Ron's Big Life Update - February 1998

Well, it's been a difficult week in the Gerber household. Margaret's father passed away last week, and we spent a few days in Yuma with the rest of the family. I had the chance to meet some distant members of Margaret's family, many of whom I'd never heard of. Nice people, on the whole, and some could tell a story that could make you laugh until your insides hurt. It's difficult to retell some of the stories, but two stand out in my mind, both of which were childhood games that Margaret played with her brother and sister:

• Granny. Granny is a two-player game. One player is "it", and gets to ride his (or her) bicycle in circles on the driveway. The other player is the "granny", who has to walk slowly across a diameter of the driveway without changing his (or her) speed at all. When the "granny" eventually gets run over (!), then he (she) gets to be "it" and "it" becomes the "granny". Margaret said that you'd cry only until you realized that you were now "it" and got to run over your sibling. Good lord! It's a wonder that Margaret survived childhood at all!
• Bucket-head. Also a two-player game. One person sits up in a tree with a five-gallon gas can attached to a pulley. (I think it was a bucket in the original version of the game.) The other person has to run out from the base of the tree while the tree-dweller tries to drop the gas can on him (her), then they switch. Margaret's brother can clearly recall one time when he got hit squarely on the head. In his words, "I got all dizzy and had tunnel vision, but I wouldn't let anyone tell mom because she'd make us stop playing."

The more I find out about childhood in Yuma, the less I believe in Darwinism.

I also found out about a family dog named "Dodger" that recently got run over.

Then I flew out of Denver to San Jose for a business meeting, and Margaret stayed behind to deal with family stuff. She'll be back here in about two weeks.

San Jose was rainy, to say the least. Windy and rainy still doesn't do justice. Mighty windy and mighty rainy comes close. We spent the first day and night in Santa Cruz, and stayed at this nice hotel on the beach that we like. Normally, the beach is nice and sandy, as one would expect from a beach. This time, we looked out our windows and saw driftwood - enough of it so that you could barely make out the sand underneath. Over the course of the next two days, it was windy enough so that by the time we left, the driftwood had blown inland and left the beach clean again. They estimated the winds at 50-75 MPH in the region, and the newspaper headline the day we flew out read "79,000 without power in Bay area". Oy! We had a little bit of time to kill before we were due at the airport, so we drove to a local flea market, which had unfortunately suffered lots and lots of wind damage. I felt bad for the vendors there who were fixing up their damaged booths; it's odd how I felt much more sympathy for these people than for the people whose houses were washed down the side of the cliffs. (Part of me says that if you're stupid enough to build a house on the side of a cliff, then don't kvetch when it falls down. But that's just me.)

So I got back into town over the weekend, and what should be waiting in my big pile of mail? Why, it's a invitation to purchase the bestest book in the world: "The Gerbers in America: From 1790 to 1998!" Joy joy!

"You'll go back in history and meet Gerbers like Francis, a farmer, who lived in Monroe County, Illinois in 1850." The author of the invitation, Eugene E. Gerber, "guarantees that once you've started this Gerber book, you won't want to put it down." Utterly spellbinding! "No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended;" I guess we're supposed to delight in the listing of our non-family namesakes. Well, at least "each heirloom quality Gerber book is handmade to order and elaborately illustrated," so that my $34.50 plus postage and handling would not be wasted if I actually cared about my namesakes. The publishers were nice enough to include a wholesome picture of three Gerber-looking people smiling at each other while flipping through a rather paltry-looking paperback book.

Compared to junk mail, I preferred the baby food jokes.

I, like a billion other people, enjoyed "Titanic". It told a nice story, and it LOOKED amazing. Unlike "Waterworld," I think the million dollars per minute was well spent.

I also saw "Fresh", a terrific movie about a 12-year-old inner city kid who's a runner for drug dealers. It came out in 1994 (or '92?), and it was excellent. It probably flew beneath the radar of Blockbuster Video, so I can't imagine anyone else has seen it.

I just found out that German pop singer Falco was killed in a car accident. 1998 stinks.

I recently picked up some good 45's, including "Right Between The Eyes" by Wax, an early recording of Nick Lowe's "Cruel To Be Kind" (later rerecorded for the hit version), an early recording of the Pretenders' "The Wait" (later rerecorded for their first album), Justine Bateman [Mallory from Family Ties] destroying "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", Barry White destroying "Louie Louie", and Laverne and Shirley singing "16 Reasons". My 45 collection wins the gold in the Special Olympics of Music.

I take a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that while El Nino beats the snot out the rest of the country, Minnesota has been dry with daytime highs in the 40's.

Finally, I recently had a dream that I'd like to share with you. I dreamt that I was back in school in Rochester, and that we were having one of the U of R's big party days. Only this one was especially sensitive to us Jews. It was "Yarmulka" day, and because it was cold outside, they were handing out free Yarmulkas With Ear Flaps. I woke up laughing.

I guess I should go home now. I'm not in a big hurry because the fridge is empty and Margaret's gone. I feel like a bachelor again, and it's no fun for a single guy to own a house.

Stay warm,
Ron "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the Stars On 45" G

Ron's Big Life Update - December 1997

Howdy, all.

It's dark outside, my boss is in Japan for a week, no one else is around, and this is a good time to get some work done uninterrupted by other people. Or I could just write a letter...

It's winter in Minnesota, and this is clearly the place to be at this time of year. My graphite snow shovel has held up magnificently, and my driveway is snow-free. It hasn't gotten too cold yet, but every year around Christmas it stays below zero for about two weeks. Add the wind chill on top of that, and Oy it's cold. We former-Arizonians would say It's a dry cold...

I can slowly feel myself becoming Minnesotan. I just put $400 worth of snowtires on my car (that's four good tires, not eight cheap ones), I got Minnesota plates for the car, and in the ultimate act of becoming Minnesotan, I got a Minnesota driver's license. I read the little book, and took a computerized multiple-choice test, and wouldn't you know, I passed. (Just so you know, the test-taking room had about 30 of these little computer stations, each about the size of a computer slot machine. The questions were all done on a touch-sensitive screen, so no #2 pencils or anything like that.) I did get dinged on one or two nit-picky questions, though. If you're driving at night, and some other car is approaching you from the other direction, how far away should the other car be when you turn off your hi-beams? 200 feet, 500 feet, 1000, or 1500 feet? Well, "How the heck should I know" was not one of the choices, so I got it wrong. When I first got my NY license, the ID # was 19 digits long. A few years back, NY changed their licenses so that the ID # was 10 digits long. Now, MN uses 13 digits. 19, 10, 13: is this progress?

Aside from the computer I bought a few months ago and my head-blastin' new snowtires, I haven't bought anything of importance lately. We still occasionally shop at Sam's Club because we like the huge quantities of stuff they have. If you buy one package of chopped onion at Sam's Club, you'll see that it contains 3487 servings. That's one serving of chopped onion every day for almost ten years!

I got a piece of junk mail to end all junk mail: a solicitation for me to buy "The New World Book of Gerbers", which is precisely what you think it is - a book listing of all the people in the whole world whose last name is Gerber. What a stupid thing! In fact, I think you should tell the author that his book is a stupid thing (not to mention the most boring piece of literature since the book of the first million digits of pi). He's Eugene E. Gerber, and the solicitation provides an address and phone number. So I thought, Should I buy this? Am I really this desperate to see my name in print? The only person who I thought would like to own this is my brother, Ken, who IS this desperate to see my name in print. (Ken - I was going to actually get this for you for Hanukah. But I didn't, because it cost money.) I can only pray that whoever put this book together sorely overestimated the number of interested Gerbers in the world, and that there are a million copies of it stashed in a warehouse somewhere.

Are there books of other last names? Is there a "New World Book of Osmonds"?

I've been getting to do a tiny bit of traveling for work. I briefly visited San Jose (hi, Jill), where we ate a lot and I lost $9 at poker to my coworkers. I'm not too worried about the $9 because one of our dinners was rather expensive: 7 people + 1 excellent Italian restaurant = $350 dinner bill, which our manager Dave signed for. Expense reports rule, especially when someone else picks up the tab.

Saw a couple of movies recently:

• Gattaca - a sci-fi flick about genetic engineering and what-not. I thought it stunk, but Margaret liked it. Critics didn't think it was as bad as I did, but it's still bad.
• Eve's Bayou - a neat movie about a family growing up in Louisiana in the '50s, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Quite good, and I expect to see a few of the cast members' names on the Oscar ballots.
• Lone Star - a neat movie set in Texas on the Mexican border. It played in theaters last year, and we rented it. Excellent offbeat film.
• The General - A Buster Keaton comedy from 1926, with a lot of trains. Made even more amazing when you realize that all that running around on top of the trains and jumping off the tracks and everything is real; special effects were pretty minimal in 1926. Excellent flick.
• Sullivan's Travels - sort of like It's A Wonderful Life, but a comedy from 1941, starring Veronica Lake. Two thumbs up.
• Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - it was slaughtered on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and was most excellent. It starred Raul Julia (!) and was taped (not filmed, taped) in the early '80s. It was supposed to be all high-tech sci-fi in the future, where if you misbehaved your personality was temporarily transferred to a wild animal for "reconditioning" or something. The special effects made Dr. Who look like Jurassic Park, and the acting was pretty much non-existent. And it was sponsored by a grant from WNET, the PBS affiliate in New York City. Astonishingly bad on every level.

Crap From The Past is progressing slowly. I had been doing some production work at a community station, much like the one I was on in Tucson. The goal was to wait until someone at the station died, then replace his show with Crap From The Past in the schedule. A perfect plan, except for the really slow attrition rate at the station. Nobody died. So I decided to pitch my show to every other station in town, and even to some radio networks to try and get CFTP syndicated. The responses that I've gotten back so far were pretty much what I expected: no room on the schedule for another specialty show, but the program directors all liked Crap From The Past. One PD liked it enough to recommend it to one of the syndicated show guys at a radio network, which is pretty cool. My most promising leads still haven't gotten the demo tapes yet (they're still in the mail), so I should know before the year ends whether or not I'll be rich and famous. If I'm not a household name by this time next year, you'll know the outcome.

If you have Microsoft Word Version 7, type "zzzz" and let the spell checker fix it. I don't know why, either.

A potentially great idea: a radio station with a format of "Books on Tape". That's it, just Books on Tape, played 24 hours a day over the airwaves.

If Margaret were here at work, say would say Hi, I'm sure. (Holy jeez! I forgot to go home.)

On that note, enjoy the longest night of the year (December 22nd - my anniversary!) Out here in Minneapolis, the sun will rise at 7:48 and set at 4:34.

See ya,
Ron "Altoids saved my marriage" G

It's 1000 feet.

Ron's Big Life Update - October 1997

"Guns don't kill people. The government kills people." - Dale, from King of the Hill

Well, howdy. I know I've been sorely negligent in writing lately, and it's my own fault. No, wait, it's not MY fault, it's SOMEONE ELSE's fault. Namely - the MAN. I've been oppressed and beaten into submission by THE MAN, and it's only after my years of struggle and torment that I am finally able once again to freely write a mass e-mailing. Free at last...

The real reason that I haven't written much lately is that work has been utter pandemonium - we moved into a new building. The optical storage group (me, et al) moved from the nice-convenient-enormous-Seagate-facility-located-only-1.8-miles-from-my-house-complete-with-a-cafeteria into an also-nice-facility-that-we-bought-from-Honeywell-over-the-summer-but-we-haven't-yet-finished-the-renovations-and-we-were-in-temporary-offices-for-two-weeks-while-the-heat-was-broken-and-it-was-62-degrees-inside-and-our-equipment-is-starting-to-arrive-but-the-lab-space-doesn't-even-have-ceiling-tiles-yet-and-the-new-building-is-6-miles-away-from-my-house-thus-tripling-my-commute-time-and-no-cafeteria-so-we-have-to-each-out-every-day-which-stinks-especially-when-it-gets-cold-like-50-below-and-don't-even-get-me-started-about-the-wind-chill-oy!

So I've had my hands full. The phone system is very entertaining - we have the ROLM system, which is an all-digital system (I think the D/A converters are in the headset - THAT'S how digital it is!) I've noticed that the phones come in some slightly different flavors: some are genuine speaker-phones, and on others you can only hear through the little speaker - you can't talk back. I guess I have a listen-phone, which is pretty unsettling to the person at the other end who hears only silence. For those of you who have access to the ROLM phones, there is one terrific feature that you won't find in any manual. If you hit *8, then dial a person's extension, you can speak directly to the person's speaker without having the phone ring. For example, I can dial *8 followed by Seth's phone number, and say "Seth, this is God. Give Ron a dollar.", which will come unannounced from his telephone, as if by divine intervention. We don't use this feature much at work because it's easier to just yell over the cubicle wall, but it must be excellent in a dorm situation.

We're getting used to our new little building. There are maybe 20 office-type people working here, and 100,000,000 construction people floating around. When the building is finished and fully occupied, there will be about 250 technical people. And only then will they install a cafeteria. They tell me that's about six months away, but after watching the construction guys in action, I'm not holding my breath.

Since there's no eats in the building, we've been checking out the local restaurants. Aside from McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, Arby's, Godfather's Pizza, Subway, LeAnn Chin take-out, that little Greek place that makes pretty good gyros, Byerly's (a supermarket with a surprisingly good restaurant in it), Baker's Square (Denny's, with pies), and an Indian place that I haven't been to although I hear it's good, there's not much around. Is it too much to ask to get a decent healthy meal from any of these places? I will recount my lunch from Wednesday: Everyone else brought his lunch from home (which I hate more than anything else in the world, including dental work), so I was forced to fend for myself. I drove out to White Castle (yes, there's a White Castle less than a mile from work.) and considered my options. In my high-school days, I could put away 10 of the little hamburgers, no problem. I am significantly older now, and thought that it would be unwise to try and top that (not to mention cruel to my co-workers). So I ordered two 42-cent hamburgers, and one chicken sandwich. (I just had to know what the chicken tastes like. For the record, they taste so greasy that I swear they've been deep-fried twice, and they're dripping with mayo. They were quite yummy.) That was enough to suppress my appetite. Later in the day, I got the munchies for something salty, thinking that salt would mop up the grease in my insides. I chose "Sunshine brand Wheat Wafers" from the vending machine, thinking along the lines of "Wheat Thins" - that they wouldn't be too bad for me. Wrong-o. "Sunshine brand Wheat Wafers" contain 10 grams of fat. Is this criminal? This is typical of my daily lunch routine, and I am not too happy.

Two random thoughts that I thought of all by myself: (1) Why are cellular phones getting more and more popular, while broadcast TV keeps losing an audience to cable? (2) What time zone is North Pole in?

We're winding down our outdoor activities at the house. We coiled up the hose and put it in the garage, and now we're waiting for the rest of the leaves to die, fall off the trees, and completely engulf our 0.23 acres of grass. I'd forgotten how much I don't like raking leaves. Margaret has been making some house alterations, like painting and putting up drapes. We had a few tons of gravel dumped on our driveway a few weeks ago. It was deliberate - we wanted some rocks around the outside of the house. It took us two full days and many many wheelbarrowfuls to redistribute them, but the house looks pretty good now. We also resealed the driveway. The folks at Home Depot know Margaret on a first name basis. Oh, and we got a graphite snow shovel from Sam's Club. (we are READY!)

Well, I finally broke down and bought a computer. After leeching off other people since Jon's Commodore 64 in 1982, I finally own a computer. I got a 166 MHz Pentium, 32 MB of RAM, 4 GB SCSI hard drive, crapola monitor, and a CD Writer. Yep, I am going to great lengths to write my own audio CDs. I have a few blank CD's left over from Kodak, and it would be a pity to waste them by not having a CD-R machine, so I bought one. My first project was to transfer my cassette copy of the very first American Top 40 show (7/4/70) onto CD, so I can hear my idol Casey Kasem introducing songs by such nobodies as War, Crosby Still Nash & Young, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Stevie Wonder, as well as such visionaries as Mark Lindsay, the Flaming Ember, Crabby Appleton, and the Poppy Family (featuring Terry Jacks of "Seasons In The Sun" fame). Just for the record, the #1 song was "Mama Told Me Not To Come" by Three Dog Night. Keep your feet in the ground, or you'll float off into deep space and die a grisly and horrible death.

I caved and got Minnesota license plates for my car. Now it looks like all the rest of the cars in the state. My New York license expires in five days, so I'll have to get a MN license, too. Now THAT's assimilation.

Saw a few movies lately, most on the VCR:

• City Lights - an extraordinary silent film, with Charlie Chaplin. Everyone should see this movie.
• Horse Feathers - one of the lesser-known early Marx Brothers films. Very funny. The password is "swordfish".
• Midnight Cowboy - Jon Voight & Dustin Hoffman (his first film after The Graduate.) Outstanding character study film, and made even better by the 1994 25th-anniversary-rerelease on video, with interviews on the tape after the film.
• Barbarella - high-camp sci-fi trash from 1968, starring Jane Fonda in a role she disavows. Hyped before its release as one of the two major science fiction films of 1968 (the other being 2001: A Space Odyssey), this film disappoints on every level. So bad, it's still bad. It has a character named Duran Duran, which gave the new wave group its name.
• L.A. Confidential - it's in theaters now, and I think it's worthy of its comparisons to Chinatown. Great from start to finish. Four stars. Two thumbs up.
• Devil Doll - it showed up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and their demolition of this early '60s possessed-ventriloquist-dummy flick is on par with Manos The Hands Of Fate, Pod People, and Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. If you're not watching MST3K (Saturdays 5-7 and 11-1 EST on the Sci-Fi channel), you're missing out.

Musically, I have some new additions to the Crap From The Past playlist:

• "Bad Case Of Loving You" - Moon Martin. The original version of the Robert Palmer tune.
• "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" - G.C. Cameron. The original version of the Boyz II Men tune.
• "I Feel For You" - Pointer Sisters. Recorded between Prince's version and Chaka Khan's version.
• "Schock Den Affen" - Peter Gabriel. "Shock The Monkey" sung in German!
• "Dancing Queen", "Mamma Mia", "Knowing Me Knowing You", and "Fernando" - Abba. All sung in Spanish.
• home demo versions of "I Missed Again" and "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins.
• Sheryl Crow's unreleased album from 1990. It's produced by Hugh "Melissa Etheridge" Padgham, and it's not bad.
• the first two Alanis Morrisette albums. (released in Canada.) They're bad. Real bad.

I'm doing some production work at the local community station: 90.3 KFAI-FM, Minneapolis. I've been trained on all the equipment, and now I'm just waiting for someone to die off and free up a time slot on their schedule for the world's largest crappy radio show, Crap From The Past. This could take a while.

And finally, we found out that our furnace works (heat! yay!) and our air conditioner probably doesn't. When we bought the house, it had one of those in-the-window AC units. Well, Margaret discovered that it wasn't secured to the window frame at all; it was just resting there and held in place by the window itself. So when Margaret opened the window to check out the caulking, gravity took over and our now-unsecured air conditioner landed squarely on the concrete slab outside our kitchen. It didn't bounce or shatter - it just came to rest, thud. We now have a slightly dented air conditioner sitting in our garage, and I don't think I'll be plugging it in any time soon.

Well, nothing else happening. The two cats are fine. I'll be spending the Xmas holidays in Houston with Margaret's extremely pregnant sister and her husband. She's due sometime around Thanksgiving, so by Christmas, she'll presumably be smaller and the house will be infested with baby things. Blech! At least this diverts attention from Margaret's mom away from us...

See ya, and write when you can,
Ron "Wake Me Up And Make Me Cocoa" G

Ron's Big Life Update - September 1997

Hi, all. Hope your respective Labors went smoothly. We labored very little on Labor Day, actually; everyone we know either went home to visit parents, or had company in from out of town. Low-key holiday at the Gerberhaus.

Not long ago, I sent e-mail to my brother in which I described a potential product line of breakfast cereals: Day-O's, Grouch-O's, Tornad-O's, Meskeet-O's, Barry Manil-O's, etc. The following two paragraphs are his response to me, and then my response to him. I laughed, anyway.

It's funny that you come up with all these cereal names with -O's. During high school, we used to play Wiper Games with my car. You dump stuff all over the windshield and I turn on the wipers and see how far I can fling them. But they had to end in O. Doritos, Nachos, Burritos; they're all fair game. I still have Cheerios in the inside air conditioning vents.

I, in response, have a story about Cheerios. Margaret, as you know, is a big slob, much like yourself. We had changed the oil in my car, and had about 3 quarts of used oil in a plastic milk jug. She put the jug o' oil on the floor in the back seat of her car, thinking that one day she might bring the oil to a gas station and they would dispose of it properly. (Pouring used motor oil down the drain is not considered proper disposal.) Needless to say, months elapsed and the oil never found its way to the gas station. It did find its way out of the jug, though, and would have made a hefty mess on the floor of Margaret's car had she not accidentally spilled an entire box of Cheerios all over the floor first. As fate would have it, Cheerios absorb motor oil fairly well, and prevented what could have been a planet-threatening oil spill in the back of Margaret's car. That was about two years ago, and I'm confident that those same Cheerios still grace the floor of Margaret's car to this day.

Ron "why labor when you can sleep till noon" G

Ron's Big Life Update - July 1997 (III)

Yo, Chuck F. (And Pat and Seth, too. But this is mostly music, so you can delete this right now.)

I think the pop music scene is pretty bleak also, but not as bleak as last year. There are a few songs on the radio that I actually like: "Sunny Came Home" by Shawn Colvin (even though it's a rewrite of Sophie B. Hawkins' "As I Lay Me Down"), "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind (the same guilty pleasure as "Two Princes"), "Virtual Insanity" by Jamoqari (sp??), the Babyface/Stevie Wonder duet, "Your Woman" by White Town (I don't think that the opening sample is borrowed from anything), and a few others. The leadoff single from the Brand New Heavies was disappointing, so I'm waiting to pick up the album. Radio right now is not the greatest selection of pop tunes, but I'll take Hanson and the Spice Girls over the shoe-gazing grunge bands any day. (What a production on the Hanson record! It's the Jackson 5 all over again!) And the Spice Girls will last about as long as the New Kids, so I'm not too scared.

On a good day, I can pick up a bunch of pop stations from some smaller surrounding towns, and not one of them carries Casey's Top 40! I'm beginning to get a little peeved, to say the least. Does Casey air in NYC at all?

My idea: a duet between Johnny Cash and Mariah Carey. Cash and Carey! I gotta lay off the caffeine.

I saw "Face/Off" with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. (I actually saw it with Margaret, but you know what I'm trying to say.) Every aspect of the movie is completely over-the-top-ridiculous. Which makes it very enjoyable, naturally. John T and Nicholas C were excellent, and I must say that John Woo is the king of ammunition. One thumb up.

Glad you liked Glen or Glenda. I agree that Ed Wood made some truly inspired dementia. I knew from the opening shot (some text on the screen that ran into the next scene before you had a chance to read it) that this was a doozie. You've probably seen "Orgy of the Dead", but don't rush out to see it if you haven't. I still think you'd enjoy "Mystery Science Theater 3000", now airing on the Sci-Fi Channel on Saturdays at 5PM and 12AM. There's been a little shuffling of the personnel, and now the filler skits can be unbearably bad, but the movies are still terrific.

No new news on the Crap From The Past front. I'm still flipping around the dial trying to find a suitable station.

Cash and Carey... I slay myself...

Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - July 1997 (II)

From the same creative genius that brought you such legendary breakfast cereals as Grouch-O's, Day-O's, and Barry Manil-O's...

It's the world's first breakfast cereal that gives you the great down-home taste of Meskeet...Meskeet-O's!

(It's been a buggy summer so far.)

This afternoon at lunch I also came up with the idea of Misfortune Cookies ("You will go bald, be found guilty of three misdemeanors, succumb to a life-threatening disease, and die penniless and alone.")

Most of my free time out here has been clogged up with house stuff. I spent the last few evenings mowing the lawn with our !@#$%^&* push-mower (I'll give it one more week and if it doesn't get any easier, it's history.), raking the lawn with our new rake, and taking up the soggy carpet and tiles from our basement floor. Apparently, we have a little seepage problem in the basement, which we've only noticed because we've gotten quite a bit of rain lately. In fact, since I've moved out here in June, the tornado sirens have gone off twice! I'm just guessing that the recent run of storms is atypical, though, and some drain tiles should fix the now-unfinished basement.

Been trying to settle into the usual routines, but they're not going as smoothly as planned. I found out that my free cable expires at the end of the month, so we'll have to tape as many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as we can before they pull the plug. I also discovered, much to my dismay, that there aren't any radio stations out here that carry Casey's Top 40 on Sunday morning! No more Casey Kasem?!?!? I'm DYIN', I tell ya... And I got Alanis Morrisette's first two albums on CD. (She had two Canadian albums in the Debbie Gibson/Tiffany vein before she moved to the states and started over from scratch.) They're awful, but I now own them. I'm still flipping around the radio dial to try and find some suitable outlet for Crap From The Past - no progress yet.

Well, fare ye well. And for you Southerners, fare ye-all well.
Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - July 1997 (I)

Hi. I'm finally settled into my new job and my new house. I'm now convinced that a house closing involves more signatures than anything else in one's life, but it's worth it. After about a week of unpacking, we can see the floor in most of the rooms! I've already mowed the lawn and made four trips to the hardware store, so I can say with pride that I'm a homeowner. Our first trash pickup is this Friday, and I can hardly wait!

We attached our VCR to the wall, and LO and BEHOLD! We have free cable. This marks the fourth (4th) time that I have gotten free cable this way. I must have the "kavorka" for free cable. Now if it only worked for donuts...

I found out that my new job involves a little bit of travel in the short term. I'm heading out to San Jose for two days in August, and possibly Holland (!) at the end of the summer. Woo-hoo!

I needed to pick a job title for my business cards, so I am now a "Senior Advisory Development Engineer," which means nothing, really. I wanted to be "Grand Poobah", but that was shot down pretty quickly.

The phone numbers don't spell anything funny, like PET-BANK or BIG-FOOT, unfortunately.

Hope all is well in your neck of the woods. The next time it snows, think of Minnesota...

Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber