Liz: “Did you just break your mirror?”
Ron: “Yes. Yes, I did.”
I don’t plan on getting it fixed, either.
Early October – I discovered a sealed package of cubed turkey in my fridge. It was three months past the expiration date, and it was bulging like a Mylar balloon. And, unexpectedly, I threw it out. There’s a fine line between eating slightly expired food and inviting certain death, and I chose to fight another day…
Mid-October – Liz and I finally got the cats completely integrated. Liz’s two cats have no problems with Stinky, but Stinky still occasionally hisses and growls at them. At first, we thought that Stinky was just a brat, but it appears that the hissing may just be part of her playing with the others. They hit each other in the head, Stinky hisses, they run around some more and repeat. Fun to watch!
Liz finally got sick of calling one of her cats Poohead, even though I insist that’s his name. After more than a year of namelessness, Poohead is apparently now named Oliver. Truth be told, I’m lukewarm about the name Oliver and I still call him Poohead. He doesn’t respond to anything, so why bother with a proper name? I will occasionally call him “Olivore”, an ancient name meaning “One who eats only olives.”
Liz noticed that Noodge had a big clump of matted fur on his back, so we held Noodge down and Liz cut it off. Good sized clump indeed – about the size of a Nilla Wafer. When she was done cutting it off, she showed it to Noodge and said, “Look! This came from you!” Noodge’s eyes got really big, then he grabbed it in his mouth and ran off with it. Now, it’s his favorite toy! Yes, Noodge’s favorite toy is a big ball of his own fur. We call it Mini-Noodge.
The cats love to play, so we constantly throw toys across the room and yell, “Go get it!” They chase the toys and do their cat play thing. That keeps the cats busy, and more importantly, keeps them out from underfoot. Well, after a “go get it” or two, we noticed that Noodge carried Mini-Noodge back to us in his mouth and dropped it near our feet. At first, we wrote it off as coincidence, because cats don’t fetch. But we threw it a few more times just to check. 22 “go get it”s later, we figured out that Noodge plays fetch! (But only with Mini-Noodge. We have no idea what we’d do if we lost his favorite toy…) And he does it consistently – later in the week, he fetched over 30 times in a row. The first few throws, he trots back enthusiastically. Once he gets up to 10 or so, he walks back slowly with it. No hurry, I suppose. If we’re extra enthusiastic about it, we can make him exhausted so that he pants. So we now have a cat that fetches, and we need to find someone with a video camera to document it.
Mid-October – Learned a valuable lesson in computer server hardware. The virus checker on one of our servers went off, and I figured that since I was tidying things up, I’d run some of the same maintenance things on our server that I routinely do at home. This included running a defragmenting routine on the drives in the server. Well, the server has a RAID array in it, and a RAID array stores files by splitting them into little chunks and saving them over different parts of different disks, with a built-in redundancy that can reconstruct a drive in the array if one fails.
And fail it did. Joe, our IT guy, was good-natured about the whole thing. He said that the drive was probably in rough shape anyway, and may have eventually failed, but my defragmenting routine pushed it over the edge. He used the analogy that if the drive was a 1981 Fiat with 200,000 miles on it, then I just did 100 miles of high-speed off-roading until the wheels fell off.
We got a new drive, the RAID array rebuilt it like it was supposed to, no data was lost, and I agreed not to go dinking around with anything else in the server room. Valuable lesson: don’t defragment the RAID array.
Mid-October – I had a short article appear in Optics & Photonics News, talking about the incentives that companies offer inventors so that they’ll submit invention disclosures. Nice publicity for me and the firm, and it even had a picture!
Early November – Since Liz and I would be getting married on the beach in early 2007, I thought it was time to have a tiny bump on my lower back removed. It started as an ingrown hair, and eventually just became this little bubble of tissue, maybe the size of a pea. Not cancerous or anything like that – just a little bump. A nuisance at worst, but probably something I’d be self-conscious about in a bathing suit.
So I had it removed in a 15-minute procedure at my little clinic. They have a surgeon on staff who does little procedures like that all the time. He said that mine was completely typical, and he does about three of them every week. I laid on my stomach, they applied a little local anesthetic, and then I felt absolutely nothing. During the procedure, we talked about Hawaii. The surgeon and his wife had been there a few times and loved it.
The doctor said these things were completely common, and over the years, he’d had about 10 of them removed. You cut them off, they don’t grow back, and that’s that. He said that the interior was white-colored with the consistency of cottage cheese. (EWWW!!!) After it was finished, when he asked if I wanted to see it, I said, “Sure!” It pretty much looked like he’d described. And no, I did NOT grab it in my mouth and run off with it…
I walked out with a few stitches covered by a band-aid. No pain meds, no nothing; this was a really minor procedure. Seven days later, when it was time to take out the stitches, I realized that I couldn’t do it myself because I couldn’t see or reach them. So before I went to work I awoke Liz from a deep sleep with “Wake up and do surgery! Take out my stitches!” She, being the surgical ICU nurse and all, could take out stitches in her sleep. And she did, then went back to bed. Liz later described my scar as looking like a coin slot – it’s horizontal and about the size of a dime.
Late November – Spent Thanksgiving with Liz’s family in Ada, Minnesota, a very small farming town about 45 minutes northeast of Fargo, North Dakota. Her parents are the best cooks on the planet, so we eat until we feel ill, then lie around and watch TV and movies, then eat some more. For days on end! It’s the most relaxing way imaginable to spend the holidays. Deeply enjoyable, and I look forward to the trips up to Ada.
One of the nights we were up there, we met some of Liz’s friends at the local VFW. It looked like a typical bar inside, and they had a band there that night. Three people in the band – guitar, bass, keyboards, and all could sing fairly well. No drums, though, and they played over a programmed drum machine pattern from the keyboards. Really, really basic drum patterns, too, which made me think that they were the sample patterns that came with the keyboard. That, along with the keyboard-heavy arrangements, their costumes, and their mulletesque haircuts gave them a distinctly late-‘80s vibe. If ever a band should have been named “Phil & The Casiotones”, it should have been them.
They blasted their way through every classic rock song in the book, played as if they were auditioning for Flashdance. Sonically, imagine a wall of keyboards, applied to every song on classic rock radio, and it made for an unintentionally hilarious evening of music. I loved it, although my yelled requests for “Pac Man Fever” and “Welcome to The Jungle” apparently fell on deaf ears.
Across the bar, there was a table of incredibly drunk people. Not just somewhat sloshed, but incredibly sloshed. Their table was completely full of empty bottles and cups, and some of them could barely stand. One of them staggered toward our table and asked Liz if she wanted to dance. Liz, sitting next to her fiancée and prominently wearing an engagement ring, politely declined. The guy then looked at me and asked, “How bout you?” I said, “I’m good,” then he staggered back to his own table. My guess is that certain drunks, like crows, are drawn to shiny things, so that Liz’s ring and my bald head must have looked particularly appealing. As we drove home, we made extra sure that he and his drinking buddies were nowhere to be found on the road.
Later, when we got home from the trip, I found a live bat buried in the cats’ litter box. (!) Noodge used to bury his toys in the litter box when he was little, so we’re assuming that Noodge found a bat (!), caught it (!!!), played with it and decided he’d had enough of it. I let the poor thing out on the driveway, and he eventually flew away. I’d had the house’s exterior sealed by pest control people a few months earlier, so we’re not really sure how one got in.
Early December – After nearly 11 years and 129,000 miles, I finally got new brake pads on my Corolla. Each time I got my oil changed, they’d tell me that I only had a few mm’s left, which would only last six months or a year. That had been the story for literally years on end, and I finally just caved and had them replace the brake pads. My 1996 Corolla was so old that the dealership had to special order them! Hilarious – the most popular car on the road, and they needed to order the parts! Turned out that they only kept parts on hand for cars 7 years old or newer, so my brake pads had to be delivered from some warehouse near Chicago! The mechanics all gathered around and checked out my car, since they’d never seen brake pads that old and couldn’t believe that they were still working after 129,000 miles. I probably could have gotten another year out of the old ones, but why risk screwing up other parts of the brake system?
I noticed that the Toyota dealership had a little machine that prints out the window stickers to remind you when your next oil change should be. It was a pretty slick little box about the size of a small loaf of bread, and it prominently displayed the brand name “oilchangestickers.com”. The more I thought about it, the more clever this device was. The people at oilchangestickers.com figured out that there was a need in the marketplace to replace the handwritten stickers, which would fade, fall off, or require a technician to check the mileage. They came up with a box that accepts plastic labels (in rolls of several hundred and a cost of six cents each), plugs into your computer through the USB port, reads the mileage from the appropriate database, and prints out the little sticker with special ink that won’t fade from sun exposure. Pure genius! And the Toyota guy said that every Toyota dealership has one of these – brilliant! And they continue to bring in $ from sales of the blank labels! Wish I’d thought of it!
Mid-December – I noticed that every once in great while, my cell phone screen appears completely reversed from left-to-right. All the information and graphics are there, but everything is left-right reversed. All the letters are backwards, and all the prompts for the buttons are located over the wrong buttons. Crazy! By the time I do something else on the phone, the screen has fixed itself as if nothing was ever wrong. Liz has seen it a few times, but has never been quick enough with her own phone to snap a picture of it. I saw this same thing happen a few years back with a friend’s PDA, but that thing became permanently left-right reversed and was therefore unusable. Mine still works fine, except for this weird left-right thing that happens about once a month. Weird.
Late December – “Crap From The Past” got mentioned in Twin Cities Metro magazine! I scanned it in for your convenience.
Late December – Liz’s parents came down to see us for Christmas. A low-key visit, for sure, and they were in and out in less than 24 hours, including sleep time. We took them out for Dim Sum at a local, very authentic Chinese restaurant, and I think they liked it. That’s where they wheel around little dishes on carts, and you pick whatever looks interesting. They have little steamed buns (mmm!) with sweet bean paste or barbecued meats, and stuff that’s way more exotic, like pigeon! (Not so mmm…) Liz doesn’t even like Chinese food, but she liked Dim Sum! We’ll try it again next time they’re in, now that we’re more comfortable with the whole process.Early January – Not sure why, but I’d been dreaming very vividly recently. Must have been the temperature, or something like that, because it seems to happen in certain parts of the year, for weeks on end. I always enjoy my dreams, especially the ones that make absolutely no sense. I keep a pen and paper by the bedside for just this reason.
From Oct 17, 2007: I was at an amusement park, which was located a few blocks from my house near the intersection of two giant highways. (In reality, the highways really exist near my house, but there’s no amusement park.) From where I was, I could clearly see one of the bridges that extended over the highway. Not just a little overpass bridge, but a giant-sized bridge like the George Washington Bridge in New York. Except that to build such a thing in Richfield, Minnesota, they had to cut a few corners. There wasn’t any pavement on the bridge; instead, cars drove vertically up the metal pole on one side of the highway, drove across the highway on horizontal metal poles, and drove vertically down the metal pole on the other side of the highway. The tires stayed on the poles using little grooves, like what you see in car washes. And the transitions between horizontal and vertical weren’t gentle. There was actually a giant-sized spatula mechanism that flipped your car from vertical to horizontal, almost exactly like the thing that flips mini-donuts! So from where I was, it was easy to see the stream of cars going up the pole, being flipped, driving across the highway, being flipped again, and going down the other pole. I was at an amusement park, and as I waited on line for one of the rides, I heard a familiar song coming over the loudspeaker system. Wait, I know that song! It’s… “Bang Your Head Against A Wall… Twice” by Deth Boat! A song that I helped write and record back in the late ‘80s, with my real friend Jason’s real New York band, Deth Boat! Neat! And it worked perfectly at the amusement park! That’s about all I remember. I sketched out the bridge on my scribbled notes in the morning…
From Jan 3, 2007: I was talking to somebody, although I don’t know who it was. This person was telling me, “Saddam Hussein has a chili recipe to DIE for. Some say it might even be as good as Hitler’s.” That’s all I remember. I don’t get it, either.
Mid-January – Liz and I have been preparing for the upcoming wedding in Hawaii. Later today, I have to go pick up her dress from “Wedding Gown Care Specialists”, a company in a northern suburb that pressed her dress and packed it into a suitcase that Liz supplied. This company didn’t make the dress or alter the dress, they’re just PACKING the dress. For money, of course.
I plan on packing the bare minimum for the trip – tuxedo, shoes, camera, bathing suits, short-sleeve-and-shorts-ware, hat, sunblock, sunglasses, maybe a map or two, toothbrush and credit cards. I don’t know what Liz plans on taking, but my guess is that it involves a “comically large” suitcase. (Thanks to Jenny & Graham for that term.) I hope I don’t damage myself or the comically small rental car with it.
We leave tomorrow. I’m sure there will be plenty to write about in the next Big Life Update.
Until then, one final picture. Our cat, Stinky, occasionally leaves her tongue sticking out when she’s done cleaning herself. You can imagine that a cat sticking her tongue out looks like a doofus. Well, finally, after years of trying, I managed to get a picture of Stinky looking like the dumbest cat in history.Happy New Year!
Ron Gerber and Liz Visser (She hasn’t decided if she’s changing her name yet. I vote to keep the old name, since she’s “Elvis!”)
