The formula is pretty much the same in all the movies - forgettable musical numbers, annoying harp playing, and dialogue that's as crisp and hilarious today as it was over 70 years ago. So happy! Plus the box set of the NBC show "Freaks And Geeks", which aired for a season around 1999 or 2000. All the episodes, with all the music left intact. (That's a big deal, actually. It turns out that when a show is released for home use, they have to re-obtain the rights to any music they used, which is usually prohibitively expensive. For instance, when the old "WKRP in Cincinnati" episodes were repackaged, the music was replaced with sound-alike dummy music, which really killed the viewing experience. A show about a radio station, with no recognizable music? That's just wrong…) Liz rules.

End of December - I discovered, to my dismay, that my radio show would fall at the end of New Year's Eve, and that at the end of the show, I would be essentially counting down as the ball dropped. Great. But I figured that if I can't be out at the parties, then I should bring all the parties to me! So I threw a killer New Year's Eve party at the radio station, and we all partied like it's 1979. Since I was the host, I wore my tuxedo, and Liz wore her prom dress. We looked smashing. I played nothing but Stevie Wonder for the entire 90-minute show, and must have had 30 or 40 people in the studio with me at the end for the countdown. Much fun had by all. Too much fun for me, actually, and I let myself get run down enough during the New Year's weekend so that I got a heckuva cold, which lasted all throughout January and required antibiotics. God bless Zithromax.

Early January - Worked on a cool patent write-up for a client who designs and builds custom stringed musical instruments. I now know lots of intricacies about the construction of guitars, violins, mandolins, and a few other stringed instruments I can't play. I'm lucky to get one or two write-ups a year that are this interesting to me, and this one should keep me humming right through spring.

Late January - Surprised Liz by joining the Y where she works out. Now we run and lift together, and it keeps us both motivated. There's a Y right around the corner from me, and another one right around the corner from her place, so we can go wherever it's convenient. Pretty slick. Liz is amazed (appalled?) that I’m still using the same running shoes that I bought during my freshman year of college in 1987. (During the Christmas break at the end of '86, Pat said that he'd run with me if I got running shoes. So I got running shoes. And 18 years later, I'm still waiting for Pat to run…) The shoes are still in immaculate shape, which shows how much (or how little) I've run since then. Plus, they're THIIIIIIIS close to being stylish again!

Mid January - Went with Liz to a friend's wedding in Detroit. Had a fine time at the wedding, and got to drive around Detroit and check out the city. Detroit is a much more extreme city than Minneapolis. The rich parts of town, like Grosse Point, are way fancier than anything out here, but at the same time the scary parts of town are far more frightening. We noticed that the character of the neighborhoods changes abruptly also - the transition between Grosse Point and scary is exactly one block, located right at the Detroit city limits. Liz and I had enough time to check out the Henry Ford Museum (a whole lot of collectible old cars and planes) and out of curiosity eat for the first time at a Big Boy (the worst hamburger Liz has ever had). Plus I let myself get run down AGAIN, and got another cold. Great!

Late January - My radio show, "Crap From The Past", turned 13 years old and got a Bar Mitzvah on the air. And because Kool & The Gang's "Celebration" became a party staple popular right around the time of my own Bar Mitzvah in 1981, we began the show appropriately with "Celebremos", a version of the song done in Spanish by Kool & The Gang themselves. Weird, and completely appropriate. The "Crap From The Past" website (www.crapfromthepast.com) got a facelift and looks even more marvelous than before.

Late January - Grandma turned 94, and my mom and I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale to visit her and celebrate. I spent one full day and two nights down there, which was a nice change in climate for me, and was greatly appreciated by Grandma. In addition to eating at the super-fine Colombian restaurant right near Grandma's house, Mom and I wandered around Las Olas, an insanely affluent section east of Ft. Lauderdale near the ocean. Lots of yachts, flashy cars, and wealthy retiree women walking around holding their yippy dogs. We actually saw a Bentley parked at a 7-11. On the way home, I got myself deliberately bumped from my flight, so I now have a free flight anywhere in the U.S. for the upcoming year from United Airlines! Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, I had to spend four hours in Dulles Airport in D.C. for my connection, and I now have nothing nice to say about Dulles.

Mid February - Liz had a week off from work, so I took a week off too and we spent four days in Las Vegas. Just for giggles. The only time I'd been out there was 10 years ago, when I met my parents out there for about a day - it didn't make much of an impression back then, and I thought it would be fun to see it as a grown-up.

While Liz and I were waiting in the Minneapolis airport to leave, an America West person approached us and asked us if we'd be willing to move our seats so that some kids could sit with their parents. We said OK if we can still sit together. Important lesson to take away from this: if an airline employee politely asks you to change seats, always reply Yes. They put us in First Class! Row 2! We're guessing that they asked us because we dressed nice, didn't have kids, and had practically no carry-on luggage.

We were obviously newbies at First Class, so the flight attendant took care of us. The first time he asked us for drinks, we didn't want to abuse the system, so we just got OJ. And then we saw what the other First Classers ordered, so the next time through, it was Bailey's on the rocks. So that's the secret - people sit in First Class just to get all liquored up! And they fed us an actual meal on real plates, with real utensils and glass glasses. The utensils were ice cold, just like the utensils on the Delta flights I took as a kid to visit the grandparents in Florida. Funny what triggers memories!

We joked that First Class might have been the high point of the trip. To be fair, we had a great time and it was wonderful to get out of town and see new places, but Las Vegas is a horrible city. A beautiful stretch of desert ruined by the ugliest, tackiest city I've ever encountered. (And I've been to Paterson, NJ!)

For starters, everyone smokes everywhere. At all times. Staying on a non-smoking floor in your hotel? HA! A lot of good THAT does, considering that the hotel only has one air circulation system. Sitting in a non-smoking section in a restaurant? Double HA! From the second you get off the plane in the Las Vegas airport, it's all over. It's like a bad vision of the late '60s, man. You may as well burn your clothes afterwards because the stink's not coming out without a fight. On the way home, we didn't notice the stink as much in the airport, because four days of that junk must have completely destroyed our sense of smell.

We rented a car and stayed at a little hotel downtown, a mile or two north of the famed "strip". Kinda scary neighborhood, but it didn't really faze us. Actually, the only sense of danger I felt was the "Gee, I hope I don't eat too many donuts or SOMETHING BAD'S GONNA HAPPEN" danger, so it wasn't a problem. The hotel had a free bacon/eggs/hash browns/toast breakfast that was really good on the first day, so-so on the second day, and passed over by us on the last two days. I didn't think it was possible for breakfast food to get old, but it happened.

In short order, we hit the "strip", a four-mile-long stretch of Las Vegas Blvd. where all the big hotels are. Just for reference, if you ever go, park your car at the (free) Mandalay Bay garage at the south end of the strip and walk everywhere else. Don't even think of trying to drive to a destination anywhere near the strip, day or night. We got the garage tip from our What To Do In Vegas guide, which was worth its price just for the parking tip.

I'm sure you've heard that prostitution is legal in Vegas. This is not necessarily a good thing for the vast majority of Vegas-goers, who presumably do not frequent the services of prostitutes. About every ten feet along the strip, some guy attempts to hand you what looks like a naked-lady baseball card, complete with phone number and prices. $44! A bargain! And by the end of the night, there are literally thousands of these tacky cards all over the streets and sidewalks, up and down the strip. We also noticed tacky naked-lady pamphlets about the size of real estate guides, and a naked lady van with pictures and phone number painted on the side. I actually like the idea of van-delivery, but I couldn't tell if the vans were functional delivery devices, or just moving billboards. Yuk.

We probably spent about 12 or 18 hours total along the strip, divided up over the first two days. The high points: a cool aquarium with sharks, turtles, and other weird things at Mandalay Bay, a very good rolly-coaster at New York, New York, an exhibit of Monet's paintings at the Bellagio, big lions (just like Stinky, only 100 times larger!) rolling around and playing at MGM Grand, an odd indoor mall at The Venetian that featured a painted sky on its ceiling and an indoor gondola ride (so you can take a gondola to the Gap?), a poolside blackjack table at the Tropicana (though I didn't play), and scaled-down versions of the Statue Of Liberty at NY, NY and the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel (which I didn't climb). We also saw comedienne Rita Rudner's show at New York, New York, which was pretty darn funny.

Rita Rudner joke about the tacky naked-lady cards on the strip: "A gentleman handed me a card with two naked women on it and said that I might be interested. I said, 'Why? Do they want to go shopping? It looks like they could use some clothes.'"

People dress trashy in Vegas, even if they're not for sale. Liz and I were worried that we didn't have nice enough clothing for the show. Boy, we were WAY off! We dressed like royalty compared to most everyone else! Rita Rudner joke about Vegas-ware: "The outfits that women can get away with here probably won't play too well at home. The cool woman in the cute outfit in the disco here in Vegas? If she wears the same thing at home, she's the hooker at the PTA."

Neither of us had any desire to do any gambling, really. My only gambling experience was 10 years ago, when I played a slot machine at Caesar's Palace just long enough to win a tacky gold medallion on a thick gold chain. And that involved dropping 30 bucks in about a minute with 10 pushes of a button; the stupid machine lost every time and I got nothing back at all. So I wasn't worried about losing my nest egg.

Liz had instructions from one of her co-workers: take this 20-dollar bill, and lose it specifically by following these instructions on the dollar slots. Can do! It lasted less than a minute - seven pushes of a button and it was gone, with no payback at all. Just like my slots experience! Later on, we took some pictures of Liz standing by a huge slot machine that extended over her head and must have been 15 feet wide. I have pictures of her (a) with a big smile on her face right before she fed the machine $2, (b) facing away from the camera while she was feeding the machine $2, and (c) with a sad face after the machine ate her $2. A big crowd had gathered during the whole ordeal, and people's reactions to the whole thing were priceless.

I also had specific instructions from my friend Eric: roulette - put this dollar on red, and from my friend Kris: roulette - put this dollar on 28 (his age). Fair enough. I found a dollar roulette table, but it had a $4 minimum - you'd need four $1 chips to play. So I placed Eric's and Kris's chips, then put a dollar on 25 (Liz's age) and 36 (my age). Wheel gets spun, ball landed on… 36! I won! So I grabbed my chips, explained to the woman next to me that I better leave before I develop a gambling habit, and walked away with a little of Vegas's money in my pocket. Ain't life sweet?

The food in Las Vegas is not as cheap as the all-you-can-eat-for-99-cents days of yore. Some of the buffets are cheap, but the cheap ones are unbelievably crowded, and it's not a pleasant dining experience. So we only did one buffet, and we ate around 5 PM, which worked out very nicely. It was French food, which was pretty tasty. We wound up sitting next to the dessert area, which proved very convenient, since Liz and I ended up eating a combined EIGHT desserts! Yes, eight (8). VIII! I knew I was only going to get to do this once, and I got my money's worth. My brother, Kenny, would be proud.

The rest of the meals were frustrating - the handy travel map I borrowed from a co-worker had restaurants listed on it, which all looked promising. But after the map was wrong THREE TIMES, I gave up on the map and we just ate anywhere. Nothing spectacular by any means, and the whole dining experience was no doubt hampered by the omnipresent smoke, which had probably dulled our taste buds. We had a darn fine caramel apple at one of the hotels, some pizza that hit the spot (right place right time), and not much else to rave about.

The last two days were far more interesting to me, once we ventured off the strip. The rest of Las Vegas looks just like the not-so-good parts of Tucson. Streets laid out in a huge grid, traffic lights every half-mile or so, strip malls everywhere, and an unbelievable amount of graffiti. To my uneducated eyes, it looked like the whole city was on the wrong side of the tracks. I was not impressed, until I got well outside of the city.

One day we went hiking in Red Rock Canyon about a half-hour west of town - a very cool thing that you don't get to do much in Minneapolis. I'd forgotten how much I like hiking in the desert. The terrain is a lot like Tucson's, but no saguaro cactus, just some little prickly-pear cactus. And mountains everywhere! I don't think Liz was as impressed with the spectacle of nature as I was, but she enjoyed the fresh air and we took a lot of pictures. We found a mother and a daughter that were doing what we were doing - one person taking a picture of the other - so we traded cameras and they took some of us together and we took some of them together. They came out swell.

Later that day, we drove out to Hoover Dam, about 45 minutes southeast of town. Yeah, it's big. I forget the exact number, but I think there's enough concrete in Hoover Dam to pave a three-inch tall, four-foot wide sidewalk around the Earth. With curbs. And I think there's enough water being held back by the dam to completely cover the state of Connecticut one foot deep. We got to tour the generators at the bottom of the dam, which are pretty big indeed. Apparently, the really valuable resource is the water control itself, not the production of electricity. They said that the water itself is worth about ten times the value of the electricity produced by the dam. Neat!

The next day, we tried in vain to find another of the restaurants on the map, then gave up and bought some fruit at a local supermarket. (Were they actually smoking in the supermarket? We couldn't tell, but I wouldn't doubt it.) Whoever dreamed up packaging little celery sticks with little cups of peanut butter was a genius! And our last festivity was going to Lake Mead, which is the man-made lake that formed when they built Hoover Dam. We weren't really sure where we were going, only that we paid $5 to enter a state park, and the little map they gave us showed us where a marina was. So we drove there and rented a fishing boat to take out on the lake. Liz had plenty of experience driving boats as a kid, so she did most of the driving. The little boat we got had a small outboard motor, and put-putted along very nicely at a good clip. We had a little difficulty reading the map that the marina gave us - no real discernible features to the coastline and no compass in the boat (!), so we didn't stray too far. But we got some sun, went real fast, and had the boat back in time. Liz made the mistake of letting me pull the boat up to the dock while she jumped out. After some encouraging words while I was guiding the boat in, she failed to mention that I should put the boat in neutral. It seems obvious, but it didn't occur to me to shift into neutral. So as she was getting out, the boat was still moving, and Liz tripped. No permanent damage, though, but I still feel pretty bad.

The flight out of Las Vegas was probably my worst flying experience yet. Mind you, I kept my streak of never-missing-the-plane unbroken, but America West did everything in its power to keep us in Las Vegas.

Let's compare America West and their Las Vegas hub to Northwest, who has a hub in Minneapolis and is not known for its spectacular service. When you use the automated kiosks for Northwest, the machine does its business and then prints out your boarding passes. Almost immediately, a Northwest person is in your face putting the sticky ID strips on your luggage, then taking your luggage to the mysterious conveyor system, where its disappears and magically reappears at your destination. I don't know how it works, but the live Northwest human being makes sure that once you push the buttons on the kiosk, your luggage is quickly attended to, accurately labeled, and sent on its way without a second thought. Very reasonable.

Not so with America West in Las Vegas. After waiting on a good-sized line for the ticket counter, Liz and I were redirected to get on a LONGER line at the automated kiosk station, which was awkwardly tucked in a corner of the terminal, slot-machine style. Well, one typically doesn't bring his luggage to a slot machine, so once you reach the kiosk stations, you have to either squash your luggage into the person next to you (frowned upon by the person next to you) or abandon your luggage (frowned upon by the security people). After you push the kiosk buttons in the usual manner and it prints your boarding passes, nothing happens. In fact, the absence of an America West person to tag our luggage was particularly glaring at this point. I asked some official-looking woman what to do, and she told us to take our un-tagged luggage to yet another long line at the ticketing counter. That's three lines so far, in case you're counting. I lugged our bags onto the scale, gave the woman our boarding passes, and watched in horror as she calmly labeled my bag with a "JFK" sticker, intending to send it to Kennedy Airport in New York. "NO! NO! NO! I'm going to Minneapolis! MSP!", I believe I yelled at the top of my lungs. She then removed the JFK tag and properly labeled our bags without even looking up - no apology or anything; this must happen all the time. She then told us to take our tagged bags to the X-ray line - a fourth line to stand on with our luggage! The epitome of efficiency! After Mr. X-ray assured us that they take care of it from here, we watched our bags get tossed onto a fairly substantial pile of luggage, then wandered down the hall away from the other irritated passengers. Then up the stairs to security? That seems odd. Well, we'll just follow the signs to … the largest sea of angry humanity ever in all of history. From the top of the staircase, we couldn't even see the end of the lines. At various points while were waiting on the security lines, we stuck Liz's camera over our head and took pictures of the enormous crowds. If I had more chutzpah, I would have hammed it up and told everybody to smile. (Can you image a picture of maybe a thousand angry airline passengers waiting in line, all smiling at the camera?) Eventually, we reached the end of the security line, and noticed Dennis Rodman waiting just a few people over. He looked just as annoyed as we were, only he was much taller.

After a sprint from the security station to the gate, where the flight attendants were ready to close the door, we were the last ones on the plane and arrived to find a hubbub around our two seats (which were clearly not in First Class this time). Apparently, some woman wanted to put her two kids in the seats next to her, which were empty until Liz and I showed up. This caused consternation for all parties concerned, and annoyed the flight attendants because it delayed us getting out of the gate. The kids moved back to their seats, a whopping one row back so they were directly behind us and their mother, and off we went. Long story short: most obnoxious family ever. It's not nice to say terrible things about strangers, so I won't. I'll just think them to myself.

And we essentially kissed the ground when we got back to Minneapolis. God bless our county-wide smoking ban that kicks in in March (restaurants, bars, you name it - no smoking!), and our reasonably-priced-if-not-terribly-flashy independent restaurants, and our fairly conservative (and warm!) clothing. It was worth seeing Nevada, and we had a great time, but coming home just makes us love our cold flat blue state even more.

Liz says HI.

Take care!
Ron