Ron's Big Life Update - September 2005

If I were going to be a female superhero, I would most definitely want to be named Carmen Dioxide.

Hi, all. As summer grinds to a halt, I figured that it's time for a Big Life Update. First, the old business.

I think I mentioned that I'm officially a Patent Agent now. I'm officially Registration No. 57,166. Yes, I'm a number.

Liz did, in fact, keep her cat. He still yowls at night, so she puts him in the basement. And he still doesn't have a proper name, although Poohead seems to be the most popular. We're still coming up with additional names, like Izzy, Yoink, and Pewter. And he's HUGE - he weighed in at 8.1 pounds when Liz got him, and now he's around 12. I like the idea of a gigantic cat the size of a cougar… named Poohead.

As for the Crap From The Past website problem, it's now solved spectacularly. As of June, I lost access to the guy in Bath, NY, who had a server with a T1 connection. So my archive of all my old shows disappeared. Well, wouldn't you know, I got hooked up with archive.org, a very large, very respectable, non-profit organization that does this exact sort of thing. For free. Permanently. They also host the old show archive for "Democracy Now", a far-left news show that runs on KFAI and a few other stations nationwide, so these people know what they're doing. So since June I've gone completely overboard - I ditched all the old crappy RealAudio files, and re-encoded all 13+ years of my old shows as both hi-quality and lo-quality mp3s. It's hard to say how many files there are, but it's certainly in the thousands. It will probably end up being about 100 GB of storage at archive.org, with an unlimited bandwidth. E-gad! For those of you that feel like poking around, you can access everything through crapfromthepast.com, or by searching on "crap", "past", "KFAI", "Gerber", or something like that at archive.org. Deeee-mented, and now reeeeee-spectable!

Now, on to new business.

Late June - Liz's work schedule was about to change to weekdays only; she'd been working every other weekend and had always had a weekday off. So to celebrate her last weekday off, I decided to play hooky with her and we went to Valleyfair, a big ol' amusement park in the southwest suburbs. As fate would have it, an enormous heat wave rolled through the Twin Cities at exactly the same time, and it hit 96 degrees that very day. And humid. And it was all right there in the weather forecast the night before. So I'm guessing that it scared off most people, because the park was essentially empty! No giant crowds! We wore plenty of sunblock and drank plenty of water while we were there, and since Valleyfair has water rides, we really didn't notice the heat. Plus, since there was nobody there, we were able to go on a ride, get off the ride, run around through the turnstiles, and get right back on again! No waiting, anywhere in the park, all day! This was it - the dream we've all had, ever since we were little kids! We rode the Wild Thing 4 times in a row till we felt kinda pukey, then ate something, then went on some other ride a few times in a row, and so on, for the entire day. And as you know, fun should be quantifiable, and I defy anyone to top our Fun Quotient for the day: Liz went on a total of 37 rides. That includes water rides, and serious head-blastin' roller coasters. (I went on only 36; I stupidly dropped my keys at one point, and was looking for them while Liz went on a water ride.) That's right - 37 funs. I think the total came out to 6 rides each on all the three or four major roller coasters, plus lots of smaller rides. Best day ever.

Early July - Some of you may remember a catchy little pop song called "Funkytown". It was a hit in 1980, and 25 years later, it's still everywhere. Well, the guy who wrote it, produced it, and played most of the instruments on it is named Steven Greenberg, and he's from the Twin Cities. He still lives in town, and he still has a hand in the local music scene out here. Earlier in the year, I summoned up the courage to ask him to be a guest on "Crap From The Past", and he agreed. So on the July 8th CFTP show, he sat in with me, live, for the entire 90 minute-long show! That's right - the guy who did "Funkytown", right there in the studio with me! He brought friends and family, and I brought Liz, and everybody brought cameras. He was great - he told stories, he described how he recorded in the studio back then, he talked about being the drummer in a rock band in the early '70s (!), he has a great business sense and talked about how artists, producers, writers and musicians get paid, and it all made for some great radio. The show is posted on the CFTP archives (see above), so you can hear what I'm talking about. One of the true high points for the summer. He signed all my Lipps, Inc. 45s (and there are more than just "Funkytown"), including the actual 45 of "Funkytown" that I bought when I was 11.

Mid July - Another poker game. These have become a welcome, regular occurrence, and we've been playing about once a month. Well, one hand in particular stands out from this particular game. We were playing Texas hold 'em, and I was dealing. My down cards were Ace/5, unsuited. Respectable. I was in, along with most of the table. I then dealt the flop one card a time - ace, ace, ace. Yes, that's right. Five cards - four aces. I have never in my life gotten a natural four aces, so you can imagine my surprise. My thought process went something like this: "Holy $%^&*! Four @#$%^ aces! Oh no - who's going to stay in and bet? I have four $%^*&* aces and I'm going to win the ante!" Then one of the guys at the table bet. What could he have that beat four aces? So I raised him. And he raised me. And then all in. Yikes! He had a pair of queens down - a very high full house. But it doesn't beat four aces. I won a few bucks on the hand, and I think I was up about 2 bucks by the end of the night. Big spenders, we are. That's right - four $%^&* aces, baby.

Late July - I threw a birthday party for Liz at my house. The whole outdoor barbeque thing, chairs outside and all that stuff. Unfortunately, it was hot. Really hot. And humid. Really humid. Not just humid humid, but record-setting humid. The dew point was 80 degrees, which is exceptionally uncomfortable. The heat index (that how hot it feels) was a mere 125 degrees! I guess it could have been worse - a few miles to the southwest, the tiny town of St. Peter set a state record with the highest dew point ever recorded in the state of Minnesota - 86 degrees. Good party, though.

Early August - Despite my undying love for my spectacles (with the cool hexagon lenses - the same style lenses that my grandfather was wearing in his wedding photo from 1936), Liz really didn't like them. And she was vocal about it. Pretty incessantly, I must say. So I caved. I got new glasses, and I even let her pick out the frames. She's the one looking at them all the time, not me, so I trusted her to pick something nice. They do look pretty snazzy, and I've successfully put an end to the complaining, although there's no good story behind them. No pictures of me in the new spex, yet. I still have the hexagon glasses at home just in case.

Mid August - I had a one-day business trip to Boulder. Boulder is big enough to qualify as a small city, but I think it's considered a distant suburb of Denver. It's about an hour from the Denver airport. The rental car company gave me a Neon, and apparently Neons are still as crappy as I remembered from 1995, when some other rental car company gave me a Neon to drive from Tucson to the Grand Canyon. This one had only 9000 miles on it, had no pickup at all, and pulled severely to the left. Quite the lemon.

Boulder itself seemed nice. My trip coincided with freshman orientation at CU, so the area around the school was chaos. But the rest of the city was very pleasant. On a recommendation from a co-worker who used to live out there, I visited Whole Foods. Technically, it's a supermarket, but the term "supermarket" doesn't quite do it justice. It's more of a haven for fairly healthy eaters. A zillion kinds of produce, about half of it organically grown. A meat counter that spanned two full walls of the place, with every kind of species and permutation you can imagine. A deli counter with magnificent sandwiches, pizza, a salad bar, take-out entrees, you name it. And all of it labelled very carefully, with ingredients even for the pizza. Virtually all of it, chemical-free. I was amazed. So much so, that I ate two of my meals there, and bought fruit for the plane ride home. And all the while, I was surrounded by reasonably thin, highly liberal people - overall, a very enjoyable experience, and a nice change from the suburban markets out here. Plus, bike paths everywhere! I could get used to all that! Of course, I'd never be able to afford a house…

Late August/Early September - The State Fair, a Twins game (Liz's first), and The Renaissance Festival (a first for both Liz and me). Talk about eatin' bad!

The hot new food at the state fair was billed as spaghetti and meatballs on a stick, although it was logistically quite a bit simpler than that. They baked noodles into the meatballs, then deep fried them like a corn dog. Then insert stick, dunk in sauce, and voila. It was inoffensive, but not terrific. Liz and I combined had 11 food items, which I won't list here. 11 funs.

The Twins game was Liz's first pro baseball game, and it was a good time. The Twins shellacked whoever they were playing, so it was a nice, relatively exciting introduction to the game. Plenty of hits - we got three doubles, a triple, and a three-run homer. She asked a lot of questions, and I realized that baseball has a ridiculous number of rules. The one that stumped me probably has a very simple answer: Why are strikeouts scored as "K"? I know a walk is "BB", for a Base on Balls, but I was stumped where "K" comes from. I'm just thankful Liz didn't ask about the infield fly rule. I also ate a bunch, but I didn't have the stomach to eat for the cycle again. Maybe 3 funs.

The RenFest was… worth going to once. Maybe. Well, not really. A friend of ours is really into it, and has a costume and a season pass and all that. We went with him, since he knows the place pretty well. Maybe we just went on an off day, but Liz and I just didn't get it. Even if it hadn't rained like a car wash, I don't think we would have fit in well with the Huzzah crowd.

The RenFest did give me a brilliant idea, though. They always have the joust, and it's always so predictable. Guys in armor on horses with big sticks run right past each other. Then they do it again. Bo-ring. (It's the medieval equivalent of baseball!) So my idea is this: I suggest that we combine the competition of jousting with the good old fashion down home American tradition of the rodeo. That's right - we replace the horses with bucking bulls. Now imagine two guys in armor with big sticks trying to knock each other off the bulls, and you see where I'm coming from. If marketed correctly, the rodeo joust could be HUGE! It's a shoo-in with the young hipsters of today - it's unquestionably EXTREME! Those hipsters. I envision the rodeo joust having its own celebrities, like a hipper, cooler version of Tony Hawk. Who just happens to wear armor and gets bounced around by bulls. And it's a no-brainer to upgrade those rodeo clowns to jesters…

Yep, brilliant. And probably a better idea than my new idea for a condiment - ketchstard.

Early September - Liz and I drove down to Iowa to visit her grandparents. They seemed nice, and I think they didn't actively disapprove of me. Good enough! I think that's enough to earn brownie points in the family! And they earn extra brownie points from me because they thought I was a lot younger than I am - apparently I'm now at the stage where that's a compliment.

Early September - We've taken to using the word "pants" in place of the usual swear words. It's pretty effective, once you get used to it. Someone cuts you off on the road? Clearly has his heads up his pants. Someone trying to sell you something? Clearly full of pants. And so forth. I believe my friend Kelly came up with the whole "pants" thing, and I like it. Not your thing? Then pants off…

Mid-September - I guess you could characterize it as a minor gas leak in the house, although I don't want anyone to panic. For months, I'd occasionally get a whiff of gas in my laundry room, kinda near the water heater. Well, this past Saturday, I thought, "You know? I should get that looked at." Nothing out of the ordinary, no hissing sound or anything, I just thought that it would be a good idea. So I dug out my gas company bill, expecting to find the number to call if you smell gas in your house. The number's not on the bill. Oh, the bill gives you numbers to call if you're moving, or have billing questions, but no number to call IF YOU SMELL GAS IN YOUR HOUSE?!? Why would you not put the single most essential, disaster-preventing phone number right there on the bill?!? So I went to the website, thinking there would be a big, red phone number labeled "what to do if you smell gas in your house". No, not on the home page. Actually, nowhere near the home page. After some difficult navigation through their website, I eventually found a number to call, buried amongst some innocuous, useless blather at the bottom of one of their pages. I don't think that these pantsheads realize that they are, in fact, the GAS COMPANY. And sometimes, people need to make emergency calls to the GAS COMPANY, unlike, say, the request line to "Crap From The Past".

Once I found a phone number, things went much more smoothly. The phone line got it right: the very first thing I heard was "push 1 if you smell gas". I got connected to a live person who took some info and immediately dispatched a technician. The guy showed up within a half hour (on a Saturday morning, no less!), and was friendly, helpful, and knew what he was doing. I asked if I could watch, just out of curiosity, and he said, "Sure!" It's far more interesting for him if people watch and ask questions, so I did.

He came in carrying a gas detector, which was about twice the size of a voltmeter. It had a wand tethered to it by a flexible, transparent, plastic tube. It worked just like you'd think one of these would - as he brought the wand tip near the leak, it beeped and a number on the display increased. I asked if it was responding to the gas itself or the additive, and he told me that it responds directly to natural gas. Neat! I have no idea how it works, but it does. Apparently, these things have been around for about five years, and cost about $3500. He described one of the older ways they used to test, which involved cracking open a vial of something inside a chamber and looking for a color change, or something along those lines. Clunky. He still uses the soap bubble test sometime to check for leaks, just like they do with tires.

He found the culprit - a fitting that leads into my water heater. And although it wasn't technically his responsibility to fix it, he offered to tighten the fitting for me. Sure! He went out to the truck, got two big wrenches, and five minutes later, no more leak! How much did I owe him? Nothing - he said that the trip to find the leak was free, and it was a minor adjustment to fix it. I shook his hand and thanked him, and off he went. For free.

I was impressed enough with the service to write to the gas company, noting that the actual service was excellent, and the technician they sent out (For free! On a Saturday morning!) was superb. I also noted that they should probably put their emergency phone number on the bill - the technician said he'd had about a hundred people tell him that. My new impression of the gas company? A collection of fine people, all trying to escape the stupid pantsing bureaucracy.

Unrelated to everything: Somehow, I'm now the Treasurer of my radio station, KFAI, and also the Secretary/Treasurer of the Minnesota chapter of the Optical Society of America, both of which started in May, 1978. How did this happen? My mom has been the Treasurer of the Substitute Teachers Association of New York (or something close to that) for years! Grandpa was an accountant back in the day, and even though mom and I have no formal training in financial statements and whatnot, we seem to be carrying on the torch.

That's about it. Hope your school years start smoothly, and I hope you get to be lab partners with the pretty blond girl! Liz says hi, too.

Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - June 2005

Hi, all. It's been a very good couple of months, and virtually everything I have to report on is good news. I realize that eliminates most of the suspense, but these things aren't exactly nail-biters. In chronological order…

Early March - Met Liz's parents when they drove down to visit. They're from Ada ("AY-duh"), a small farming town in upper Minnesota near Fargo, and about a four hour drive from here. It was the first time I'd met anyone's parents (in that sense) in about ten years, so I was a little nervous. We all went out to dinner at a great restaurant here in town, and thanks to an ungodly amount of sangria, it went very nicely.

Late March - My washing machine died. It was a Maytag, and dated back to the late '70s, according to Frank, a friend of mine who is an actual repairman for Maytag. While the part that died was replaceable, it was expensive, and it made more sense to just get a new machine. So I got a new Maytag, based on Frank's recommendations. Apparently, the Maytag line that earned the company its stellar reputation has gradually been whittled down to just one model, which is what I bought, and it's pretty darn terrific. And for the record, the other washing machine models that currently use the Maytag name are, according to Frank, crap that looks like it was designed by an eighth grade shop class. There you go.

Mid April - Quite possibly the greatest weekend in all of history. The low point of the weekend was a wedding, so that will give you an idea of the scope of this particular weekend.

Saturday morning: Got up around 9 to clear blue skies and around 60 degrees. Wanted donuts, but since Liz and I shouldn't really eat donuts, we came up with a compromise. We'd walk to Donut Connection, which (according to MapQuest) is 2.96 miles away from the house. Three miles each way to burn off a donut? Perfect! We moseyed through side streets, took a foot bridge over the interstate, and wandered around the perimeter of a nature preserve. Liz didn't believe that there was a nature preserve in my little first-ring suburb of Richfield, but there it was. We each got 2 donuts at Donut Connection, and they were possibly the best donuts in the entire history of circular food - still warm! Mmm. Then on the way back, Liz pointed out that K-Mart across the street was flying a banner outside the store proclaiming "Nationwide Bike Sale". I'd actually been looking for a bike so I could go riding with her, but I couldn't justify spending $300 at a bike store to get a decent one. So we strolled into K-Mart, and $52 later, we strolled out with the cheapest bicycle ever built. It was pre-assembled, so it was straightforward to get it home - one of us rode in the lowest gear while the other one walked.

Saturday afternoon and evening: One of Liz's college friends got married, so we went to the wedding. The ceremony was at the Basilica here in Minneapolis, which is a mighty fancy church. So fancy, that whenever some religious event makes the news, they always show the inside of the Basilica. We guessed that the ceilings were somewhere around 75-100 feet tall. The acoustics for the pipe organ and singing were unbelievable, with so much natural reverb that it was like the whole church was singing in the shower. Although, the same acoustics made normal speech almost unintelligible. The reception was in the super-fancy lobby of a super-fancy office building west of downtown. The DJ was embarrassingly awful, the food was so-so, but the cake was good. So good, in fact, that when I noticed that some extra pieces of cake were laid out by the windows across the room, I believe my exact cry was, "Son of a b****! Cake!", and I nearly knocked over one of Liz's friends in my cake-bound haste. It's funny NOW, but Liz was probably appalled at the time.

Sunday morning: Got up around 9 again, properly inflated the tires on my new bike, and rode it the 8 miles or so to Liz's house. Then we properly inflated the tires on her bike, and rode to Liberty Custard, a seasonal ice cream place that Liz has been dreaming about since the fall. She had a malt, I had a scoop of ice cream with a piece of cake. Breakfast o' champions! Then we kept riding all over the county on the designated bike trails for the next four hours. The weather was a tiny bit overcast, but unseasonally warm, and just perfect for doodling around on bikes. We estimate that we put around 30 miles on the bikes, which is pretty good for the first day. I decided in the first five minutes that my cheapy bike needed a new seat, but there's not much you can do when you're actually on a bike ride. So after four hours of riding on the brick-like seat that came with my $52 bike, my posterior was a wee bit sore. It started to drizzle just as we got back to Liz's house, so we parked the bikes in the garage, hopped in the car and drove over to Matt's Bar for dinner. They have the best greasy burgers and sammiches, which hit the spot perfectly. And now that Hennepin County is non-smoking county-wide (woo-hoo!), we didn't smell like smoke afterwards (just grease. Mmm…) Since we were on a roll, we stopped by Lund's, an uppity local grocery store, and picked up one of their "picnic cakes", an 8-inch square frosted cake that Liz loves. And split it. Mmm… During the next hour, she sanded the woodwork in her condo's hallway while I checked eBay to make sure that none of the CDs she was about to donate to my radio station were worth anything.

And there you have it - the perfect weekend. Virtually all of it outside with perfect weather. Virtually all of it junk food, with no vegetables whatsoever. And a little bit of color on our arms, which were exposed during the bike ride. If the whole summer is like this, I will be a very happy camper indeed.

Late April - Took the Patent Bar Exam again. Same format as last time - 100 multiple-choice questions, all pulled from a huge pool of questions. It seemed a little easier the second time around, though that may just be luck of the draw. During my practice exams, there was one particular question that I got wrong so often that I printed it out the night before the exam, just so I'd have the answer fresh in my head in case that question showed up on the exam. It turned out to be question #1! A pleasant surprise and a nice way to start the test. How'd I do? Again, the government told me that I'd be notified in "due time", so keep reading.

Early May - Liz got a cat. He's about a year old, is already de-clawed (we'd never do that to a cat, but it was already done), and has a huge poofy tail like a dust mop. Very cute. She had trouble picking a name, though, and we kicked around quite a few. Liz's friends all made suggestions, including Thadius, Hyde, Quincy, Poohead, Bentley, Lenny, and Q.T. McWhiskers. I wanted to name him after Italian food, so I called him Gnocchi for a while. Now I call him Pesto. He doesn't respond to anything, so it really doesn't matter what his name is. And I like the fact that everybody has a different name for him. The cat cries a lot, to the point where Liz now puts him in the basement at night so she can get some sleep. It's still not clear if she's keeping him, so I'll have to let you know in the next Big Life Update.

Late May - Memorial Day Barbeque! The tradition continues, only not at our house this year. Too much food was et, naturally; that's part of the tradition. Bleh.

Early June - I found out that I passed the Patent Bar Exam! Woo-hoo! This makes me a Patent Agent. (FYI - the hierarchy is Patent Engineer, Patent Agent, and then Patent Attorney if I go to Law School. Which I won't be doing any time soon.) I can now sign my own documents and talk directly to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, instead of going through another patent attorney. The exam has a reputation for being the hardest bar exam, and passing it is a nice career milestone for me. A bump up in prestige, and a bump up in what the company can charge for my services. Good stuff! To celebrate, they bought dessert for the whole company - two giant cakes that were almost too rich to eat. Heck, if I get a cake every time I pass an exam, I'll go to Law School!

I gradually became aware that there are essentially no other patent agent/attorneys anywhere with a Ph.D. in optics and almost ten years of industry experience. There was one that I worked with who brought me into the firm where I am now, but he got out of patent prosecution about a month after I got here, and he's not doing that kind of work anymore. That leaves me. And that puts me in a very good position to take on optics clients; I can say firsthand that as an inventor, you want to make sure that the person writing up your inventions knows the technology and speaks the language. There really isn't any substitute for that. So I'll set a modest goal, and give myself two years to completely take over all the patent prosecution for the entire field of optics! Sure, why not?

And wouldn't you know it, within a week after finding out I passed the exam, I got four letters from recruiters…

Early June - We went rafting and camping on the Peshtigo River in upper Wisconsin, a six-hour drive from here. It was the same trip as last year, with slightly better weather but only 11 people. Last year we had 22, and that's where I met Liz. So this was sort of a one-year anniversary, sort of. I bought an inflatable mattress and a tent, so I didn't have to mooch equipment off anyone this year.

We drove up on Friday afternoon, set up tent while it was still light out, made a fire, and sat around gabbing and eating smores until everyone was set up and accounted for. Saturday morning, we went out rafting on the river. The water was low enough so that the usual two-person rafts wouldn't have worked well, so everyone got a free upgrade to Funyaks. Aside from being fun to say, Funyaks are much easier to steer and are self-draining - a big plus. We finished rafting around noon, then started eating. "Bring enough for yourselves and a little extra to share." Based on that, we all brought way too much food. With only an hour-long break for a nap at some point, we cooked and ate non-stop until midnight. What a day!

We drove back on Sunday, and while Liz and I were in the car, we tallied up everything we ate on Saturday. I will now reproduce the list of everything I ate between noon and midnight on Saturday. Do not try this at home.

2 fancy hamburgers
1 Polish sausage & bun
2 juice boxes
4 s'mores
1 banana
half an orange
one-third of a watermelon
1 yogurt
1 package of Pop-Tarts (something like "Ice Cream Sundae" flavor - no natural ingredients whatsoever)
4 pancakes & buckets of syrup
3 breakfast sausage links
10 (ten) pieces of really good bacon from a local custom meat place, some of which were wrapped in the pancakes along with the sausage links
1.5 pieces of rhubarb pie
a handful of grapes
half a pizza sandwich (a specialty of a friend of ours, who makes them over the fire in her little Coleman sandwich grilling thing)
half a cherry sandwich (see above; I think these may be called Mountain Pies?)
more than my share of leftover sliced, grilled potatoes
more than my share of leftover beans
1 package of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls

Now THAT's a weekend, in true Gerber Eatin' Style. Liz ate enough to feel sick also, but she ate significantly less than I did. She's not a Gerber.

Mid-June - Had the usual poker game with friends. We play about once a month on a Saturday, low stakes, pretty much the way I've played since high school. Only this time, instead of having the dealer call the game like we usually do, we decided to play a whole night of Texas Hold 'Em, just like they do on TV. (Aside: Who wants to see other people playing poker? How ridiculous is that? Future generations will undoubtedly see "Poker on TV" as the mid-00's equivalent of televised bowling. I'll be glad once the whole trend passes, and we can play just like we always have, without the hype.) I lost my $5, but I ate my weight in boneless wings.

Mid-June - Most expensive date ever. Liz and I met some co-workers of hers at a Japanese restaurant downtown. Pricey, but fun. Liz had never been to one of those places where they cook everything right in front of you and put on the big show with the knives and the pepper shakers and the big fire and all that. She had a blast. A few of our friends are jugglers, and we think they would be naturals for that style of cooking. "Now… FIVE peppers shakers! And watch me pass them to the table over there!" Ooh! Then we saw a movie - "Madagascar", which was light, fizzy fun. The high point of the movie was a lemur that was voiced by the guy who does "Da Ali G" on HBO. Pretty excellent, although I wouldn't want to see the movie again (it was no Finding Nemo). And THEN, we saw a band at 1st Avenue, "Ted Leo and the Pharmacists", a punky/pop three-piece in the fine tradition of early Joe Jackson. They were pretty good, and played everything way faster than they did on the records. Everything was upbeat and fast. To give you an idea of how fast, Ted played Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark" as an encore, and it was the most down-tempo song of the night. Fun show! Then I dropped Liz off and went home, having crammed more entertainment into one evening than all of last year.

Mid-June - Minor crisis, although it could be a major crisis for the Crap From The Past website. The guy who's hosted my old show archives (25 GB, ludicrous amount of traffic) is losing his T1 connection, and I have until the end of June to find another person willing to donate some space and bandwidth for my archives section. Mind you, the archives section has every CFTP show I've ever done in the last 13 years available on demand for streaming in their entirety, all for free. If I can't find another generous donor, I can't host the archives section of my website, and my website becomes lame-o. Yikes.

That's about it. No big travel plans coming up, unless they turn out to be spur of the moment. Liz says "Hi". Pesto says "Me-ow-woo-woo-woo".

Take care!
Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - February 2005

"Walnuts ruin everything." - Chef Boy RG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz says HI.

Take care!
Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - October 2004

The transition from summer to fall out here was abrupt. August was unusually cool, September was unusually warm, and on Sunday, October 10, I was out canoeing on one of the local lakes in Minneapolis. Sun, crystal clear skies, short sleeves, and a guy with a pushcart selling ice cream novelties. Just five days later, temperatures were around freezing at night, and I was making notes to myself to shut off the water to the outside nozzles so the pipes don’t freeze. For some reason I’ve been extra-conscious of the spectacular fall colors this year, but I’m still not ready for winter. People still talk about the 29 inches of snow that fell on Halloween in 1991, but I’m going to stay in happy denial until it actually does snow, hopefully a long, long time from now.

The latter half of the summer was dominated by two big projects around the house – fixing the lawn, and getting some new furniture. I realize that neither of these is all too exciting for anyone except me, but these updates can’t all be bubonic plague/gall bladder-ectomy/divorce/pneumonia/TV appearances.

A little history behind the backyard lawn: Initially, when we moved into the house, Margaret wanted to go ape and replace the entire backyard with garden/flower bed stuff. I wanted grass. Acres and acres of nice, green grass. We ended up with a compromise – Margaret planted some substantial flower beds and I got a small patch of grass in the middle of the yard. Years elapsed and Margaret’s interest in the flower beds waned, especially this past year, when she was understandably concerned with finishing up the divorce and moving out. So by the time summer rolled around, I faced the daunting task of bringing under control a sorely neglected yard, half of which was literally waist-high with weeds. I knew my pathetic little push-mower (with the spinny blade) wasn’t going to cut it, and I made the first baby-steps toward taming the mess when I bought my co-worker's Craftsman 4.5 HP mower in July.

Halfway through the summer, I signed up for an extra trash can removal service from my trash pickup company. Relatively small fee, and they give you an additional 96-gallon trash can for grass clipping, leaves, and any other yard waste. This was a good idea, and I spent the first half of the summer filling up the can every week just with waist-high stalks from the backyard. Slow, steady progress, one can at a time.

In getting rid of some of the horticultural atrocities in the backyard, I found some of the burial grounds for Margaret’s house projects. For instance, more than one project of hers involved tearing up parts of the driveway. (Don’t get me started…) Well, the asphalt bits had to go somewhere once they were removed from the driveway, and I discovered to my dismay that a particularly large bed of weeds was built on a mass grave of sorts for thousands of dead asphalt bits. Oh, the cursing and swearing that followed THAT discovery.

Halfway through August, one grand experiment marked the turning point in my liberation of the backyard. Through my trash service, I had my usual 64-gallon can, plus the additional 96-gallon can for yard waste. That’s a lot of potential trash to be removed every week, and I decided to try my luck on one particularly fateful week. Early on a Saturday morning, I wheeled the empty 64-gallon can to the asphalt graveyard in the backyard, and began excavating. Several hours later, I’d completely filled the can with broken asphalt bits that I’d dug out of the ground. I didn’t even make a dent on the asphalt graveyard, but I’d completely filled the can. Now, assuming that the density of broken asphalt bits is similar to that of water, 8.34 pounds/gallon, my 64-gallon trash barrel weighed about 530 pounds. I noticed as I was topping off the can that there was a little warning on the top of the can that cautioned against putting more than 200 pounds in the can. Oh dear.

First order of business was moving the can from the grassy backyard onto my concrete patio. Two thick plastic handles, two thick plastic wheels, one big plastic can, and none of it all too happy that I’d filled it with 530 pounds of asphalt. Imagine, if you will, the difficulty I faced when trying to tilt the can back onto the wheels. Me, at 140 pounds, versus huge pile of rocks almost four times my size. The unspeakable torque required to tip up the can on the two wheels was bad. The careful balance required to keep the can upright on the two wheels without tipping too far and crushing me – also bad. The fits and starts required to wheel the cart from the asphalt graveyard all the way to the edge of the concrete patio – also bad; I’d get a few inches and then the two plastic wheels would dig into the lawn, like a pair of pizza cutters in the hands of Luciano Pavarotti. After about a half hour of sweat and strain, I reached the edge of the concrete patio, with two jagged trenches carved out by the wheels extending all the way across the lawn.

I dare say that moving the can across the yard was relatively easy compared to what followed. A breeze. A piece of cake. A walk in the park. A day at the races. A night at the opera. Mere animal crackers, compared to actually getting the can over the 1-inch ledge between the grass and the concrete at the edge of the patio. I will remind you that my 140-pound frame is not optimal for weightlifting, and the 530-pound trash can on wheels couldn’t care less about being anything other than dead weight.

It took over a half-hour to get the trash can up over the 1-inch lip, during which I contemplated steroid use (“…some kind of fish paralyzer…”), theorized about how much milk I’d have to drink so that my bones wouldn’t be crushed into a fine powder, and made crude jokes to myself about the difficulties one would face if one were to simultaneously dispose of all five Spice Girls. Somehow, as if God himself leaned in and gave a shove to the Cosmic Pinball Machine, I got the damn thing onto the patio. And there it sat until Thursday night when I had to wheel it out to the curb – no easy task, but mere coconuts compared to the 1-inch lip.

Friday morning, I just happened to be home awaiting the delivery of some furniture when I heard the trash pickup truck making the rounds in the neighborhood. I was worried, genuinely worried. I had a vision in my head of the hydraulic arm from the truck grabbing the 530-pound can, then making the most hideous noise in the universe, then breaking clear off the truck right in front of my house. Or worse, tipping over the whole truck right in front of my house. Or still worse, the bottom falling out of the plastic can, spilling 530 pounds of asphalt bits right in front of my house. You see my cause for concern.

The truck eventually made its way down the block to my house. I watched from safe inside my living room, hiding behind the curtain. The truck first emptied the 96-gallon yard waste container, which wasn’t very heavy at all. No problem. Then moved over to the 64-gallon gravel-fest. Oh dear – I wondered if my insurance covered having everything on my property completely destroyed by an angry garbageman. The hydraulic arm grabbed the container, picked it up, dumped it in the truck like nothing was wrong, set it back down on the ground, and the truck drove on to the next house, apparently unaware that some severe damage was supposed to have been inflicted on it.

Well, this marked a true epiphany. Apparently, I could now throw out literally anything I wanted. If I found a mound of anti-matter buried in the corner of the yard, I could just put in the can, and Friday morning my trash guys would carry it off like nothing was wrong. So I spent the next month-and-a-half digging up and throwing out the various asphalt bits, homemade paving stones, bricks, and tree logs. (Ooh! Got to use the chain saw to cut them down to manageable size! Good times!) Trash night became workout night, and slowly but surely over the course of a whole summer, I managed to clear the mountain of debris out of the backyard.

There was a sizeable patch of little gravel rocks in middle of the backyard, which I didn’t really like. Now, a few years back, we’d ordered 9 cubic yards of little gravel rocks for the yard, and while I still like the look of them in the front of the house, I wanted them out of the backyard. And in hindsight, I can say with certainty that laying down rocks is far, far easier than getting rid of them. So I moved a huge pile of them from the middle of the yard to the edge of the house, and they looked mighty fine once they were moved. But the rest were mixed in with dirt, wood chips, and other flotsam that rendered them ugly and useless. Those rocks ended up in the 64-gallon trash can, which remained ON the concrete patio while I delivered the rocks to it one shovelful at a time. What a pain.

Then, once all that could be removed was removed, I rented a roto-tiller. Have you ever played with a roto-tiller before? It’s probably about 100 pounds, and is about the size of a lawn mover. Most of the weight is way at the front, and is directly above the slowly-spinning blades, which dig up the ground with remarkable efficiency. The difficulty in using a roto-tiller is making it go along a desired path. Once it starts to lean, you have to use every morsel of strength to get it back on track. It’s some serious work. And after about two hours of completely destroying the remnants of the unwanted flower beds in the backyard, I broke the roto-tiller. (The drive belt fell off – the guy at the rental place knew it might be an issue beforehand and gave me ample warning.) I only had a few square feet to go, but I was tired, the sun was going down, and the rental place was closing. And somehow, I had to get the thing back into my trunk to drive it home. So I left the few square feet undone, and I’ll tackle it again next spring.

I’ve since compared notes with other people who have used roto-tillers, including a guy who inadvertently roto-tilled his way up a substantial portion of the chain-link fence in his backyard. (Bolt-cutters…) People have compared it to the exertion you need for Motocross. I’d say it was far and away the most physically demanding thing I’ve done in years. Keep in mind that I manually roto-tilled about half of the backyard in my ¼-acre lot, which is far more than most people roto-till. My upper body strength is pretty minimal to begin with, and while destroying the yard was as immensely rewarding as the Dumpster Incident from months past, I was unspeakably sore for a week. The calluses on my hands lasted for over a month. But it was certainly worth it – if this is the grand symbolic gesture I need to reclaim the house and the yard, then so be it.

I put down grass seed the next weekend, and now it looks mighty fine by all accounts. The neighbor in the house behind me congratulated me on how supa-fly the lawn looks. It’s still not 100%, and I haven’t even attempted to control the creeping charlie that owns the front yard, but it’s a step in the right direction. After 7-1/2 years in the house, I finally have a nice, green lawn in the backyard.

Now, for all of you physics professors that read this, there are some fine freshman-level homework problems from that we can take from the gravel-removing experience. I will now flesh some of these out numerically, with some real dimensions.

The trash can’s exterior dimensions are 23 inches deep by 29 inches wide by 41 inches tall. The can isn’t a true rectangle (or it would hold 118 gallons), and it tapers from top to bottom so that trash doesn’t get stuck when the can is inverted, but we can assume it’s rectangular for some simple calculations. The handles are at the top corner, the wheels are directly beneath the handles in the bottom corner, and we’ll assume an infinitely small radius for the wheels. The can itself weighs about 50 pounds. Assuming that the center of mass of the gravel is at the true center of the can, and that the can is rectangular with the above dimensions and pivots about the infinitely small wheels at the bottom corner, the torque about the wheels required to barely get the can up onto its wheels is (23/2 inches) * (530 pounds + 50 pounds) = 6670 inch*pounds. Therefore, the horizontal force I’d have to apply to the handles to barely get the can onto its wheels is (6670 inch*pounds) / (41 inches) = 163 pounds, which is more than I weigh. No wonder I worked up a sweat. While I wheeled it, I had to struggle to keep it at an incline of (atan [23 inches/41 inches]) = 29 degrees, so the center of mass stayed directly above the wheels. And if you feel like extra credit, you can assume a wheel diameter of 11.5 inches and try and figure out the minimum instantaneous force you’d need to exert on the handles to get over the 1-inch lip without tipping over. The force is a vector, but we can assume that my little muscles would try to minimize the magnitude of the force, regardless of direction. Actually, that’s a pretty substantial problem, and is “beyond the scope of this paper”. I appeal to my fellow physicists to get back to me with a solution, which I’ll report in the next big life update. If I assume infinitely small wheels, I can do the math, and it appears that I lifted about 400 pounds. Yikes.

(Footnote: FYI, Halliday & Resnick, Chapter 14, Problem 11: What force F applied horizontally at the axle of a wheel is necessary to raise the wheel over an obstacle of height h? Take r as the radius of the wheel and W as its weight. Ans: W*sqrt(h(2r-h))/(r-h). For r = 5.75 inches and h = 1 inch, the force F is about 70% of the weight, or about 400 pounds.)

(Second footnote: Assuming infinitely small wheels, so that the can drags frictionlessly over the corner of the ledge, gives a nice analytical solution. Easy to solve if you set the net forces in x, net forces in y, and net torques about the corner of the ledge all equal to zero. Plugging in numbers shows that if I pull straight up on the handles, essentially lifting the can straight up, I would lift a tiny bit more than the actual weight of the can, which arises from the small torque exerted by the ledge to keep the can oriented upright. At the other extreme, if I lay the can down horizontally – a bad idea, mind you, because the asphalt would spill out on the patio – then I essentially end up holding half the weight of the can, the other half being supported at the other end by the ledge itself. In between these two extremes, the actual force drops fairly monotonically from W to W/2. So apparently, at the very very least, I lifted (580 pounds/2) = 290 pounds, as an instantaneous force on the handles. Ridiculous.)

Believe it or not, other things have happened to me besides the lawn. For instance, I’ve been remembering my dreams lately. Three of them spring to mind, which I’ll describe briefly.

Just last night, I dreamed that I was somewhere unfamiliar. Hotel? Different house? Not sure, not important. My college friend Charles came over late, as if he was arriving on a late train or something like that. It was about 4 AM when he showed up, and he insisted on watching David Letterman. (At 4 AM? I dunno.) We turned on Letterman, and it was the early-‘80s wild-haired Letterman of yore. He was in a bizarre sketch in which he was a giant, and everyone else was incredibly small. The small people were cutting up and carrying away a giant-sized blueberry muffin, and chanting the following, oompa-loompa-style:

Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cookies cookies cookies cookies
Cake [pause] cake [pause]
[Repeat ad nauseum]

Naturally, I have no idea what it means, but I’ll go along with anything that has giant-sized food and chanting about said giant-sized food.

I had a dream back in mid-August, where for some reason I was in a funeral home. I don’t think I was there because anyone I knew had died, I was just there. I was standing in a sort of a lobby area, and I noticed a “list of comforting songs” taped to the wall. Naturally, I checked out the list. The only song I remember seeing on the list was George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog”, but I’m sure there were more funk-tastic gems on there. Nice! Comforting to me, anyway.

And at the beginning of August, I had a dream that I was at work here in the law firm. And that I came up with an idea for a “Crap From The Past” show. (This happens all the time in real life. It’s like dreaming that I went bowling and bowled a 130.) So I grabbed a pad at my desk, wrote at the top “March Madness”, underlined it, and then wrote down three song ideas. (Again, this happens all the time – this is how I do most of my programming for the show.) I wrote down “Madness” (British group that had a hit with “Our House”), then “Mpenn” (Michael Penn’s first album was called “March”), then “CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS” (a mid-‘80s hit for Iron Maiden). I figured in my dream that three was enough to get started on the March Madness theme, and I could flesh it out later with songs about insanity, about marching, or about basketball.

Well, I woke up, and scribbled down the Madness madness, and it struck me as odd for two reasons. First, this was a very plausible idea for a theme show, and later that week, I actually did flesh the concept out to 90-minute length and did the complete March Madness theme show, explaining that the idea really did come to me in a dream. Plus, I did the show in August, which is even more Madness!

Second, I was reading and writing very clearly in the dream, which I thought was impossible. Margaret had mentioned that the particular part of your brain that’s supposed to control the recognition of characters and all that is not supposed to be active when you’re dreaming. In my previous dreaming experiences, when I see a sign, like a road sign or something, I’d know that there were characters on the sign, and maybe I’d understand what the sign said, but I couldn’t actually say what the characters were.

I’d heard of other instances where you’re not supposed to be able to read in dreams. Back in college, my old roommate Seth described a dream he’d had. He was out on a little rowboat with some woman named Amy. They separated for some reason, like one of them went out on the boat and one stayed behind. Seth wondered how he would every find Amy again, since he didn’t know her last name. But wait! She sent Seth a letter, and she must have written her last name in the return address on the envelope. Seth pulled out the envelope, and read her full name, “Amy Eeefer”. Eeefer??? In describing the dream, Seth said that he probably came up with Eeefer from the position of the letters on a keyboard, all next to each other for the left hand. Still, that’s a lotta e’s.

Did I ever mention that I used to jokingly rate restaurants on the number of e’s in the restaurant name? McDonald’s – no e’s: unacceptable. Burger King – 1 e: marginal. Greasy Tony’s – also 1 e. Kentucky Fried Chicken – 3 e’s: quite good. Eegee’s (a deli from Tucson) – 4 e’s: outstanding! Best restaurant ever!

So I got a few more pieces of furniture to fill up the house. I’d mentioned that the living room looked really empty, so I would up getting four nice modern-looking chairs from the clearance outlet of “Room And Board”, a respectable furniture place here in town. They’re technically dining-room chairs, so they’re fairly small, but I think they look pretty good. I still need a round cocktail table in the middle of them, then I’ll pretty much be done with the redecorating. I’m still enjoying the big empty spaces in the house, and I think I’ll just leave them as big empty spaces. An IKEA store opened up here in August, and I bought two modern-looking lamps there. They go nicely with the new chairs. You know, it’s really hard to make my new furniture sound interesting…

My little brother, Kenny, was out for a visit in August. I’ve written about him before, and it’s always got something to do with food. We Gerbers eat a LOT. We threw him a barbeque, in which we ate a LOT. Naturally. And in what’s now become a perverse Gerber tradition, I greeted him with a 7-pound can of vanilla pudding. In previous visits, it had been chocolate, but I felt daring. It took the entire weekend, but we polished it off. Initially, when we opened the can, it tasted a little odd. We thought, bad canned pudding? How can this be? So we put plastic over the top and put in the fridge for later. Well, later, it tasted just fine, so we concluded conclusively that cold pudding is the way to go. Room temperature? Not so much.

We threw a poker game while Kenny was here, and came up with what may be the finest new poker game ever: Psychic Poker. It’s 7 card stud, with nothing initially wild. But before every up card is dealt, the player gets to “predict” what it’ll be. If he’s right, then it’s wild for everyone. For instance, before I get dealt a card, I say, “I predict a 7.” And when I magically get dealt a 7, then 7’s are wild for everyone. It’s actually a pretty good game, and one that we’ve incorporated into the regular poker games since then.

My band played our final planned gig in August. We still never settled on a proper name, and wound up playing all our gigs under the name “It Figures”, which also happens to be the name of some women-only gyms here in town. It was a dark and stormy night outside, but the gig was a lot of fun and was received well. We don’t have anything else scheduled, but I’d certainly be up for working the nostalgia circuit playing “It Figures” reunions. After all, if Olivia Newton-John can charge $75 a head at Mystic Lake Casino, why can’t we? We play WAY more songs than she does…

And one day after the gig, I DJed a wedding, pretty much walking distance from my house. Good party, good food, good crowd, great location, but so-so acoustics in the room, which had 30-foot-high ceilings. And then I came up with a brilliant idea – why bother with a photographer, because no one likes posing for pictures. Why not hire a courtroom sketch artist instead? I think a sketch artist would be far cheaper than the photographer, and would probably be more fun. We know that he’d work quickly, since no one in a courtroom pauses so that he can “get the shot”. And I know I would enjoy being sketched, rather than putting up with hokey poses for the photographer. I’m tempted to put in a call to the government offices of Richfield (my suburb of Minneapolis) to see if they have a sketch artist, and to see if there’s any interest in doing weddings. With me as the DJ and a courtroom sketch artist, you’d have a wedding that people would be talking about for years!

I’m currently studying for the Patent Bar Exam. Right now, I’m a Patent Engineer, which is basically an engineer with no formal law training. Once I pass it, I’ll be a Patent Agent, which allows me to correspond directly with the Patent Office, rather than be paired up with an experienced attorney – a good thing. The exam is pretty tough and requires a few months of studying, but I should have it passed by the end of the year. That’ll be nice. After that, the next step would be law school (which would make me a Patent Attorney), but I have no desire to go back to school, and the firm where I work isn’t putting any pressure on me to do that. Nope – I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Because the exam is substantial, I thought it best to take a review class in a classroom setting. So I got to go to Chicago for a week at the end of September. 6 days of classes, 46 hours of classroom instruction, and basically a whole semester-long class crammed into a week. It was fun to be back in a classroom environment, but 8 hours a day was a bit taxing.

I knew I’d want to drive around while I was out there, so I drove out from Minneapolis, rather than fly and rent a car. It’s about 420 miles to Chicago, and about 7-1/2 hours in the car. I did my Friday night radio show here in Minneapolis, then left Saturday morning, making a small detour through Rochester, MN, so I could eat lunch at my favorite barbeque place. (Mmm… John Hardy’s…) Before I left, I overinflated the tires by about 3 PSI, just to boost the gas mileage. I averaged about 72 MPH the whole trip, and my car got about 37 miles per gallon! Woo-hoo! Mr. Toyota himself would shake my hand and give me a gold-plated donut!

Chicago itself was fun. I stayed in the hotel where the course was taught, which was in Downers Grove, a dull, distant southwestern suburb of Chicago. The interesting stuff was downtown, and I wound up doing an immense amount of driving back and forth between downtown and the hotel. It was important to me to have excellent Chicago pizza, and the locals recommended “Due” (“two” in Italian, pronounced doo-ay). I got the whole story from the Due staff – Pizzeria Uno was a stand-alone restaurant opened in Chicago in the ‘40s. It was good. They opened a second restaurant in the ‘50s, called “Due”, which was even better, and has pretty much the best deep-dish in town. They then spun off the nationwide chain “Pizzeria Uno” restaurants, which are pretty terrible and are not representative of the first two at all. And I can attest to the pizza – that’s some gooooooood pizza. Although you really can’t compare it to New York pizza, because they’re two different things entirely. New York pizza is flat, and prides itself on its flatitude. You fold it in half to eat it, or pile three slices on top of each other if you’re in a hurry. Mmm… On the other hand. Chicago deep-dish takes a half-hour to cook and is more of a fork-and-knife experience. It’s pretty terrific, but it’s not for those on the go. Also mmm… I think I had pizza three or four times over the course of the week.

Also wandered around downtown Chicago. They have a life-size bronze statue of Bob Newhart sitting on a couch, just sitting there in the middle of a sidewalk. A photo-op if ever there was one, but I didn’t have a camera. I had to just say Hi Bob, and leave it at that. One of my classmates was staying at the Hotel Sofitel in downtown, a super-trendy European hotel, where people tend to speak a lot of French. The first night we were there, the hotel was welcoming members of “The French Government”. Motel 6 it’s not. I got to see the inside of the rooms, and it looks like you’re staying at an IKEA. The last night we were there, we made it to Blue Chicago, a well-known blues club, but the music didn’t start until 10:45, and we all had class the next morning. So instead, we wandered back to the hotel lounge and drank with the Cirque du Soleil, who were also staying there. (Well, technically, we were drinking in the same room as the Cirque du Soleil people, who were also staying there. At least we think it was them – they were speaking French and there were a lot of them. At any rate, “drinking with the Cirque du Soleil” is my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Much like Philly loves their cheese steaks, Chicago has a fascination with the hot dog unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. I had two while I was out there, and they were good, but I just don’t get it. To me, a hot dog requires a baseball game around it.

I tried driving through Evanston, north of downtown Chicago, to go see Northwestern. Unfortunately, it was dark by the time I got out there, and my map was just a little too coarse for the area, and I got horrendously lost in Evanston, then admitted defeat and turned around. I have a friend who grew up in Evanston, and it’s a nice residential neighborhood. But the streets change name every block and I didn’t have the patience to get through it to see Northwestern. Maybe next time.

I got to listen to a few hours of what might be the finest commercial radio station in the country – 93.1 WXRT, a rock station in Chicago. The formula is simple, and it’s amazingly close to what I do every week: pick interesting songs to play and let the DJs talk about the songs themselves. Sure, it seems obvious, but I defy you to show me any other commercial station anywhere that does that. I’ll relate one segment of XRT so you can see what I mean.

First, they ran a movie review of “Shawn Of The Dead” by a guy with the deliberately thickest Chicago accent imaginable. Then, they went right into “All You Zombies” by The Hooters, an overlooked gem from the mid-‘80s. Very nice zombie reference! Then followed with “Hey You” by Pink Floyd. After the Pink Floyd song, the DJ explained that there was a connection between the Hooters and Pink Floyd, in that when Floyd recorded the live version of “The Wall” in the mid-‘80s, the Hooters were one of the performers on the recording. Neat! Nice tidbit, and nice way to make the listener care. Just a little example of why XRT has such a stellar reputation, and I’m glad I got to hear it firsthand.

I also tuned into a little college station at the left end of the dial. During one trip in the car, I heard the Gin Blossoms (yay!), Green Day (yay!), and Debbie Gibson (huh?). The DJ came on, back-announced the songs, and explained that we’re listening to “All G’d Up”, which I suppose consists only of artists that start with G. Silly, but very refreshing, and now I find myself saying all g’d up for no good reason. That’s some fat g’s!

Because of a prior commitment in Minneapolis, I had to leave Chicago right after class on Friday night. And after being conditioned by the class to sit in one place for ludicrous lengths of time, I was able to make it back from Chicago with only one stop for gas and Hostess Sno Balls (a road trip tradition), and no other breaks. 7-1/2 hours after I left, I rolled into the driveway intact but sleepy at 1:30 in the morning. A fine trip, which definitely recharged the batteries. Plus I put over 1000 miles on the car, including 220 just during the time I was in Chicago – that’s a lot of doodling around!

I’ve been seeing someone here in Minneapolis. The first new girlfriend after the divorce is a little awkward, but she’s sweet and she’s been very understanding. Her name is Liz, she’s a nurse at the VA hospital here in town, and we met on the giant rafting trip that I wrote about in the last letter. Since she’s seen me in the Incredible Electric Blue Jumpsuit and wasn’t scared off, I knew she was a keeper.
Liz never knew Margaret, and only knows me and my house in their post-Margaret states. I think she may be the only person in Minnesota who didn’t know Margaret, which is just fine with me, with the fresh start and all. She’s not looking to get married and settle down just yet, and I’m not looking for Mrs. #2 just yet, so we’re just enjoying time together and fielding whatever the world throws at us. So far, so good. I’m discovering that freshly-divorced guys can be a little skittish emotionally, which has caused a hiccup or two in the relationship, but nothing to worry about.

Liz has a nice car – a sporty Toyota thing. I am not alone in my car envy, and I let Liz drive as often as she’ll let me. So one day, as she was driving somewhere, she cursed at some other driver on the road. At that point, some primal instinct kicked in and I blurted out, “Bad Margaret!” Followed of course by a dirty look and a sheepish apology, complete with a lame explanation of how the only time I associated Liz with Margaret was in a negative context. “Bad Margaret”; Dumb Ron. No hard feelings, though, and it gives us something to laugh at.

I’m a little older than she is, which made me a little uncomfortable at first. But nobody else seemed to care, including Liz, and I’ve gotten over it. She’s 25, and since I’ll be 36 as of this Friday, we’re both perfect squares. How sweet. And nerdily accurate. I thought my mom would balk at the age difference, foolishly forgetting that there were 13 years between her and Phil, my stepfather. Nah – not an issue, apparently. Even though back when I was a camp counselor, Liz would have been the age of my kids. Even though I started collecting 45 RPM records before she was born. Oh well, it’s just joke fodder at this point, since I routinely complain about my gout and yell at kids to get off my lawn. One cool aspect of being older than she is – for her 25th birthday, I got her a CD copy of the “American Top 40” show that was current the week she was born. Yep, Casey counting down the top 40 hits from the week she was born. A pretty cool birthday present, if I say so myself. For your information, #1 that week was “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer.

I’ll probably send out one more of these letters out before the end of the year. In the meantime, enjoy Halloween and Thanksgiving!

Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - August 2004

“Itchweed? What the heck is itchweed?” This was my reaction when my gardening-savvy next door neighbor informed me that a very tall clump of plants in my backyard was called “itchweed”. Not as serious as poison ivy, but plenty itchy. Oh, that’s just great. According to my other neighbor behind the house, Margaret deliberately planted a patch of itchweed to keep the evil neighbor lady away. Ironically, both the evil neighbor lady and Margaret got divorced and left, leaving behind a couple of happy guys and some rampant itchweed that’s now spread all over my backyard. Margaret was superb at planting but terrible at weeding, and it’s fair to say that the itchweed incident has pretty well captured the tone of my yard work over the last few months.

Itchweed aside, life bounces along very nicely, and I’ll hit the high points of the last few months chronologically:

Mid-May – I got my crown put in, completing my least favorite dental ordeal ever. It was a two-visit procedure, where they made a temporary out of a two-part epoxy while I was there, then two weeks later I came back for a permanent, which a lab made out of ceramic. They gave me some recommendations with the temporary crown, like be careful when flossing and no sticky foods, etc. But all that changed once they replaced it with the permanent crown, because they told me there’s absolutely no way that the permanent one’s coming off. No way at all. My jaw will give way before the cement does, or so I’m told. Apparently, I’m bionic now.

And the insult-to-injury part is that they pipe Lite FM throughout the office, so you can hear the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling” while they grind your dead tooth down to a nub. That Lite FM totally rocks. But they let me keep the temporary crown and all the intermediate castings, so that’s cool. And, no, I didn’t watch “The Marathon Man” before going to the dentist.

Late May – A group of twenty-two (22!) of us all went rafting/camping on the Peshtigo River somewhere in upper Wisconsin. Quite the weekend, and no, we didn’t watch “Deliverance” beforehand.

This was the third annual rafting trip, carefully orchestrated by my friend Kris. Somehow I’d missed the first two years, and going into the trip I was 97% enthusiasm and 3% apprehension, since I’d never been camping before. (I come from a proud tradition of non-camping.) Fortunately, our friends had lots of extra equipment, and I was able to share a tent and borrow an inflaty-mattress. For the rest of my gear, I threw myself on the mercy of Margaret’s favorite – Unique Thrift Store in the northwest part of town. For a total of $28, I got myself a heavy camouflage-colored raincoat that I wound up wearing for the entire weekend (except while on the river), a sleeping bag, an extra blanket, a pair of nylon pants with suspenders (which I didn’t wear but brought along just in case), and quite possibly the greatest purchase in the history of all mankind: an incredible electric blue nylon jumpsuit to wear on the river.

As I was changing into the incredible electric blue nylon jumpsuit, I had second thoughts: “I’m going to look ridiculous. Everyone’s going to laugh at me. It’s just like going through adolescence again at 35.” So I stepped out of the tent, and the other 21 were all silent for an uncomfortable second or two. And then the votes came pouring in – I looked fan-tas-tic. Just like an astronaut, or the tour manager for Abba! And to make life even more stupendous, the rafting place gave out electric blue helmets that exactly matched my incredible electric blue nylon jumpsuit! In my outfit, I dare say that I looked like a comic book superhero – sort of like Suzy Chapstick with a Helmet.

The whole weekend was pretty terrific. My friends, Matt & Janice, borrowed Matt’s dad’s HUGE van, which seats four comfortably with camping gear. So I tagged along with them along with Liz, a friend of Kris’s who we hadn’t met before. As you might imagine, the drive was fun – a six-hour drive each way across Wisconsin in a giant van with random tunes from the iPod. On one particular exit ramp between highways, we caught sight of quite possibly the most Wisconsin-ese establishment anywhere. The sign next to the place left no doubt, and read, “Porn! Fireworks! Cheese!” Tempting, but we didn’t stop. I bought a round of gas for the van, and had to apply for financial aid from the gas station.

On the whole, the weather cooperated. If I remember correctly, it was in the 50s during the day, and the 40s at night, and it rained on and off and stayed dry during the important parts. Walking around and sleeping in t-shirt, another t-shirt, sweatshirt and camouflage raincoat worked just fine.

People brought crazy amounts of food, and most of our waking time was spent eating, drinking and to a lesser degree, throwing around a frisbee. I myself contributed to the food mayhem by going with Kris to Sam’s Club beforehand – bad idea. I thought that Pop-Tarts would be a nice addition, and they were, but we really didn’t need 36 packages of them. I wound up eating the leftovers during the entire month of June, and I think I gained a few pounds because of them. Stupid, I am.

The rafting itself was a blast. Two-person rubber rafts, and one paddle each. Not a kayak-style paddle, just a one-sided paddle. Although it didn’t feel too strenuous at the time, most of us had insanely sore shoulders for a few days once we got back into town. On the drive back, we looked like hell, we smelled like smoke from the campfire, and we stopped at a little family restaurant about an hour away from the campsite. Maybe it was the Pop-Tarts talking, but that place had the best food ever.

After I got back from the trip, I threw everything in the washer (except the Pop-Tarts), and I found out what happens if you run an entire tin of Altoids through the laundry. Nothing – they dissolve and the tin comes out perfectly clean.

Also in Late May – It rained for 11 days in a row. The grass gets very tall after it rains for 11 days in a row.

I heard an ad on the radio for a little drugstore in Wisconsin. They were advertising that they had sunblock for all SPF values from 0 to 50. Now I’m not a stickler for little details, but I just had to laugh. And it’s from the way SPF is defined – for an SPF 15, it takes 15 times longer to get the sunburn as when you’re not wearing any sunblock at all. So SPF 45 – 45 times as long. SPF 1 – means basically that you’re not wearing any sunblock at all. So the mathematical idea of an SPF 0 sunblock means basically that you burst info flame when you put it on – instant sunburn without spending any time at all in the sun. No, I didn’t say it was hilarious, it just made ME laugh.

Early June – I’d been thinking that my cat Stinky was bored and could use a playmate. After all, her cat friend Pukehead died last year, and Margaret had just left and taken all the good junk with her. While I was delighted with the empty spaces, it seemed that Stinky was bored.

My friend, Janice (owner of the aforementioned iPod and daughter-in-law of the huge van owner), volunteers one night a week at a no-kill cat shelter and offered to bring me in to scope out the kitties. I found one that was a year old and was very playful, so I thought to myself, “Good playmate for Stinky.” However, I didn’t think, “Clingy needy noodge who wouldn’t leave me alone for a second and kept me up all night meowing and who scared the pants off Stinky, who in turn spent three days hiding behind the furnace.” The shelter was nice enough to take the new cat back, and Stinky was happier than ever once she figured out that New Cat was no more. One awful week, and no permanent damage to any of the parties concerned.

At what point did I think this would have been a good idea? Getting a 1-year-old playmate for a 10-year old cat? I distinctly remember one point during the first night with New Cat – it must have been about 4 AM and New Cat was still crying outside the door – yelling, “Shut up! Shut the hell up!” Which is a phrase I learned in grad school from Jimmy Z and hadn’t used since. Until New Cat.

We came up with a good name, too, which I’ll reserve for any future cats that come along post-Stinky. And it fits right in with Stinky and Pukehead: Latrina!

And some of you had doubts about my potential parenting skills… Ha! I got nothin’!

I found that there’s a nice little sidewalk near my office that leads past a lake, so I’ve been taking little walks in the middle of the workday. Half mile out, half mile back, twenty minutes of sun and fresh air, and I feel much better afterwards. One day, my walk back was interrupted by a flock of geese, slowly crossing the road. A BIG flock of geese – I counted about ten grown geese, and over 60 little baby geese. Little fuzzy wobbly baby geese! So cute! I’d never seen so many of them in one place out for a stroll, and it put me in a good mood for the rest of the week.

Mid June – My car turned over to 100,000 miles. Aside from regular maintenance and a pre-emptive replacement of the battery, it’s still on the original everything. 100,000 miles on the original brake pads, and they said that they’re only about half worn down. God bless my ’96 Corolla. I got it one month after I got married, and it turned over one month after Margaret left town. So I was married for exactly 100,000 miles.

Hebrew school would have been far more interesting if they’d called it, “Torah! Torah! Torah!”

One of the neighbors near my mom’s house in New York moved recently, and mom found out just how much her house is worth. I know what she paid for it in 1975, and the new number seemed astronomical in comparison. So I crunched the numbers and compared with my own house here in Minneapolis, and I found out an amazing thing: both our houses have been appreciating at exactly 7.5% per year! Which is a pretty good investment, in addition to the tax benefits of home ownership, etc. I just thought it was a neat coincidence.

I started getting some new furniture in the house. In the last letter in May, I explained that I had enough furniture in the house to adequately furnish a one-bedroom apartment. Well, it was time to get some grown-up furniture, so I got a new bed and nightstands, and now I’m looking into some new living room furniture. (At present, the living room is barren except for the cat throne – two big pillows next to the giant window – and some little cat toys.) The good stuff is pricey, so I’m saving up.

On my first order, I’d ordered a complete bedroom set, with dresser/mirror and the works. I’d taken measurements on the bedroom, and it all looked pretty promising. However, it had not once occurred to me that the dresser wouldn’t fit up the stairs. The two huge guys from the delivery service couldn’t get it to turn the corners, and since I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have any luck after the two huge guys left, I sent the dresser/mirror back with them. Rats! Fortunately, I still have my old dresser/mirror, and it looks like that should be just fine for now.

Margaret had been a fan of our old reel-type push mower, and while I liked it principle, it just didn’t cut very well. In the words of our neighbors, the old mower gave us a “comb-over lawn”. So after she left, I was asking around about lawn mowers, since I thought my friends would have some opinions about them. Wouldn’t you know it – one of my co-workers moved out here into a condo and has no need for his old lawn mower. It’s a nice little gas-powered not-self-propelled Craftsman 4.5 HP, and it’s exactly what I was looking for. He let me have it for $25, and I’ve never been happier. No more borrowing the neighbor’s mower when I needed a “real” mowing.

Plus, since it’s my mower now, I have license to take it into places that I really wouldn’t dare to take the neighbor’s mower. Specifically, the waist-high patch of weeds that occupied a full half of my backyard needed a cutting, and I didn’t have a scythe. So I set the blades as high as they would go (so that hopefully I’d avoid rocks or stumps), and one blissful hour later, I could actually see the ground in parts of my lawn that had been no-man’s land for 5+ years. A liberating experience, on par with the dumpster!

So I relayed the mower story to my brother, who reminded me of something similar (and equally not-so-smart) I’d done back in my high school days. Back then, I was in charge of mowing the lawn for the parents. Well, one week I decided that I’d had enough of the weedy patches in the corners of the backyard, and I mowed my way through everything. Boy was I pleased with myself. Well, in short order, I found out that the bulk of those weedy patches was poison ivy, and I was pretty much covered head-to-toe with itchies for a week. You’d think that I’d remember doing something that stupid, but nope. My brother has the knack for the good stories…

Late June – There’s a little mom & pop ice cream place in St. Paul called Izzy’s, and they’re mighty good. Every year, they have a tasting contest which is to die for. You pay one cover charge, and then you get to try 24 potential new flavors, then vote on your favorite. The top two make it permanently onto the menu! It’s an annual event, and it may very well be the high point of the whole year (not just the high point of June). My friends and I each had 24 scoops of ice cream, and it made me deliriously happy. It turns out that one of my poker buddies was responsible for one of the flavors – he’s a dessert-creating genius. I voted for his ice cream, which involved some kind of beer, if I remember correctly, but it lost to a carrot-cake-like creation called “Chubby Bunny”. Mmm…chubby bunny… O Boy am I looking forward to next year…

I came across a patent examiner by the name of Melba Bumgarner. That poor woman.

Early July – This year’s fireworks display was sponsored by Clear Channel. Instead of small displays in each neighborhood like in years past, we had one giant fireworks display to serve the entire midwest. And it was beamed in from Dallas.

Been finding jeans in my size on the clearance rack (it’s good to be tiny), so I’ve been dressing better. Like I’ve been saying, I’m the epicenter of fashion: Paris, Milan, Richfield.

Because so many of you came up with witty band names when I asked for them a few months back, I will throw out another challenge. We’ve all heard of the prestigious Mile High Club, in which a couple goes at it in an airplane bathroom. Well, I’m trying to come up with a name for something similar but not quite as “classy”, in which a couple goes at it in a Port-a-Potty. You’d think such a thing must have a name, although no one seems to know what it is. (Your suggestions will be compiled and distributed in the next Big Life Update for all to see.)

Mid July – I came up with a great idea for a band. It’s a rock band with the usual guitar/bass/drums, but with three lead singers that all try to outsing each other all the time, on every song. My friend Carla suggested the name “This Means War”, which captures the cartoonish aspect just perfectly. (Imagine the combative screeching of Yes’s Jon Anderson, Styx’s Dennis DeYoung, and Rush’s Geddy Lee, all vying for sing-time, and you get the idea.) I’m not sure what to do with This Means War, but it seems like such a good idea…

Why does no one sell a toilet seat with heat and massage?

Late July – I resealed my driveway, for only the second time since I moved in in ’97. It took six buckets of gloop, but only took two weekday afternoons after work to get it done. The stuff has the consistency of chocolate pudding (and you can imagine my Pavlovian response to 30 gallons of chocolate pudding), and they sell it with cheap little brooms that you use to spread it around. The driveway looks much better now. No punchline there, it just looks much better.

One day, I pulled into a parking spot at work and noticed that in the spot next to me, there were two tiny red flowers growing in the space between the asphalt and the concrete curb. They were the same kind of flowers that the office building’s landscapers use (whatever they were), and it was such a cute sight to behold – these pretty little flowers growing in something as mundane as a parking lot. Later that day, as I was working on the lawn, I noticed a yellow flower growing out of the dead tree stump that’s in the backyard. The stump must be about five feet off the ground, and there was this single happy little yellow flower growing from it. Two of these in the same day! Late July must be some kind of Mardi Gras for flowers.

As always, Crap From The Past is doing quite well. We’re up to five affiliates: an FM in Minneapolis, an AM/FM in New Zealand, an AM in Phoenix, an internet-only in Phoenix, and now an FM/internet somewhere in northwest England! Three continents! I can’t get arrested in Minneapolis, but they love me in Phoenix.

Saw a bunch of movies over the last few months, and will now play critic:

Super Size Me – Big fun! Healthy guy eats nothing but McDonalds for 30 days and gets severe health problems. Loved it.

Kill Bill, Parts 1 & 2 – Expected a hack-em-up film on par with Kung Fu Theater (from Saturday mornings on Channel 5), but discovered an elegant piece of storytelling on par with Pulp Fiction. (Makes me want to see Jackie Brown.) Kudos to Q for using Kaboom Cereal and “Goodnight Moon”, an excellent but obscure pop record from 2000 by Shivaree.

Van Helsing – If only there existed a drill bit that could bore into my brain and drill out the memory of this movie. Quite possibly the least enjoyable film I’ve ever seen. (Not the worst film, mind you, because I deeply enjoy really bad movies. Glitter, Waterworld, I’ve seen ‘em all.) So Kate Beckinsale has a tiny waist – big deal; I have a tiny waist! The most enjoyable part of the movie is the closing credits, mostly from your knowledge that the movie is over.

Fahrenheit 911 and The Corporation – One got a lot of hype, the other slipped under the radar, and both are well-executed, left-leaning documentaries worth seeing. The premise of The Corporation is that things have gone to heck since corporations attained the same legal status as a person. Highly recommended.

Blacula – Dumb but fun 1972 reissue on DVD of the first in the sparsely populated genre of blaxploitation vampire films. Followed by sequels; I know for a fact that one of the sequels, Scream Blacula Scream, contains a line like “How long do I have to sit here and listen to this crap?”, which is perfect fodder for one of my Crap From The Past IDs. Someday, I’ll rent and dub…

At some point you must have heard me talk about Black & Whites, my favorite cookies. They’re huge, cake-like things, and they’re strictly a northeast phenomenon. Actually, they’re probably only in New York City, and the places where NYC retirees go. So NYC, in fact, that they were featured on an episode of Seinfeld many years back. In the interest of spreading the goodness, I will now give you the recipe for Black & Whites (and I know that the recipe works because Margaret made a batch of them and they came out great).

From More magazine, October 2002, page 126:

Black & Whites
- - - -
COOKIE DOUGH
1½ cups all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar [note that ½ cup = 8 tbsp]
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
¼ cup vegetable shortening, at room temperature
1 large egg
2 tablespoons buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
FONDANT ICING
2½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
2 teaspoons corn syrup
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons hot water [note that 2 tbsp = 6 tsp]
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

1. Heat oven to 350°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper; set aside.
2. Sift flour, salt and baking soda into a large bowl, and set aside.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream sugar, butter and shortening at high speed until fluffy. Beat in egg, buttermilk and vanilla. Add dry ingredients, and mix at low speed until just blended.
4. On prepared sheet, portion dough into 8 mounds, and flatten slightly. Bake for 16 minutes, or until edges are golden. Place sheet on rack; let cookies cool.
5. In a mixing bowl, whisk together confectioners’ sugar, corn syrup, hot water and vanilla. Transfer half of mixture to a separate bowl, and whisk in melted chocolate and cocoa. If necessary, use double boiler to warm the chocolate glaze. Frostings should form a thin layer. If needed, thin with water, or thicken with confectioners’ sugar.
6. Peel cookies off paper and turn over; ice half the surface with the vanilla fondant and half with the chocolate. Let stand at room temperature until icing sets (2–3 hours).

Makes 8.

Happy eating, and enjoy the rest of your respective summers!

Ron Gerber