Late August - Liz coined the word "over-extrenuated".
August 28 - Made a sandwich. Finished the peanut butter, the jelly, AND the bread. Aced it!
August 31 - Went to MN State Fair with out friends Squid and Lemur. Survived, despite eating all of the following:
Chocolate chunk scone
Black currant iced tea
Cappuccino
Cinnamon currant scone
Big Fat Bacon
Ice cream sandwich samples
Fried apple pie w/cinnamon ice cream
Microwave beef pot roast sample
Cider Freezies
Chai on a stick
Mocha frappe
Hamburgers
Kettle corn sample
Elk burger
Summit beer
Cheese curds
Roasted corn
Corn ice cream
Pretzel dog
Soft pretzels
Spring Grove Sodas
Dole Whip
Deep-fried Reeses
Bourbon chicken
Sweet Martha's cookies
Milk/Chocolate Milk
Weird rib sandwich
Ocean Spray samples
Shave ice
The fried apple pie was my favorite out of the whole bunch. Highly recommended for next year's State Fair.
Late August - Stroke of genius: In five years, my 1996 Corolla will be eligible for Minnesota Collectors Plates! It's still all-original everything, down to the factory-installed AM/FM/Cassette player! Soon, my ho-hum black car will officially be a Sweet Ride!
October 9 - Liz and I wanted to drive around and check out the fall colors, so we drove southeast, into Wisconsin, just for giggles. We'd driven for maybe an hour when we saw a tiny little sign on the side of the two-lane highway. It said, "Apple picking", or something to that effect, and had a big arrow pointing left. I like apples, so naturally, I followed the arrow. We stumbled across a lovely little orchard, run by a family and open to the public. The gave us a bucket and some big sticks with hooks on the end. The hooks looked a lot like the cage that goes over the incandescent bulb on your hang-able work light. And off we went. Best apples ever!
So we continued our aimless drive through Wisconsin with a bag of apples in the trunk. Then down to Rochester for barbecue, then back home. Best day ever. Next year, we go in September to pick pears and grapes.
Early October - I was saddened to read that WKPQ/Hornell, NY (Power 105.3) had flipped music formats from Hot AC (sort of a kinder, gentler top 40) to Country. When I was going to school in Rochester, NY from 1986 to 1990, they were my favorite station. For a while, I lived in a ninth-story apartment facing due south, and they came in clear as a bell from up there.
Back then, it seemed like they would play anything released on a 45. It was, and still is, the only commercial station I ever heard play Far Corporation's 1986 remake of "Stairway To Heaven" (put together by Frank Farian, producer of Boney M and Milli Vanilli).
Their morning show was the "Cavalcade Of Whimsy", a phrase I still use regularly. One of their morning local news stories (and this was a serious story, not a bit) was that at a local construction site, an unmanned, parked steamroller had somehow gotten loose and rolled down a busy hill. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
In all my radio experience in Rochester, nothing even comes close to being as memorable as the runaway steamroller I heard about from a tiny station 70 miles to the south. I'll miss them.
Early October - Noticed that one of the columns in front of the house was leaning. Severely. So we called Todd, our go-to contractor, and one week later, we had brand new concrete steps in front of the house and new columns. Every homeowner needs a Todd! It wasn't nearly as expensive as I'd thought, the house looks a lot better, and I can sleep a little easier knowing that the old 1964-era concrete steps won't continue sinking into the front lawn.
November 13 - Got to participate in a cool event at the Minnesota Historical Center. They had an exhibit called "Hot Wax: A Musical History Of 1968", and I was one of a handful of live DJs that played music from the era in one of the exhibit rooms.
It was the first time that I'd ever attempted doing a live gig running music off the laptop, rather than the CD players, and it worked really well. DJing this way is clearly the future, so this was a watershed event for my little DJ career. I was at the forefront of using CDs back when I started in 1986, and 25 years later, I'm starting to catch up with the rest of the world by running the music off the laptop.
November 13 - Local grocery store, Rainbow Foods, gave away scratch-and-win cards with purchase. We won 25 cents off one eight-count pack of Rayovac Hearing Aid Batteries, Size 10, 13, or 23! This truly must be our lucky day.
November 21 - Freak occurrence at another grocery store, Byerly's. Bought eleven items, and all of them turned out to be on sale. No scratch-and-win cards here, unfortunately, because we surely would have won big.Mid-December - Had a portion of our bathtub regrouted. December was not very exciting.
December 25th - Received the best gift ever - a "Desktop Drum Set"! It's in a little cardboard box, a bit larger than a notebook computer. The box proudly proclaims, "Smokin' hot drum set delivers incredible sound", "Assembles without tools in about 2 minutes" and "Jam like a Superstar!" A picture on the box shows the hands of some guy wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt, holding two tiny sticks, maybe four inches long. It's fantastic.
I don't think the Driftbenders were even an actual group; they were just Joey Molland (the guitarist from Badfinger) and Phil Solem (half of The Rembrandts), two local pop music legends up on stage playing guitar with no backing band. They took turns playing each other's songs for their entire set.
Liz and I sat front and center, practically on stage with the guys. We got some incredible pictures with Liz's cell phone - a big plus to being so close.
Both guys have the same make and model guitar, which apparently wasn't planned. I managed to nab the set list, which I got signed by the first opening act (Jeff Miller), the second opening act (Ryan and Pony of local fave the Melismatics), and Joey and Phil. Got a guitar pick, too. A mighty fun night.Mid-January - Came up with a new band name: Tuna Meltdown. I've done better.
Mid-January - The 1968 DJ event from November showed me the future of DJ work, so for Christmas, I got a new laptop that I dedicated to just music stuff. It has a 500 GB internal hard drive, which can hold a good portion of the permanent "Crap From The Past" library in an uncompressed format ("flac" files, if you're playing at home.)
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| Picture pilfered from the internet |
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| Again pilfered from the internet |
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| Also pilfered from the internet |
If you're going to dabble in the DJ stuff, some advice: (1) Get the best-sounding music files you can. Mp3s suck rocks, but if you have to use them, get them at 320 kbps. Better to use flac, if you can. (2) Be meticulous about getting the tag information correct on your files. (3) Invest in the extra hardware for sound output and controlling. It's worth it, and it'll make people take you far more seriously than if you try to run everything off your Ipod.
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| Yes, also pilfered from the internet |
Mid-January - Met the extended family in Washington, DC for Grandma's 101st Birthday! It was basically the same as the 100th Birthday - same restaurant and all that. Grandma is doing just fine. 101!
February 11 - Got new glasses. We wandered into Visionary Optical in the Southdale Mall and told the twenty-year-old girl behind the counter that I wanted something stylish that would look good on my face. She said, "Try these." And I said, "I'll take them." And that was that. Liz got a pair of prescription sunglasses, too, based on the same instructions. It was probably the easiest sale they've made all year. (There's a picture of me below with the new specs.)
Early February - Every year, radio station KVSC in St. Cloud, MN (about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities) runs a Trivia Contest. For a fifty-hour period from Friday evening to Sunday evening, they ask questions on the air, and teams phone in their answers and get points for correct answers. The team with the most points at the end of the weekend wins. I wouldn't say that it's well-known around here, but it's definitely considered a tradition, especially among us radio folks.
So this year, being the 33rd year of the contest, the theme was Long Play Records. Since I tend to have a reputation of knowing a thing or two about records, I got recruited from a St. Cloud radio friend of mine. Do I want to be on the team? I sure do! Liz had the weekend off, so we were both in.
We were part of this year's team called "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women". They took their name from the title of a book that I haven't read. I was given instructions to show up at a particular house in St. Cloud, the basement of which was converted into the "war room" for the team. I was amazed to find about 20 people, all with laptops, all wired into some custom software specifically written by the team members for the trivia contest. There were about 50 people worldwide on the team, all linked in by the internet to this software. It was very sophisticated, and very impressive.
KVSC asked about nine questions an hour, spaced apart by a few minutes, with relatively short windows to call in the answers. The team operated in shifts, so that we could cover all fifty hours.
Unfortunately, my actual knowledge of music stuff wasn't really necessary. The questions were asked in such a way that to find the answer, you had to use the internet. A sample question: "Big-screen characters X and Y go into a record store and are talking to the clerk about guitar lessons. Over X's left shoulder are seen two albums displayed on the wall. What are those two albums?" So to answer, step one was identifying the movie or TV show in question. Step two was finding the actual video online, which usually involved someone's Netflix streaming account. Then step three was relatively easy, once the scene played out on a team member's screen.
Out of the 450+ questions, I was able to answer only three of them off the top of my head. Those three questions involved playing a clip of the B-side of a hit, and they wanted to know the title and artist of the A-side. I easily identified the B-sides of "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks, "Rainy Days And Mondays" by the Carpenters, and "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" by the Fifth Dimension. While I identified those songs in about two seconds, the sad thing is that eighteen seconds later, the Shazam app on people's iPhones did the same thing. They really didn't need me at all.
But still, of the sixty-seven teams competing this year, we won. Beat everybody else. Yup, we are the champions no time for losers cause we are the champions. I, personally, didn't really contribute much, but I was happy to be there for part of the weekend and proud to be part of the team. And it extends my streak of never having been beaten at music trivia. Really, you do not want to compete against me in music trivia. You will lose.
February - Liz and I found a great bowling alley in south Minneapolis called Skylanes. The building is currently up for sale, and it needs some pretty severe repairs to the roof (many, many buckets hanging from the ceiling tile grid), but it's completely charming inside. Ten alleys, and that's it.
The first left-handed game, I rolled a 112 (almost the same as the last time we went), and Liz kicked butt with a 76. If you've ever tried to bowl with the wrong hand, you'll know that a 76 is excellent. (I had a lot of practice bowling with the wrong hand back in college, stemming from the time I mistakenly gave blood with my right arm on the day of my bowling league, and had to try my luck lefty.)February - The radio show, Crap From The Past, turned twenty years old, which is quite a hefty milestone for such a silly radio show. So we got a little press, with mentions in some of the local alternative weeklies. Nothing life-changing, but just enough mentions for the show to feel loved and wanted. It was nice.
To celebrate on-air, I came up with the most ambitious special I could think of. I went back to the American Top 40 shows for the decade leading up to the start of CFTP (that's 1982-1992), and manually extracted the commercials for those shows. To put that in perspective, that's over 500 shows and 2000 hours of audio! It took about two months to get all the commercials in one place on the hard drive. I then picked the most memorable of them, grouped them into little sets, and did an All-Commercial CFTP as the 20th Birthday show. I had talk breaks, just like always, but now I was introducing and discussing old ads instead of old songs. It sounded pretty spectacular on-air. I managed to squeeze in 131 ads during the ninety minute show. Even better is that now I have a library of about 1000 old radio commercials on the hard drive, which I'll be using in small doses in the weekly shows from now on.
You can download/stream the 20th Birthday show here.
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| Joel Stitzel, Ron Gerber and Andy Sturdevant on stage, courtesy of a picture I found posted on the web |
So after the burst of excitement about the CFTP birthday, it's back to normal for me. All this discussion about radio stuff is a nice warm-up for KFAI's pledge drive, which starts later this month.
March - Found out that Minneapolis just had the fourth warmest winter on record. Climate change is, apparently, good for Minnesota. Not so much for the rest of the planet.
March - Liz and I went to five weddings last year, so maybe it's appropriate that seemingly everyone we know will be having babies this year. We know of four couples that are due before year's end, and we expect a few more. The next few months should be very interesting indeed.
Mandatory food pictures - Liz has been cooking up a storm, as you'll see. She's modest and says that she's just following recipes, but you need cooking talent to make food look this good. All of the recipes are from the culinary geniuses at America's Test Kitchen.
August 19, 2011 - Summer vegetable pasta
Is it any wonder than I'm the heaviest that I've ever been? And probably the happiest, too!
Hope your spring is springy!
Ron & Liz
