Hi, all. First order of business: I'm still employed by ADC, after a large series of layoffs that have reduced our work force by 40% since last November. Yesterday morning, ADC downsized by 2500 worldwide, and about 800 here in Minnesota. We lost about half the people in our building yesterday, and it's more than a little eerie around here. But they're still paying me, and I'm in no position to complain. (If you're playing along at home, we're in the same business as Lucent and JDSU, and we've had the same problems as them. Now is not a good time to be in telecommunications.)
So here's what we've been up to since April:
My band (Thinland) broke up. Our cellist called it quits from performing, and we never quite recovered. We played a fun but lackluster gig in May and a painful coffeehouse gig in June, then dissolved the band. It was fun while it lasted, and I got to be a big-time rock drummer for a few live shows. Oh well.
Wedding season kicked in, and I DJed a few weddings in June with a few weddings left in the summer. Not really much to report on, except that after 16 years I'm still at the top of my game, and my authentic '70s-era blue denim leisure suit still fits nicely.
We redid our bathroom, which turned out to be a major undertaking. We'd had an inexpensive textured ceiling (sometimes called "popcorn") in the bathroom, and the humidity from showers would cause some of the paint and texture to flake off. I got sick of the falling paint flakes, so one weekend in May, I spent four hours on a stepladder with a putty knife scraping off the ceiling texture. Well, it got out of hand from there. While I was on the ladder, I jostled the old light fixture and knocked loose the wires, so we now had an excuse to replace the light fixture (one of Margaret's projects that she's been saving). All in all, we replaced the mirror with a medicine cabinet, put in new light fixtures, repainted, and replaced the shower curtain rod with an industrial-strength closet rod (in case I want to do chin-ups in the bath). Margaret did the bulk of the work, and it came out pretty fine-looking.
We did learn a bit about wiring up something with a switch, though. After we unhooked the old fixture, we wired up the new fixture with all the white wires connected together, and all the black wires together. Wrong! It was pretty entertaining, though. We wired everything up, set the switch to OFF, then ran downstairs to turn on the breaker. When we came upstairs to the bathroom, the light was ON, and the switch was OFF. Unsure of what to do at this point, I turned the switch to ON, which promptly shut off the light and tripped the breaker. After a great deal of wire-following, we figured out how it should be hooked up, which involves one connection of black wire to white wire. So now OFF is OFF, ON is ON, and all is well.
July 4th fell on a Wednesday, which didn't give any of us a 4-day weekend. Fooey, as you know. "Crap From The Past" had its own July 4th celebration, and rather than celebrate the usual Happy Birthday America, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Bicentennial. After all, isn't the real Spirit of '76 rooted in custom quarters and the metric system? The show turned out to be a high point in my radio "career", and over the course of the two-hour show, we played seven different versions of a spoken-word piece from 1974 called "The Americans". Absurd on every level, and pure radio gold. (I will assume that my Pulitzer, Nobel, and Grammy awards all got lost in the mail.)
So the weekend after July 4th, my brother Kenny came out for a visit. I'd set the bar pretty high for Kenny, and had endlessly recounted the stories of mass food consumption, including the eating-the-entire-seven-pound-can-of-chocolate-pudding-over-the-course-of-one-Sunday story and the Kenny-and-his-friends-ordering-one-of-every-menu-item-from-Taco-Bell. Kenny was a legend here in Minneapolis, and he'd never even met most of my friends.
Friday afternoon, we brought him to a Twins game. Kenny and I ate massive amounts of Metrodome food, I spilled mustard on my best jeans, the Twins beat Cincinnati, and Margaret even had a good time. Isn't Cincinnati in the wrong league? Why are these two teams playing each other? Who screwed up baseball without telling me?
We just happened to go to a game on one of those special give-away days. The first 10,000 people get a Rod Carew bobble-head doll. We didn't show up four hours early like the first 10,000 people did, so we were bobble-headless. Until... they flashed some additional winning ticket numbers up on the big screen, and lo and behold, Margaret won one! She's the most unlucky person I know (heck - she's married to ME! That's some bad luck...), and she got the big prize of the evening. The doll was a pretty elaborate hand-painted ceramic thing, and now lives in one of our display cabinets of priceless stuff.
We introduced Kenny to a few friends at the house, and they were genuinely impressed, even considering the enormous hype beforehand. He still eats a LOT (although I eat more than he does, just don't mention it to him). Ah, sweet food...
So at the end of Kenny's weekend with us, we dropped him at the airport, then hit the road for a road trip to Denver to visit Margaret's family. It's about 950 miles from Minneapolis to Denver. Unless you're superhuman and can drive it straight through, that's an easy two-day drive each way, so we took our time noodling westward across Nebraska. We drove through Oxford and Cambridge, and felt all the smarter having passed through such studious towns. We also passed a sign for a highway that would take you to two towns, Max and Benkelman. "Max Benkelman, Private Eye"! But all pales in comparison with indescribably small Funk, Nebraska. I don't think Funk is incorporated, so it doesn't appear on maps. We took pictures of us in front of the Funk water tower, and in front of a little utility building labeled "Funk Utilities". The pictures didn't turn out too hot, mostly because the disposable camera got too hot and humid. (Sorry, that's a "single-use" camera; your pictures don't turn out too well if you just throw out the camera.) We'll know for next time.
The visit was fun - we saw family for a few days, I hit my favorite record store in the world (Don's Discs), and we got to drive up into the mountains west of Denver, which I'd never seen before. Gorgeous terrain, and all new to me.
Man, Denver radio is even more screwed up than Minneapolis radio. I heard 95.7 KISS-FM, right next to 96.1 KISS-FM, with nearly identical formats. How can this be? I'm guessing that one of those is from a nearby city other than Denver, but you wouldn't know which one by listening to them. Plus there are two stations using "Today's Best Music". Shouldn't one of them be "Today's Second-Best Music"? Makes no sense to my little brain...
On the way back, we spent a few days with Margaret's mom in Yuma, Colorado, the tiny farm town where Margaret grew up. (Margaret grew up on a farm, and got to show me cows, corn and combines up close. Woo-hoo!) At the farm, we noticed the tiniest baby bunny we'd ever seen, sitting on the edge of the driveway. We stood around and watched it for a little while, then grew alarmed at (1) the fact that it wasn't running away, and (2) it appeared to have a tick stuck on its ear. Over the course of the next two days, we noticed that the baby bunny was actively shunned by an adult rabbit, and was driven away from nests and any other rabbit shelter by the adult. We surmised that the bunny was diseased, and was exiled from the rest of the herd. Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that "that bunny ain't right". Interesting...
Well, to make matters more interesting, the weekly Yuma newspaper reported an outbreak of bubonic plague among a prairie dog colony out there, and advised people to avoid contact with rodents like rabbits and mice. Oh! Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that baby bunny had THE PLAGUE, and didn't want the rest of the herd infected! Interesting...
Well, to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, I got bitten by a tick while I was out in Yuma. I don't know squat about ticks, except that this one just came right off with a tissue, so it didn't get much of a chance to do whatever burrowing biting gnawing thing that ticks do. It just left a little dot on my leg where I plucked him off - a tickey hickey.
So we drove back, and had a pretty uneventful drive at that. I found out that Margaret's little Civic gets around 38 MPG with the air conditioning at full blast if you keep it below 70 MPH, but beyond that one piece of information, I can't remember much else about the drive home. Oh yeah, we ate at Arby's. Mmmmm...Arby's...
After a week out of town and 2000 miles on the car, we arrived home on Saturday afternoon (7/14), unpacked, and enjoyed the air conditioning and the incredibly affectionate cats.
Sunday morning, I felt kinda sick. Fever, headache, sore throat, chills, random aches-other-than-headache, and some other symptoms that I can't remember. A simple Tylenol wasn't cutting it. So... (yes, you knew this was inevitable) a trip to the emergency room! It was early on a Sunday morning and nothing else was open, so by default we had to go to the good-ol' ER and get my frequent-patient card stamped. I'm now beating Margaret in the emergency room battle of 2001, one to nothing.
So we told the ER people all the facts: I'd been bitten by a tick about three days earlier, I felt fine the night before, and oh yes, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the county where I got the tick bite. Although all of these were perfectly true, they must have sounded ridiculous to the ER staff, and I'd like to think I made their day. Some wacko coming in claiming to have a medieval disease...
So my fever was 101.3 when I checked in, 102.8 about an hour and a half later when a nurse checked me into an examination room, and was probably around 104 by the time they got an IV in me to bring the fever down. I wasn't quite delirious (too bad - I was looking forward to seeing things), but I was pretty shaky and irritable. They took blood - lots of blood - and left bruises on both hands and both arms as they tried to find a cooperative vein. From the tests they ran, I found out that (1) I wasn't pregnant, (2) I didn't have strep throat, and (3) they didn't know what was causing the fever. They said that the bubonic plague test took a week, and they would have to have it sent out to the department of health (no joke).
My prescribed treatment: If it was a virus, then it would run its course (or I would die). Either way, you can't treat it. If it was a bacteria bug, then they would kill it to death with the most head-blastin' antibiotics known to mankind. They prescribed me three weeks' worth of doxycycline - big blue pills that make you pukey, kill your appetite, and make you extremely sensitive to sun exposure. These things are what they use to treat lyme disease, and will easily kill off the bubonic plague. So I have a few days left on the Big Pills, and I'll be glad when it's over.
All in all, I missed three days of work (a rarity for me - I didn't miss any full work days even when I had pneumonia last year), and I missed a Crap From The Past show (an even greater rarity - I'd never missed a show due to illness in almost 15 years of radio). I was SIKK! I lost 8 pounds, and my pants don't fit right anymore. I'm sure I'll bulk up to normal after I'm done with the Big Pills, and I can't wait.
Most importantly, I'm beating Margaret this year - one emergency room visit to zero.
We had one of the wettest springs on record out here, with one of the rainiest Mays. There was some serious flooding on the rivers out here, and some of the bridges around Shakopee (where I work) were closed for about 6 weeks. What a mess!
Then, it got hot. We had the driest 1st-two-weeks-of-July on record, ever. It was 110 with the heat index two days ago, and as I'm sure you've heard, Korey Stringer, one of the Minnesota Vikings, died from heatstroke complications yesterday! My oh my! And boy did we pick the right year to get a new furnace, complete with central A/C. The greatest invention ever, except for maybe the dehumidifier in the basement. That's good too.
I got a new logo for Crap From The Past, and I'll probably be making bumper stickers and T-shirts. Did you know that white T-shirts are cheaper than all the other colors? Why does everyone know that except me?
The CFTP website got a major upgrade, and you music geeks can keep yourselves entertained for hours with this page: www.crapfromthepast.com/favorites
Apparently, the CFTP site is now one of the world's leading authorities on Milli Vanilli. If you go to Google and search on Girl You Know It's True, Baby Don't Forget My Number, or any other Milli Vanilli hits, my site comes up first! I rule!
Finally, I'll wrap this up with more music geekery. There was a legendary live recording from 1974 of the band Steely Dan. The song "Bodhisattva" began with a 2-1/2 minute-long rambling introduction by a thoroughly-inebriated Jerome Aniton, who eventually introduced the band as Mr. Steely Dan.
I suggested to my friend Chuck, "Jerome Aniton ordering lunch in the cafeteria". He came up with this:
"Well, look at all the fine people here....haaa....I think we're in for one....damn fine lunch here today....haaa....you can tell all your friends...hell you can tell 'em over in Watts.....haaa....that they missed out on a....damn good lunch. And all you...little....little pretty ones....haaa...can have lunch too...I don't know...whatever. Because in this here cafeteria right now....Mister...whatever...is gonna fix up a sandwich and chip combo plate that's gonna make you say that....haaa...this cafeteria in Santamonnica....haaa....is def-nitly....on fi-ya...."
Nicely done, Chuck.
That's all from our end. Hope all is well, and we'll talk to you soon!
Ron & Margaret
Thursday, August 2, 2001
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - June 2001
"Well, we need the rain." - sarcastic remark made by Minnesotan; we clearly do not need the rain, and June has been about twice as rainy as it should be.
Well, howdy-do, boys and girls. (Written at beginning of June): The past weekend was the busiest I've had in a long time, and I'm still a little sleepy. Saturday: up at 6 (!) to get myself to a record show, where I was a vendor for a change. (These happen every two months, and vendors show up with crates of records and CDs from all over the midwest. They're more common out east, where I'd been going to these since I was in high school.) I sold a few LPs for a buck each, and spent the profits on new acquisitions, the vendor admission fee, and lunch. It all evens out, and I got rid of some of the fat in the record collection. After that, it was back home to pick up Margaret and rush off to a barbeque. (Four species of meat! Woo-hoo!) Margaret made rice pudding for dessert, which was a big hit. (It was indeed yummy, but rice pudding? Who'da thought?) I then left the barbeque early to go play a gig with the band at a coffeehouse in St. Paul. Eventually, I made it home and got to sleep well after midnight. Sunday: I spent a good 4 hours on a stepladder scraping the texturing off our bathroom ceiling. We had a popcorn ceiling, which is like a stucco finish, only it's very cheap to install and is not really the best quality available. It had been flaking off in the bathroom every time we shower, and I just got fed up with it. Now, we have a nice flat bathroom ceiling in need of a painting, and my right arm is sore. What a weekend! (Since then, Margaret has been repainting the walls and adding a new light fixture. Should look pretty nice when it's done...)
Since the last time I wrote, we had a large tree cut down in the backyard. It was hanging over the power lines, and was heading straight for the house. (Granted, trees don't move very fast, but the house moves even slower, and it's not well-equipped to "duck".) We paid some professional guys to cut the thing down, and they showed up with an amazing array of cutting/shredding/scooping equipment. They cut down all the branches and turned them into wood chips right there in the backyard. Woo-hoo! We saved about one-fourth of the wood chips, which they left on the driveway in a pile about the size of our car. No exaggeration - we had many many many wood chips, which Margaret eventually redistributed all over the backyard. And now, we have a stump in the backyard that's about 2-3 feet in diameter, and a lot more sun on the west side of our house. We planted some eensy little trees to make up for the big one we lost, but they're only about a foot tall right now. In due time...
We bought a new couch a few months ago, and had the darndest time trying to get rid of the old one. Even the "free" sign at the curb didn't do it, and it's been sitting in the garage for months. Finally, Margaret ripped it apart, attached some new slats to the hard maple frame, and turned it into a bench that lives on our patio. Recycling indeed!
The weather has been nuts out here. There was some serious flooding along the Minnesota river at the end of winter. Our house is many miles from the river and well above the water level, but I have to cross the Minnesota to get to work. For a while, it was pretty ugly. There is one particular frontage road that lies pretty close to the river, and you can see it very clearly from the highway on my morning commute. First, I was surprised to see water at all on the road (which was closed before the flooding started). Then, over the next two weeks, I watched the water level rise and rise, until most of a yellow right-turn road sign was under water. That's got to be at least 6 feet of water on the road, and for a few days some of the big highways were closed near the river. The water level has since receded, but I don't think the benchmark frontage road is open yet. And I don't know the status of some of the small river towns that got flooded. Presumably, they're cleaning up, but it's not making headlines anymore.
The flooding situation seems to be getting worse as a trend. We've had "hundred-year" floods three times in the last ten years, and my guess is that it's from all the man-made flood controls they've put in. If you go out of your way to contain the river at your town, then you make things worse for all the towns downstream. Or at least that's my naive way of seeing it.
We also had back-to-back days of 94 degrees in mid-May, which is insane, followed by a few days of record lows only a week later. Nutzy!
In other news, "Crap From The Past" has been getting more ambitious lately. To celebrate Cinco De Mayo, I did an all-Spanish show, in which both the music and my talk breaks were entirely in Spanish. I haven't spoken any Spanish since high school 15 years ago, and I was terrified for the whole show. It sounded pretty good, but I won't be doing any foreign-language shows again for some time. The website also got a major upgrade, with the addition of 600 new files, including 100+ audio clips and 300+ pictures! Woo-hoo! (www.crapfromthepast.com) Most of this will appeal to the hardest-of-the-hardcore music geeks, but I have some quaint odds and ends that may interest you. For example, I scanned in the stub from my very first concert - The Thompson Twins with O.M.D. from 1985. Such minutia!
My band, Thinland, broke up. We lost our cello player and never really recovered, so we all agreed that we had a good run, and we'll move on to other projects. The drums now move back into my basement. Oh well...
Our building at work is walking distance from ValleyFair, an amusement park. From our windows in the cafeteria, we can see The Wild Thing, a giant green roller coaster, and we can hear the screams from our parking lot. There's something indescribably wonderful about hearing shrieks of panic during the work day!
Ron & Margaret "Don't look back in Angora" Gerber
Well, howdy-do, boys and girls. (Written at beginning of June): The past weekend was the busiest I've had in a long time, and I'm still a little sleepy. Saturday: up at 6 (!) to get myself to a record show, where I was a vendor for a change. (These happen every two months, and vendors show up with crates of records and CDs from all over the midwest. They're more common out east, where I'd been going to these since I was in high school.) I sold a few LPs for a buck each, and spent the profits on new acquisitions, the vendor admission fee, and lunch. It all evens out, and I got rid of some of the fat in the record collection. After that, it was back home to pick up Margaret and rush off to a barbeque. (Four species of meat! Woo-hoo!) Margaret made rice pudding for dessert, which was a big hit. (It was indeed yummy, but rice pudding? Who'da thought?) I then left the barbeque early to go play a gig with the band at a coffeehouse in St. Paul. Eventually, I made it home and got to sleep well after midnight. Sunday: I spent a good 4 hours on a stepladder scraping the texturing off our bathroom ceiling. We had a popcorn ceiling, which is like a stucco finish, only it's very cheap to install and is not really the best quality available. It had been flaking off in the bathroom every time we shower, and I just got fed up with it. Now, we have a nice flat bathroom ceiling in need of a painting, and my right arm is sore. What a weekend! (Since then, Margaret has been repainting the walls and adding a new light fixture. Should look pretty nice when it's done...)
Since the last time I wrote, we had a large tree cut down in the backyard. It was hanging over the power lines, and was heading straight for the house. (Granted, trees don't move very fast, but the house moves even slower, and it's not well-equipped to "duck".) We paid some professional guys to cut the thing down, and they showed up with an amazing array of cutting/shredding/scooping equipment. They cut down all the branches and turned them into wood chips right there in the backyard. Woo-hoo! We saved about one-fourth of the wood chips, which they left on the driveway in a pile about the size of our car. No exaggeration - we had many many many wood chips, which Margaret eventually redistributed all over the backyard. And now, we have a stump in the backyard that's about 2-3 feet in diameter, and a lot more sun on the west side of our house. We planted some eensy little trees to make up for the big one we lost, but they're only about a foot tall right now. In due time...
We bought a new couch a few months ago, and had the darndest time trying to get rid of the old one. Even the "free" sign at the curb didn't do it, and it's been sitting in the garage for months. Finally, Margaret ripped it apart, attached some new slats to the hard maple frame, and turned it into a bench that lives on our patio. Recycling indeed!
The weather has been nuts out here. There was some serious flooding along the Minnesota river at the end of winter. Our house is many miles from the river and well above the water level, but I have to cross the Minnesota to get to work. For a while, it was pretty ugly. There is one particular frontage road that lies pretty close to the river, and you can see it very clearly from the highway on my morning commute. First, I was surprised to see water at all on the road (which was closed before the flooding started). Then, over the next two weeks, I watched the water level rise and rise, until most of a yellow right-turn road sign was under water. That's got to be at least 6 feet of water on the road, and for a few days some of the big highways were closed near the river. The water level has since receded, but I don't think the benchmark frontage road is open yet. And I don't know the status of some of the small river towns that got flooded. Presumably, they're cleaning up, but it's not making headlines anymore.
The flooding situation seems to be getting worse as a trend. We've had "hundred-year" floods three times in the last ten years, and my guess is that it's from all the man-made flood controls they've put in. If you go out of your way to contain the river at your town, then you make things worse for all the towns downstream. Or at least that's my naive way of seeing it.
We also had back-to-back days of 94 degrees in mid-May, which is insane, followed by a few days of record lows only a week later. Nutzy!
In other news, "Crap From The Past" has been getting more ambitious lately. To celebrate Cinco De Mayo, I did an all-Spanish show, in which both the music and my talk breaks were entirely in Spanish. I haven't spoken any Spanish since high school 15 years ago, and I was terrified for the whole show. It sounded pretty good, but I won't be doing any foreign-language shows again for some time. The website also got a major upgrade, with the addition of 600 new files, including 100+ audio clips and 300+ pictures! Woo-hoo! (www.crapfromthepast.com) Most of this will appeal to the hardest-of-the-hardcore music geeks, but I have some quaint odds and ends that may interest you. For example, I scanned in the stub from my very first concert - The Thompson Twins with O.M.D. from 1985. Such minutia!
My band, Thinland, broke up. We lost our cello player and never really recovered, so we all agreed that we had a good run, and we'll move on to other projects. The drums now move back into my basement. Oh well...
Our building at work is walking distance from ValleyFair, an amusement park. From our windows in the cafeteria, we can see The Wild Thing, a giant green roller coaster, and we can hear the screams from our parking lot. There's something indescribably wonderful about hearing shrieks of panic during the work day!
Ron & Margaret "Don't look back in Angora" Gerber
Monday, April 9, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - April 2001
"Are you adequately prepared to rock?" - Principal Skinner from The Simpsons
"Monkeys are taking over New Delhi." - Bob Edwards, on NPR's "Morning Edition", 3/22. Now THAT's the way to start the morning!
Well, I'm working again, and I'm completely settled in with the new job. Seagate is history (well, the company is still around but I'm gone), and I've been a full-fledged ADC employee for about two months. We do fiber optics stuff for telecom, and our stock is in the toilet right now (which is just fine because I'm buying...) My group is about 17 people, and about 13 of them are from my old optical group from Seagate. It's been a very easy transition for me, despite the fact that I can't walk to work anymore. I guess I could walk, but it's about 13 miles and it would take the whole work day. The ADC cafeteria is excellent; if I were in a restaurant and they served me this food, I would be pleased. I haven't put on any weight, though (bless my skinny ancestors), but I stopped working out. Muscle tone? Who needs muscle tone when you eat a good lunch?
Happy Passover and Easter and All That. Margaret put on our ersatz-Seder again, where she made sushi and in the process, covered nearly all the bases required for a certified regulation Seder. We had a few friends over this time, and consumed enormous quantities of California Rolls, Sake, Sangria, wine, and weird tasty desserts from the Oriental Market down the street. A big success, and because we invited my friend John over (the same guy from the bad pizza/beer/movie night), we had virtually no leftovers. Many thanks to Margaret's Korean roommate from college, who passed on the sushi skills quite nicely. (No raw fish, though. Just seaweed wrappers, rice, cucumbers, carrots, jicama, avocado, a cooked egg, and hot dogs, which work surprisingly well in the California rolls. Wasabi was the Bitter Herb and soy sauce was the "salty tears" for dippping.)
Our big excitement lately was getting a new furnace. Our old one was made by Trane sometime in the early '60s, which puts it at about 38 years old. Each time we had a service guy out to take a look at it, his reaction was always, "My God! I've never seen one of these this old!" I know that furnaces aren't supposed to last for 38 years, and it's a credit to Trane ("It's hard to stop a Trane, but you sure can slow one down") that this one lasted as long as it did. We decided it was time for a new one when it set off the carbon monoxide detector in the basement. At first, we thought it was just the bird that had fallen down the chimney and clogged the flume (which Margaret lovingly described as a basically a piece of charcoal with wings), but even after we cleaned out the ex-bird, we got CO beeps. So The Guy came out last week with a Helper, and the two of them swore up a storm carrying out the old furnace. We got a new Trane, and so far so good. It's remarkably quiet, and it's been unsettling for us because the only time it's been that quiet is when the blower motor died. It's ninety-something percent efficient, compared to the old one (maybe, oh I dunno, how about 10%?), and it's got air conditioning. We'll only need the AC for about two weeks in August when it's so humid that you want to die, but if we ever sell the house it will certainly help.
We saw Chinatown, The Producers, and Manos The Hands Of Fate all in one weekend. All bona-fide classics, and all even better with repeated watchings. Six thumbs up.
We also drove around last week at midnight on a weeknight to see the northern lights. I'd seen them a few times in '91 driving from Rochester MN back up to the Twin Cities, so we hopped on US52 and drove about 50 miles toward Rochester, watching backwards over our shoulders. A dangerous way to drive, but worth it. The northern lights just looked like some red clouds that were illuminated by city haze, but once we realized that we were 50 miles away from city haze, it became clear that that was it. We got to sleep about 1:30, but we saw a cool natural phenomenon. Like it oughta be.
We just went through the KFAI pledge drive, a twice-a-year fun-fest where we solicit financial support from the listeners. (No commercials; this is how we pay the bills.) Crap From The Past broke all kinds of records by raising over $2000 for the station, which is completely unheard of for a show that's on Sunday nights from midnight to 2. Thanks to all the listeners that contributed, and maybe I'll be able to convince the station management that CFTP deserves a better time slot. (I'm not holding my breath.) The website www.crapfromthepast.com has added a Milli Vanilli tribute section, and now it's getting more traffic than anything else on there. Scary, and worth checking out.
I mentioned in my last e-mailing that I would be taking three glorious weeks off between jobs. The time off did me a world of good, and I'd recommend a long break to anyone switching jobs, much in the same way that I recommend relieving some wedding day tenison by eloping and having a reception afterwards. I slept late for two weeks straight, and for the third week, we packed up Margaret's Honda and drove to Yellowstone National Park. It was awesome - Yellowstone in February is great!
We'd had such good luck with road trips before that we just decided to follow the map to Yellowstone. The route was pretty straightforward - I-90 west across South Dakota and Wyoming. We drove all day and pulled into a hotel when we got sleepy. We drove toward the eastmost entrance, and discovered that the eastmost entrance to the park is closed to auto traffic for the winter! (Doh!) The nice folks at the hotel in the tiny Wyoming town informed us of this before we got on the road, and we had to take a whole lot of 2-lane highways across Wyoming to get back to I-90. We turned south at Livingston, Montana, then another 2-lane highway took us into the park.
I have to say that it's absolutely beautiful across Wyoming and Montana, two states which I'd never seen before. It's also part of the "West", with the cowboys and all that, which I didn't realize at all. (I always associate the "West" with Tucson, just because I lived there and hadn't thought much about it.)
And yes, Montana has a speed limit (it's not infinite, as previously believed.) It's 75 MPH by day, 70 at night. We drove significantly faster than the speed limit, though, and found out that your gas mileage tends to be pretty crummy at 90 MPH.
The teensy town at the edge of park is Gardiner, which is mostly some restaurants, junque shoppes, and a hotel or two. Gardiner is pretty much deserted in the winter, and virtually everything was closed in the town except for a gas station. It was creepy. There was a sign in front of one Gardiner hotel advertising, "Elk stay free." And sure enough, there were about a dozen elk lounging on the snow-covered lawn in front of the hotel. Very cool, and it set a very nice tone for us as we drove into the park.
You buy a 7-day pass at the edge of the park, so you can come and go as you see fit without paying a fortune. There were another dozen or so elk inside the park right near the gate, as if to thumb their noses at any potential hunters. (Yes, I know elk don't have thumbs. It's just an expression. After another five miles or so on a twisty, wind-y, two-lane road, we arrived at Mammoth, which is one of the lodges inside the park. There's a hotel, some gift shops and historical buildings, some really nice scenery, and not much else in Mammoth. It's actually a nice gentle way to ease yourself into the park, and there's about 2 miles worth of hiking trails near the hotel. There were a few hot springs along the trail, and we were awe-struck how you can have near-boiling water (it's about 170-180 degrees at the surface) right next to 18 inches of snow. It was plenty cold, and I got good use out of the hood on my ice-fishing jacket.
The Mammoth hotel was really nice, and really old. It was designed in the mid-'20s (I think), when the economy was booming and plans were BIG! During construction through the Depression, it was scaled back to something more reasonable. The rooms were historically accurate to the period, complete with push-button light switches, giant claw-foot bathtubs (no showers!), radiator heating, and no TV or radio. Neat! Outside, there were magpies everywhere. Margaret tells me that magpies are pretty birds that tend to soil their reputations by being scavengers, and they were everywhere. We also saw a big raven in the parking lot eyeing a small yippy dog (a WEINER dog no less!) in one of the parked cars. Dogs is tasty!
We spent a night there, then took a snow-coach down to Old Faithful. The roads are closed to cars, but open for snowmobiles and the park's snow coaches (basically a van on skis!) We're not adventurous enough for the snow-mobiles, so we took the vans-on-skis. It's about a 4-hour ride from Mammoth to Old Faithful, and the van-on-skis makes a few stops for scenery and snacks. It's driven by cool tour guides, who come from all over the world to work in Yellowstone. One of our drivers was from somewhere near Russia (I should have written most of this down when it was fresh in my mind...)
The park had a serious forest fire in the summer of 1988, and you can still see the effects. Lots of burned trees still standing, and lots of new little saplings that are all about 3 feet tall. I was really surprised that nearly everyone working at the park saw the fire as a positive thing, and an almost necessary step in the natural progression of the park. They talked about how some of the tree species need the extreme heat of a fire for their seeds to sprout, and how the animals actually had plenty of food after the fire because the oxidized bark was edible and digestible for them! Who'da thunk? It almost makes me want to watch the Discovery Channel more (but just almost.)
The scenery was astounding, and I'd like to think that I learned a lot. We saw buffalo a-plenty, and I learned that buffalo is a more common (and less correct) term for bison. Buffalo/bison are enormous creatures, and we saw hundreds of them from the van (and up close later on). They're also tasty as I learned from some burger places out east, but oddly enough, no one out there serves buffalo as burgers. I dunno why.
We saw elk a-plenty as well. They're everywhere, and they're pretty big as well. We had a spectacular bald eagle sighting from the van. It just sat there, perched on a tree branch, much to the delight of the Japanese photgrapher in the van with us. As if on cue, it stretched its wings, yawned, and turned to the side.
We also saw some coyotes eating an elk that had fallen into one of the hot springs and died. It was pretty much elk soup by the time we arrived, and it was very cool to watch the coyotes carefully walk out along the carcass, and rip off pieces with their teeth. You could tell that the water was hot by the way the coyotes reacted when they got their feet wet. Good pictures indeed - as if it were staged for the Discovery channel.
Now imagine this - if I described a couple where he was an engineer, she has an art degree, they have no kids and 2 cats, one of which pees in a corner of the basement, she drives a Honda Civic and used to drive a Pinto, they had no proper honeymoon, and he used to do community radio, you'd think I was describing Margaret and me. Nope - this is a description of Dan & Kristin from Portland, Oregon, who we sat next to in the van. We were all pretty shocked at the similarities, and we walked around the park together. Very cool people, and I owe them a letter and a set of pictures.
There's a lodge at Old Faithful, and we stayed a night there for a night. The park at Old Faithful is superb. The hot springs that we saw in Mammoth were nice, but they were peanuts compared to the geysers at the Old Faithful park. Old Faithful itself is excellent, and I was somewhat relieved to learn that you can't exactly set your watch by it - it erupts every 79 minutes, +/- 11 minutes. It's the +/- part that sets my mind at ease somewhat - otherwise nature would be really scary in its precision.
So we strolled around the Old Faithful park with Dan and Kristin on the nicest, sunniest possible day in the middle of winter (I got a bit sunburned on my face). The paths were shoveled, but the park had about 2 feet of snow on the ground, and the air was crisp crisp crisp. We'd walk up to a geyser, it would erupt, we'd applaud, then walk on to the next one. After a while, we realized that Dan had the magic touch for geysers - "Kazaam!" and the thing would erupt on command. He had the Kavorka! And it worked repeatedly as we wandered along the trails. It was only afterward that we saw the expected eruption times; Old Faithful's average eruption separation is about 79 minutes, but the geysers in the rest of the park tended to have a few hours between eruptions, like 4-11 hours! So it really was a total fluke that the eruptions followed us around, but it's nice to believe that someone actually has the Kavorka. And somewhere on Dan's roll of film, we have a picture of a buffalo standing right in front of Old Faithful, taken from about 25 feet away. (We know you're not supposed to be that close to them, but it was standing right in front of us on the path.)
There are some really cool pools in the park. Not erupting geysers really, just warm pools that have some fantastic colors in them from minerals and bacteria. If you were going to install a decorative pool in your backyard, you'd want it to look like one of these. There was a "Do not mark bacterial mats" sign that we interpreted as "Don't pee in the pools."
I did observe one of the coolest optical phenomena I've ever seen, and I'll try and describe it to you fellow optics geeks. It was a very clear, cold day at the park, and we were looking at one of the hot spring pools. The sun was overhead and just behind us, so that the top of our shadows fell about two feet in front of us. There was some steam at the surface of the springs, so that there was a few inches of mist where the top of our shadows fell. If I looked at my own shadow, I appeared to have a bright halo around my head - like a '70s-era basketball afro of light. And each of us noticed the same effect for his/her own shadow - you see a little light halo around your own head, but not around anyone else's. For lack of a better name, I dubbed it my "aura", and I haven't come up with a good explanation of why you'd see this at all. Probably the same math that predicts rainbows, but I'm not sure why you'd see such a sharp reflection only at near-normal incidence (near the head of your own shadow). Thank God it's not an oral exam question, or I'd have to give back my degree...
After three full days in the park, we drove home. Uber-Kudos to Margaret's driving skillz, and she guided us through a Montana snowstorm. She claims to have been in conditions like this all the time growing up on the farm 3 hours east of Denver, and had no trouble passing the semis and magically keeping the car on the road at a healthy speed. (I would never have made it home at all...)
All in all: 6 days of driving, and 2700 miles on the Civic. The best imaginable week.
Margaret would like to interject here for a minute or two for a rebuttal: A flue is a metal chimney, a flume is a log ride. The park guide from "near Russia" was from Croatia, which makes me wonder what his letters to home are like - "Yes, there are buffalo wandering all over the place, all the mountains are spectacular, and everyone that works for THIS government is a dope-smoking Granola!" Yellowstone is ideal in the winter for the reason that the biggest scavengers awake at that time of year are just coyotes, not enormous bears who can strip cars. The Korean roommate wasn't from college, it was from my "sabbatical" when I dropped out and switched schools because I was broke. Her parents were transferred back by the Air Force and threw all of the roommates out, which is why I was only there for a couple of weeks. Welcome to Tucson, your lease is toilet paper. As for the new furnace, it is much too quiet. I keep checking the thermostat, because not hearing the fan running makes me think the house is getting colder and colder. I'm sure that in the summer, I'll still have to run a fan just to psych myself into thinking that it's cool. Gotta go, The Guy who's estimating the shade tree removal is due here soon.
Ron's rebuttal to Margaret's rebuttal: Yes, a bird died in the log ride that's attached to our chimney. I'm sticking to my story...
One more thing, in the name of spring cleaning: The real reason you haven't heard from me in eons is that I was putting off re-typing my alias list, which is over 100 names long. I think it's all in there, but I'm sure I screwed some things up. If you could e-mail me your current info, I'd appreciate it. (And to family members, kindly pass along any other family members I might have missed.) Also, let me know your preferred e-mail address if you have multiple entries; the ADC system only allows one e-mail address per name. Thanks!
So that's what's been up at my end. The last of the snow melted off this weekend, and spring is about to spring. Hope all is springy at your end of the world, and keep in touch.
Ron & Margaret
"Monkeys are taking over New Delhi." - Bob Edwards, on NPR's "Morning Edition", 3/22. Now THAT's the way to start the morning!
Well, I'm working again, and I'm completely settled in with the new job. Seagate is history (well, the company is still around but I'm gone), and I've been a full-fledged ADC employee for about two months. We do fiber optics stuff for telecom, and our stock is in the toilet right now (which is just fine because I'm buying...) My group is about 17 people, and about 13 of them are from my old optical group from Seagate. It's been a very easy transition for me, despite the fact that I can't walk to work anymore. I guess I could walk, but it's about 13 miles and it would take the whole work day. The ADC cafeteria is excellent; if I were in a restaurant and they served me this food, I would be pleased. I haven't put on any weight, though (bless my skinny ancestors), but I stopped working out. Muscle tone? Who needs muscle tone when you eat a good lunch?
Happy Passover and Easter and All That. Margaret put on our ersatz-Seder again, where she made sushi and in the process, covered nearly all the bases required for a certified regulation Seder. We had a few friends over this time, and consumed enormous quantities of California Rolls, Sake, Sangria, wine, and weird tasty desserts from the Oriental Market down the street. A big success, and because we invited my friend John over (the same guy from the bad pizza/beer/movie night), we had virtually no leftovers. Many thanks to Margaret's Korean roommate from college, who passed on the sushi skills quite nicely. (No raw fish, though. Just seaweed wrappers, rice, cucumbers, carrots, jicama, avocado, a cooked egg, and hot dogs, which work surprisingly well in the California rolls. Wasabi was the Bitter Herb and soy sauce was the "salty tears" for dippping.)
Our big excitement lately was getting a new furnace. Our old one was made by Trane sometime in the early '60s, which puts it at about 38 years old. Each time we had a service guy out to take a look at it, his reaction was always, "My God! I've never seen one of these this old!" I know that furnaces aren't supposed to last for 38 years, and it's a credit to Trane ("It's hard to stop a Trane, but you sure can slow one down") that this one lasted as long as it did. We decided it was time for a new one when it set off the carbon monoxide detector in the basement. At first, we thought it was just the bird that had fallen down the chimney and clogged the flume (which Margaret lovingly described as a basically a piece of charcoal with wings), but even after we cleaned out the ex-bird, we got CO beeps. So The Guy came out last week with a Helper, and the two of them swore up a storm carrying out the old furnace. We got a new Trane, and so far so good. It's remarkably quiet, and it's been unsettling for us because the only time it's been that quiet is when the blower motor died. It's ninety-something percent efficient, compared to the old one (maybe, oh I dunno, how about 10%?), and it's got air conditioning. We'll only need the AC for about two weeks in August when it's so humid that you want to die, but if we ever sell the house it will certainly help.
We saw Chinatown, The Producers, and Manos The Hands Of Fate all in one weekend. All bona-fide classics, and all even better with repeated watchings. Six thumbs up.
We also drove around last week at midnight on a weeknight to see the northern lights. I'd seen them a few times in '91 driving from Rochester MN back up to the Twin Cities, so we hopped on US52 and drove about 50 miles toward Rochester, watching backwards over our shoulders. A dangerous way to drive, but worth it. The northern lights just looked like some red clouds that were illuminated by city haze, but once we realized that we were 50 miles away from city haze, it became clear that that was it. We got to sleep about 1:30, but we saw a cool natural phenomenon. Like it oughta be.
We just went through the KFAI pledge drive, a twice-a-year fun-fest where we solicit financial support from the listeners. (No commercials; this is how we pay the bills.) Crap From The Past broke all kinds of records by raising over $2000 for the station, which is completely unheard of for a show that's on Sunday nights from midnight to 2. Thanks to all the listeners that contributed, and maybe I'll be able to convince the station management that CFTP deserves a better time slot. (I'm not holding my breath.) The website www.crapfromthepast.com has added a Milli Vanilli tribute section, and now it's getting more traffic than anything else on there. Scary, and worth checking out.
I mentioned in my last e-mailing that I would be taking three glorious weeks off between jobs. The time off did me a world of good, and I'd recommend a long break to anyone switching jobs, much in the same way that I recommend relieving some wedding day tenison by eloping and having a reception afterwards. I slept late for two weeks straight, and for the third week, we packed up Margaret's Honda and drove to Yellowstone National Park. It was awesome - Yellowstone in February is great!
We'd had such good luck with road trips before that we just decided to follow the map to Yellowstone. The route was pretty straightforward - I-90 west across South Dakota and Wyoming. We drove all day and pulled into a hotel when we got sleepy. We drove toward the eastmost entrance, and discovered that the eastmost entrance to the park is closed to auto traffic for the winter! (Doh!) The nice folks at the hotel in the tiny Wyoming town informed us of this before we got on the road, and we had to take a whole lot of 2-lane highways across Wyoming to get back to I-90. We turned south at Livingston, Montana, then another 2-lane highway took us into the park.
I have to say that it's absolutely beautiful across Wyoming and Montana, two states which I'd never seen before. It's also part of the "West", with the cowboys and all that, which I didn't realize at all. (I always associate the "West" with Tucson, just because I lived there and hadn't thought much about it.)
And yes, Montana has a speed limit (it's not infinite, as previously believed.) It's 75 MPH by day, 70 at night. We drove significantly faster than the speed limit, though, and found out that your gas mileage tends to be pretty crummy at 90 MPH.
The teensy town at the edge of park is Gardiner, which is mostly some restaurants, junque shoppes, and a hotel or two. Gardiner is pretty much deserted in the winter, and virtually everything was closed in the town except for a gas station. It was creepy. There was a sign in front of one Gardiner hotel advertising, "Elk stay free." And sure enough, there were about a dozen elk lounging on the snow-covered lawn in front of the hotel. Very cool, and it set a very nice tone for us as we drove into the park.
You buy a 7-day pass at the edge of the park, so you can come and go as you see fit without paying a fortune. There were another dozen or so elk inside the park right near the gate, as if to thumb their noses at any potential hunters. (Yes, I know elk don't have thumbs. It's just an expression. After another five miles or so on a twisty, wind-y, two-lane road, we arrived at Mammoth, which is one of the lodges inside the park. There's a hotel, some gift shops and historical buildings, some really nice scenery, and not much else in Mammoth. It's actually a nice gentle way to ease yourself into the park, and there's about 2 miles worth of hiking trails near the hotel. There were a few hot springs along the trail, and we were awe-struck how you can have near-boiling water (it's about 170-180 degrees at the surface) right next to 18 inches of snow. It was plenty cold, and I got good use out of the hood on my ice-fishing jacket.
The Mammoth hotel was really nice, and really old. It was designed in the mid-'20s (I think), when the economy was booming and plans were BIG! During construction through the Depression, it was scaled back to something more reasonable. The rooms were historically accurate to the period, complete with push-button light switches, giant claw-foot bathtubs (no showers!), radiator heating, and no TV or radio. Neat! Outside, there were magpies everywhere. Margaret tells me that magpies are pretty birds that tend to soil their reputations by being scavengers, and they were everywhere. We also saw a big raven in the parking lot eyeing a small yippy dog (a WEINER dog no less!) in one of the parked cars. Dogs is tasty!
We spent a night there, then took a snow-coach down to Old Faithful. The roads are closed to cars, but open for snowmobiles and the park's snow coaches (basically a van on skis!) We're not adventurous enough for the snow-mobiles, so we took the vans-on-skis. It's about a 4-hour ride from Mammoth to Old Faithful, and the van-on-skis makes a few stops for scenery and snacks. It's driven by cool tour guides, who come from all over the world to work in Yellowstone. One of our drivers was from somewhere near Russia (I should have written most of this down when it was fresh in my mind...)
The park had a serious forest fire in the summer of 1988, and you can still see the effects. Lots of burned trees still standing, and lots of new little saplings that are all about 3 feet tall. I was really surprised that nearly everyone working at the park saw the fire as a positive thing, and an almost necessary step in the natural progression of the park. They talked about how some of the tree species need the extreme heat of a fire for their seeds to sprout, and how the animals actually had plenty of food after the fire because the oxidized bark was edible and digestible for them! Who'da thunk? It almost makes me want to watch the Discovery Channel more (but just almost.)
The scenery was astounding, and I'd like to think that I learned a lot. We saw buffalo a-plenty, and I learned that buffalo is a more common (and less correct) term for bison. Buffalo/bison are enormous creatures, and we saw hundreds of them from the van (and up close later on). They're also tasty as I learned from some burger places out east, but oddly enough, no one out there serves buffalo as burgers. I dunno why.
We saw elk a-plenty as well. They're everywhere, and they're pretty big as well. We had a spectacular bald eagle sighting from the van. It just sat there, perched on a tree branch, much to the delight of the Japanese photgrapher in the van with us. As if on cue, it stretched its wings, yawned, and turned to the side.
We also saw some coyotes eating an elk that had fallen into one of the hot springs and died. It was pretty much elk soup by the time we arrived, and it was very cool to watch the coyotes carefully walk out along the carcass, and rip off pieces with their teeth. You could tell that the water was hot by the way the coyotes reacted when they got their feet wet. Good pictures indeed - as if it were staged for the Discovery channel.
Now imagine this - if I described a couple where he was an engineer, she has an art degree, they have no kids and 2 cats, one of which pees in a corner of the basement, she drives a Honda Civic and used to drive a Pinto, they had no proper honeymoon, and he used to do community radio, you'd think I was describing Margaret and me. Nope - this is a description of Dan & Kristin from Portland, Oregon, who we sat next to in the van. We were all pretty shocked at the similarities, and we walked around the park together. Very cool people, and I owe them a letter and a set of pictures.
There's a lodge at Old Faithful, and we stayed a night there for a night. The park at Old Faithful is superb. The hot springs that we saw in Mammoth were nice, but they were peanuts compared to the geysers at the Old Faithful park. Old Faithful itself is excellent, and I was somewhat relieved to learn that you can't exactly set your watch by it - it erupts every 79 minutes, +/- 11 minutes. It's the +/- part that sets my mind at ease somewhat - otherwise nature would be really scary in its precision.
So we strolled around the Old Faithful park with Dan and Kristin on the nicest, sunniest possible day in the middle of winter (I got a bit sunburned on my face). The paths were shoveled, but the park had about 2 feet of snow on the ground, and the air was crisp crisp crisp. We'd walk up to a geyser, it would erupt, we'd applaud, then walk on to the next one. After a while, we realized that Dan had the magic touch for geysers - "Kazaam!" and the thing would erupt on command. He had the Kavorka! And it worked repeatedly as we wandered along the trails. It was only afterward that we saw the expected eruption times; Old Faithful's average eruption separation is about 79 minutes, but the geysers in the rest of the park tended to have a few hours between eruptions, like 4-11 hours! So it really was a total fluke that the eruptions followed us around, but it's nice to believe that someone actually has the Kavorka. And somewhere on Dan's roll of film, we have a picture of a buffalo standing right in front of Old Faithful, taken from about 25 feet away. (We know you're not supposed to be that close to them, but it was standing right in front of us on the path.)
There are some really cool pools in the park. Not erupting geysers really, just warm pools that have some fantastic colors in them from minerals and bacteria. If you were going to install a decorative pool in your backyard, you'd want it to look like one of these. There was a "Do not mark bacterial mats" sign that we interpreted as "Don't pee in the pools."
I did observe one of the coolest optical phenomena I've ever seen, and I'll try and describe it to you fellow optics geeks. It was a very clear, cold day at the park, and we were looking at one of the hot spring pools. The sun was overhead and just behind us, so that the top of our shadows fell about two feet in front of us. There was some steam at the surface of the springs, so that there was a few inches of mist where the top of our shadows fell. If I looked at my own shadow, I appeared to have a bright halo around my head - like a '70s-era basketball afro of light. And each of us noticed the same effect for his/her own shadow - you see a little light halo around your own head, but not around anyone else's. For lack of a better name, I dubbed it my "aura", and I haven't come up with a good explanation of why you'd see this at all. Probably the same math that predicts rainbows, but I'm not sure why you'd see such a sharp reflection only at near-normal incidence (near the head of your own shadow). Thank God it's not an oral exam question, or I'd have to give back my degree...
After three full days in the park, we drove home. Uber-Kudos to Margaret's driving skillz, and she guided us through a Montana snowstorm. She claims to have been in conditions like this all the time growing up on the farm 3 hours east of Denver, and had no trouble passing the semis and magically keeping the car on the road at a healthy speed. (I would never have made it home at all...)
All in all: 6 days of driving, and 2700 miles on the Civic. The best imaginable week.
Margaret would like to interject here for a minute or two for a rebuttal: A flue is a metal chimney, a flume is a log ride. The park guide from "near Russia" was from Croatia, which makes me wonder what his letters to home are like - "Yes, there are buffalo wandering all over the place, all the mountains are spectacular, and everyone that works for THIS government is a dope-smoking Granola!" Yellowstone is ideal in the winter for the reason that the biggest scavengers awake at that time of year are just coyotes, not enormous bears who can strip cars. The Korean roommate wasn't from college, it was from my "sabbatical" when I dropped out and switched schools because I was broke. Her parents were transferred back by the Air Force and threw all of the roommates out, which is why I was only there for a couple of weeks. Welcome to Tucson, your lease is toilet paper. As for the new furnace, it is much too quiet. I keep checking the thermostat, because not hearing the fan running makes me think the house is getting colder and colder. I'm sure that in the summer, I'll still have to run a fan just to psych myself into thinking that it's cool. Gotta go, The Guy who's estimating the shade tree removal is due here soon.
Ron's rebuttal to Margaret's rebuttal: Yes, a bird died in the log ride that's attached to our chimney. I'm sticking to my story...
One more thing, in the name of spring cleaning: The real reason you haven't heard from me in eons is that I was putting off re-typing my alias list, which is over 100 names long. I think it's all in there, but I'm sure I screwed some things up. If you could e-mail me your current info, I'd appreciate it. (And to family members, kindly pass along any other family members I might have missed.) Also, let me know your preferred e-mail address if you have multiple entries; the ADC system only allows one e-mail address per name. Thanks!
So that's what's been up at my end. The last of the snow melted off this weekend, and spring is about to spring. Hope all is springy at your end of the world, and keep in touch.
Ron & Margaret
Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - January 2001
Happy mid-January from Minnesota! We had 34 inches of snow in December, and not much since then. (We also had Super Bowl dreams until the Giants beat us 41-0, but we won't talk about that.)
First off, I'm leaving my job at Seagate. I had a good 3-1/2 years at the company, but it's time to get back to optics. I'll be starting work at ADC Telecommunications at the end of February (fiber optics and such). The site is about 20 minutes from the house, so I won't have to move or anything. The best way to get in touch with me is still ron@crapfromthepast.com, which gets forwarded to the house. (By the way, the crapfromthepast.com site now has a huge section on Milli Vanilli. Someone had to...)
We ditched cable and got a satellite dish, then got a new couch. Margaret and I are well on our way to becoming true potatoes.
So Margaret and I both made quick trips to Florida recently. First, she flew to Tampa to help her sister move into a new house. While she was gone... I was single again! Woo-hoo! So I did the most single-guy thing I could think of - I invited my friend John over, and we got the worst frozen pizza we could find, the worst beer we could find, and watched the worst movies we could find! The details: The frozen pizzas produced some surprises - the Totino's party pizza turned out to be the best of the bunch. The little cubes of artificial pizza meat are a world away from real pizza, but the Totino's was actually quite yummy in an all-artificial way, much like Taco Bell (no one would mistake it for real Mexican food, but it hits the spot nonetheless). Other less successful pizzas included Tony's and Cub Foods' own, which tastes like a rubbery ham-and-cheese sandwich on a bad crust. All in all, we tallied up the numbers for what we actually ate: 1680 calories per person, 83 grams of fat per person. Big woo-hoo! Although I didn't sleep very well that night.
The beer: My friend John walked into Edina Liquors and asked the clerk for the worst beer in the store. The cheapest? No, the WORST. Once the clerks understood that what we wanted was bad beer, not necessarily cheap beer, they got into a serious discussion amongst themselves. Two out of the three clerks agreed: Olympia Beer is the worst. John got a 12-pack for $5. The slogan on the can appears in quotes: "It's the water." As if it were the answer to the question, "My God, what is wrong with this beer?" "It's the water." John and I agree - Olympia is probably the worst beer we've ever had, and that includes my experience with generic white-label beer (made by Perle) a few years back. Bleh! I still have ten cans in the fridge, just in case.
The movie: "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians", featuring an eight-year-old Pia Zadora. After that, we watched most of "Time Of The Apes", a bad Japanese "Planet Of The Apes" knock-off directed by Sandy "light and get away" Frank.
Margaret came back and literally found pizza boxes and beer cans all over the house. I was beaming with pride, having gotten in touch with my XY chromosomes for the first time in a long time.
A few days after Margaret got back into town, I flew down to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate Grandma's 90th birthday. I think I spent more time traveling than I did in Florida, and it was probably the shortest trip anywhere ever. On the first leg of the trip (Minneapolis to Atlanta), I sat next to two high school kids, a brother and sister on their way to a wedding in Florida. Nice kids. I got to see the sunset from the air, which is also terrific. On the next leg (Atlanta to Ft. Lauderdale), I sat next to a 50-year-old alcoholic woman, whose exact words were, "I've been looking for a light beer since 8:30 this morning." She might have been only 30, but she looked 50+. A charmer.
The 36 hours I spent in Florida with Grandma and my mom were very nice. I guess the maternal instinct is to feed your kids until something bad happens - this is a good instinct, and my brother and I freely welcome the feeding part. Well, imagine two generations of maternal instincts raining down on you, and that's how much food I ate in my short visit. Yikes indeed!
I always got a kick out of the little jobs that family members save up for you. One of them was to buy furnace filters and a new smoke detector at the local Home Depot. So Saturday morning, as I made the pilgrimage to the Big Orange, I noticed that Home Depot ran sort of a kids' camp in the parking lot, where they get to hammer and sand some wood scraps together. It was pretty cute, actually, and I can see how Margaret's childhood (which consisted of 90% hammering and 10% plotting the demise of her siblings) was pretty enjoyable.
So on the trip back, from Atlanta to Minneapolis, I wound up sitting next to the same two high school kids! What are the odds? I booked my flight online, and I picked out the seats myself, and I would assume that their parents also picked out the flights and seats at random! Weird! I'll probably run into them again the next time I fly somewhere...
Geeky aside: What if banks set up savings accounts with a complex interest rate, like 0.05i per year? So after a year, 5% of your balance would be turned into imaginary dollars, then negative dollars the year after, then negative imaginary dollars, and finally real dollars after four years. You could hide your assets from The Tax Man by turning them into imaginary dollars! Why has nobody done this before?
My band, Thinland, has been doing pretty well lately. Right before I left for Florida, we played a gig at one of the local Minneapolis bars. We got the whole show on CD, and the CD sounds much better than the actual show (where the audience told us we sounded like mud). I blame the bar's sound guy, but I can't complain too much because the CD doesn't sound too bad. We actually sound like a band, which is pretty cool to me. (We're not just a bunch of guys banging away; we're a cohesive pop/rock band. Neato.) The CD turned out to be 64 minutes long, which is TWICE as long as one of the greatest live recordings of all time, 1962's "James Brown Live At The Apollo". We're TWICE as LONG! A whole factor of 2, is what we are. And we rock as hard as one could expect from a band with a cello.
I have to lug six boxes of books from my office back to my house this afternoon, which sounds like more fun than I can handle. I'm gonna need an Olympia tonight...
So kick back, relax, peruse www.crapfromthepast.com/millivanilli/, and enjoy the rest of winter. Margaret and I will be enjoying the four weeks or so that I have off between jobs, until she gets sick of me, hits me with a frying pan, and sends me back to work at the end of February. Should be fun. I'll send off new contact info once I have a new office. (By the way, let me know if you don't want any more of these periodic Ron updates. I won't be offended in the least, but Margaret may come after you with a frying pan...)
Take care, and may all your Millis be Vanilli,
Ron G
Friday, December 22, 2000
Ron's Big Life Update - December 2000
Hi, all. Every once in a while, the computer network at work dies. When that happens, the only programs that work at all are the ones that run locally on your machine. In my case, the field is narrowed to Notepad and not much else. So...here's my Happy Holidays e-mail, written on Notepad.
I haven't written in a while, and for that I apologize. Margaret and I took a quickie vacation to Florida in early November. (A nice change in weather from Minnesota during that time of year.) We spent three days in Tampa for our niece's christening, and we found the coolest restaurant in all of Florida. "La Teresita" (The Little Terry?) was recommended in our little restaurant book - the same book that recommended Nick Tahou's in Rochester NY, and a fine restaurant or two here in the Twin Cities. The book gives selections that best reflect the local cuisine, and I can attest to that based on the inclusion of Nick's. (For those of you who have been to Nick's, I don't have to say anything; you can probably still taste it.) Anyway, La Teresita was the only restaurant listed in the entire state of Florida, and it turned out to be a little Cuban restaurant, set up sort of like a Wendy's with table service. The book recommended the Cuban Sandwich, which is pretty close to a grilled ham and cheese sandwich on a croissant. Very tasty, but the side dishes were even better. Margaret and I basically ordered one of everything, and we are now hooked on fried plantains, which are a yummy cross between french fries and bananas. (Trust me - soooooper tasty!) We'd never had Cuban food before, and it was fan-tastic! (Nothing at all like Mexican.) The restaurant was a 16-mile drive from where we were staying, and it was so good we drove back for dinner the next night. Many miles for food, and worth it.
After Tampa, we spent a few days visiting Grandma in Fort Lauderdale. We managed to synch up with my brother Kenny (better known as "Gerbs" to all his friends, some of whom don't even know his first name) and his friend Pete, and we all stayed at Grandma's house. Aside from spending time with Grandma, the high point of Fort Lauderdale was challenging Gerbs and Pete to an eating contest at one of the Chinese buffets. (We Gerbers are very food-centric.) Food was et, belts were loosened, and a good time was had by all except the restaurant owners.
And interestingly enough, we spent election day in Fort Lauderdale. (We'd already mailed in our absentee ballots in Minnesota.) We watched a bunch of TV coverage, just like the rest of the country, but we noticed that the local stations ran out of pre-produced segments around 10 PM, and they were just stre-e-e-e-e-e-etching the same sketchy details out to fill the time. Around 1:15 in the morning, somebody announced that Bush won Florida, and I went to sleep. We got up around 5:30 AM to go the airport, and the same TV people were still on announcing election results, looking mighty frazzled. You know the rest, but it was kinda cool to be in Florida to see the start of the mayhem.
December's been really cold out here. After three record-setting warm winters in a row, we're back to reality out here. The wind chill was -41 degrees this morning, and we have plenty of snow out here to kill off all living creatures. Now THAT'S winter! (Which starts tomorrow, actually.)
Margaret and I are looking for a new couch. That's been the big excitement lately. We know exactly what we want, and we're taking our time trying to find it at the stores in town. If we can't find it by spring, we'll order it by mail from one of the furniture places in North Carolina. No big hurry - the old couch still works, even though it doesn't look so good.
"Crap From The Past" has been going nicely. My website was chosen as Site Of The Week from e-crap.com, which is into entertainment stuff. The link that they set up to my site generated a total of 8 hits. 8. Which is a good indication of both the popularity of my site and of e-crap.
Our fifth anniversary is today. Now I'm discovering what it feels like when kids have their birthdays at the end of December - everything gets lumped into Christmas/Hanukkah and that's that.
Oh - U.S. Patent #6,084,846 cleared, of which I am a co-inventor. "Liquid Immersion Lens For Optical Data Storage" may very well be the least useful invention EVER, but at least I'm on it. Huzzah.
It looks Margaret is going to win the Emergency Room game for 2000. I took the lead in March with pneumonia, but Margaret tied it up over the summer with a gall bladder-ectomy, and then a bee sting. Unless I stick a fork in my head - twice - it looks like Margaret will win 2-1. At least next year I'll get a good draft pick...
Update on a good joke from two years ago: Remember how I bought $50 worth of Pinnacle Micro stock when the shares were around 10 cents each? And how we joked that I was now the majority shareholder? And how the day after my purchase, the price went up to 43 cents a share? And how we laughed and laughed? Well two years later, the stock has fallen a bit - now it's 0.8 cents a share and my huge investment is worth exactly 4 dollars. Frankly, I don't think it's fair that the price per share can dip below a penny. That's cheating! I'm still going to hang onto it, and I wonder exactly how low this thing can go...
Hope all is warm and fuzzy in your respective necks of the woods. Have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a pleasant Festivus, and a Happy New Year.
Ron & Margaret
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Ron's Big Life Update - September 2000
(Yes, this is a mass e-mailing, but I think it's excusable because I know all of you and I'm not cutting and pasting anyone else's words. If you really hate these things, let me know and I'll run you through the e-shredder.)
Well, howdy! Summer ends with a thud here in Minnesota, and the transition between hot and not hot is usually a sad affair, where we see if any of last year's long sleeve shirts still fit. Fooey. At least I'll still be able to walk to work for another month or so, until it gets down around freezing in the mornings (THAT's unpleasant...)
So the big talk around town is (naturally) the amazing colossal Crap From The Past website:
- crapfromthepast.com
At last writing it was just a dummy page, but now it kicks royal booty, including a detailed history of the show, playlists for the last eight years, and about fifteen hours of audio clips, songs, sound bites, and old show excerpts. It's HUGE! (And there's not a single scanned image to be found on the entire site, which is largely because I don't have a scanner.) Plus you can listen to the show online at any time, which is certainly better than waiting up late on Sunday nights to hear it live. To say that I'm pleased with how the site turned out would be a bit of an understatement, since I think it's best thing to happen to mankind since the electric toaster (admit it - we all like a little toast with our radio shows...) That number again... crapfromthepast.com. You don't need a credit card handy and operators are not standing by. (No banner ads either. I hate those.) Plus, you should change my email address to ron@crapfromthepast.com, which is way cooler than the one I have at work.
Since the goal is to have as many irons in the fire as possible, I have a bunch of extracurricular music projects in the works. The coolest one is at the local branch of Life Time Fitness, where I'll be DJing a step aerobics class next Wednesday. This will be a trial run for both me and the instructor, and if all parties are agreeable, it may turn into a weekly thing. The class is right after work on Wednesdays and is less than a mile from work, which is 5 minutes from the house - easy. For you DJ types, the step aerobics class is 150 BPM for 15 minutes, then 128 BPM for the next 45 minutes. Any music is good as long as it's beat-mixed and has a predictable whomp to it. This is pretty much a dream gig for a DJ - it's the same mixing that you'd do in a club, but the music isn't quite so loud, you don't smell like smoke afterwards, you don't have to deal with drunks, it's at a reasonable hour, and everyone dances to every song you play. Plus the scenery's not bad... I'll keep you posted...
The band stuff is going well. Thinland rox! We regrouped and reorganized a bit, so we're now guitar, bass, drums, and a cello. The cellist is really good, and he fills out the sound like a keyboard would. The band has already had two gigs, neither of which I played in; there was a coffee house about a month ago that was too small to fit drums in, and there was a block party this past weekend that I couldn't attend because I was DJing a wedding (the wedding was about an hour southwest of the Twin Cities in tiny Le Seuer, Minnesota, home of Green Giant veggies!). But now, Thinland has a real gig that I'll be able to play at - for those of you in the Twin Cities:
Thinland
Thursday, October 19, 8:00 PM
at Eclipse Records
an independent record store and performance space
St. Paul, MN
It's not Wimbley Stadium, but it's a start.
In other news, we found out that Margaret is allergic to bee stings. About two weeks ago, she got stung by a bee and we had to rush her to the emergency room. (Again! She takes the lead in emergency room visits this year - 2 to 1. I can't let her win, and I have to have at least one trip to the emergency room to tie... where's Dennis Miller with the obtuse commentary when you need him?) They gave her four prescriptions for ten days each - that's more drugs than they gave her for her gall bladder surgery! Plus they said that the next bee sting could be worse: it's not like your body builds up an immunity to them, and each subsquent sting produces a more drastic reaction. E-gad! So we don't like bees anymore.
That's the big excitement out here, unless you count the elections (and since Jesse's not up for re-election yet, nothing of significance is happening.) Hope all is well in not-Minnesota...
Take care, and be sure to check out crapfromthepast.com!
Ron "Who needs Napster when you've got Crapster" G
Friday, June 2, 2000
Ron's Big Life Update - June 2000
"Please don't eat the urinal cakes." - a little sticker in the men's room at the Oak Street Theater, Minneapolis
Hi, all. I know I've been fairly e-silent for the past few months, and I'll just assume that those have been the happiest months of your lives. This is just an e-howdy to let you know what's been going on with Margaret and me.
In March, I got sick. Not just a little-cold sick, but an I-gotta-go-see-a-doctor sick. I hadn't been that sick since my sophomore year of college (anyone remember The Plague from 1988?) The final diagnosis: I tested positive for mono (mono?!? Where on earth did I get mono? I haven't been a college student in years!), along with a mild case of pneumonia and sinusitis (a big sinus infection). I hadn't known that pneumonia shows up on a chest x-ray, but there it was, making my lung things look all fuzzy. They gave me some all-powerful antibiotics, and I started the long trudge down the dirt road to recovery. I spent most of March and quite a bit of April coughing, and I lost 8 pounds. Needless to say, I was a joy to be around.
And yet, I didn't miss a full day of work at all. I put in about a month of partial-days, where my goal was to show up just in time for lunch. Once I got to work I was fine, but the first two hours of the day were killers. Plus, one day after I saw the doctor, I did my radio show - we were in the middle of our fundraising pledge drive, and you can't miss those. I'm pretty sure I got a few sympathy calls, and my personal goal was to be the sickest DJ ever. (I believe I achieved that goal. Life is good.)
So that was March and April. Margaret coughed a bit, but didn't get as sick as I was. I think it was sympathy-coughing, like when the husband puts on the same amount of weight as his pregnant wife. Once I recovered, I started walking to work again. All is well again.
Somewhere in April, I was recruited to be the drummer for the local band Thinland. All these years spent wanting to be a drummer, then all these years with a drum set gathering dust in the basement, and now... the drums are in Jeff's basement, and we rehearse Monday nights. Thinland is a rock band, and we'll be playing a bunch of self-written pop tunes. The two guitarists have written a bunch of songs over the years, and we have more than enough material to keep us busy. The goal is to be able to play 10 songs on stage, and play a gig as the opening act for some other local band by the end of the summer. None of us plan on getting rich or famous; we have realistic expectations, and we just like playing. Life is good indeed.
The radio show bounces along nicely. There have been quite a few people who found some particular obscure song on my playlists (posted at kfai.org), and asked for a copy. I know how hard it is to find some of these songs, so I'm more than happy to send out a copy of "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" or "The Super Bowl Shuffle". (Trust me - they're obscure.) Well, I thought I would rummage around for some songs that I've been looking for, and I noticed that Dr. Demento played one of them about a year ago. I sent off a nice e-note explaining who I was and asking for a copy of The Extras' "Circular Impression". (Again - mighty obscure.) He made a copy for me, and we've sent a few CDs back and forth. He's a bigger music fanatic than I am, and I am duly impressed. Turns out, he grew up in Minneapolis! Who knew? So I made another friend in the music biz, and yet I still toil in obscurity. Seems fair.
Well, I finally cracked and bought the name "crapfromthepast.com". I just got the name last week, and right now it's just a dummy page. I have a friend working on a little web site, and within a month or so, there should be a more impressive dummy page.
We've been attempting a regular poker game out here. As the night wears on and we get a little punchy, we've been inventing games. Some of the better games have been Birthday Poker (your birth month is wild for you), Numerology Poker (add up the digits of your up cards, and that's wild for you), and Prime Poker (all prime numbers are wild). I take great pride in my favorite new game: Bruce Willis Poker (all Bruce Willis Movie numbers are wild: Die Hard 2, Die Hard 3, 4 Rooms, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, The Whole 9 Yards, and 12 Monkeys. That means 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 9s, and Queens are wild!) We've been trying to come up with a way to incorporate dice into the actual games, but haven't thought of anything more creative than rolling a die, and whatever number comes up is wild. Bruce Willis Poker, yet I still toil in obscurity...
For Memorial Day, we went to a barbecue with meat from five different animals. I inadvertently ate half a pan of brownies on top of that, and I felt pretty gruesome afterwards. Isn't that what Memorial Day is all about?
So we've got a bit of travel coming up soon. We got invited to two weddings in NY/NJ, nine days apart, so we'll be spending some time in the Eastern time zone. Here's our sketchy itinerary:
- Thurs, June 15 - fly into NY
- Fri, June 16 - wedding in NJ
- Sat, June 17 - drive down to Washington DC to see family and many museums (Margaret's never seen the art museums, and I think she may just go bezerk...)
- One of the days 6/19 6/20 or 6/21 - We have tickets to see Aimee Mann and Michael Penn in Virginia. I forget which day.
- Fri, June 23 - I have a dentist appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Dr. Wolff rules!
- Sun, June 25 - wedding in NY
- Mon, June 26 - fly back to Minneapolis
So there's quite a bit of unclaimed time in there, and we haven't ironed out the details yet. I'm sure I'll hit Manhattan, but I haven't figured out which day yet. Details to follow.
I will leave you with one final story. One of the big electronics retailers out here, Best Buy, is relocating its headquarters from one of the western suburbs to a neighborhood a few blocks from our house. In the process, they'll be buying out the houses and businesses on the land, then flattening it and starting over. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since our little suburb of Richfield will be making lots of money in property taxes. Anyway, the whole process of buying out property reminded one of my poker buddies of a little story...
My friend Tom used to work at the big IBM site in Tucson. IBM was buying out some of the local homeowners in order to expand the campus, and the process was going smoothly until they came across one particular homeowner that wouldn't sell. His property was valued at about $25,000, and he asked IBM for $400,000. He figured that IBM had to pay him the money, because he wouldn't sell otherwise and IBM would be left with a house in the middle of its campus. IBM said no - too much money. Then the guy tried a new tactic - he started carting in junk onto his property. Old refrigerators, dead cars, big ugly metal things. He figured that IBM wouldn't want an eyesore like that on its campus, and would have to pony up the big money and buy him out. Well, not only did IBM say no again, but they built an enormous hill around his house and built him his own access road. IBM's problem solved: no more eyesore, and at a cost significantly less than $400,000. The last Tom heard, the guy is still stuck in the house with all the junk on the property, because his property value has gone down from the original $25,000 and (oddly enough) he can't find any buyers for the property. There's a moral in there somewhere...
My lone movie review: Gladiator was fair. If given the choice, I'd rent The Insider again instead.
Hope all is well in your respective necks of the woods. And for your July 4th barbecues, remember that you're at the top of the food chain, and it's important to eat as many different animals as possible. (I will now wait for a crazed PETA representative to throw a pie at me...)
Ron & Margaret
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