Ron's Big Life Update - April 2009

“Ooh! The broth section!” – me, as Liz and I were killing time in a grocery store.

It seems like surprisingly little has happened with us, although much has happened with the rest of the world. I will now philosophize for four paragraphs.

A quick search in Google tells me that the average American has a credit card debt between $8000 and $12000. (I found a variety of numbers, but they’re all in that ballpark.) Imagine how long it would take you to pay off a debt of $10000, and what you would have to do to get it all paid off. You’d have to cut WAY back on everything, and you’d have to radically change your spending habits. For most people, just breaking even and not increasing the debt would be a challenge, let alone setting aside an additional $10000. To pay off a debt that large, it's a sure bet that there would be a significant amount of pain involved. Well, collectively, THAT’s what we as a country will have to go through to climb out of this recession. It’s going to take years and years, and is going to require people to rethink their lifestyles and start to live within their means. It took us over a decade to accumulate this debt, and anyone who thinks we’ll be able to just pay it off in a few months is sadly mistaken.

I feel the compulsion to gaze into my crystal ball, so here are my predictions for the next few weeks/months/years. They’re not pretty.

We dig out the word “depression” to describe the state of the economy. We come up with a new term that rivals the “Great Depression” to describe the current one. Two, if not all three, of the automakers in Detroit fail, resulting in a horrendous chain of business closures and job losses that spread to dealerships, auto parts suppliers, and anybody with even a hint of a connection to Detroit. Congress gets fed up with bailing out businesses, and pulls the plug on bailout money. The resulting debt from the current round of bailouts weighs down the U.S. economy for the next 10 or 15 years; other countries with less ambitious bailout plans recover more quickly. The U.S. dollar falls significantly compared to the rest of the world. U.S. wages fall to those comparable in China, so that Chinese workers earn comparable wages to those in the U.S. Cheap imports disappear, but there’s an upside: it becomes economically feasible to return to manufacturing stuff here in the U.S. It’s good to make things close to where they’re used. In the next few years, housing prices continue to fall, based on the laws of supply and demand; much like big cars falling out of favor, there will be little demand for huge McMansions in the distant suburbs (exurbs). The demand for housing will be for modest single-family homes, reasonably close to work. Unfortunately, I don’t foresee builders building developments with modest-sized houses any time soon. I would hope that people would return to some of the tried-and-true rules of thumb for homebuying: don’t spend more than two to three years’ salary on your house. Any more than that and you’re overextended. Likewise, don’t spend more than six months’ salary on your car. And, most importantly: pay cash for everything that depreciates, like furniture, electronics, cars, and virtually everything else that has buried the average American in a sea of debt. You can finance your education and your home, since those don’t depreciate (under normal circumstances). I sincerely hope that this upcoming depression teaches the value of savings, and saving up in advance for a purchase. I’m a cynic at heart, so I predict that any attempts at legislating lending reforms will be shot down. As a result, the only protection we will have against accumulating mountains of debt will be to simply say no to offers of credit. Basically, don’t buy stuff that you can’t afford. Since we Americans have been buying stuff we can’t afford for over a decade, this will be a hard lesson to learn.

So that’s what’s rattling around in MY head. You’d think that with this line of thought, I’d be ready to kill myself at any moment! Not really. On the whole, there’s nothing I can do to affect anything, except have a bunch of cash on hand and try to keep myself employed. Liz and I aren’t overextended by any means – I’m still driving around in my ’96 Corolla (just starting to lose that new car smell at 150,000 miles), and our tiny little house in the first-ring Minneapolis suburb will be paid off in the summer of 2012.

So here is the assortment of flotsam that’s been my life in the last few months…

Early January – We had a humidifier installed on our furnace. Minnesota winters are cold and dry, and it’s better for your health and the woodwork in your house if you keep the humidity at a reasonable level by adding a little moisture to the air. It’s funny how the weather patterns out here demand that you add humidity in the winter, but run a dehumidifier in your basement during the summer.

January 13 – It was –16° F this morning, and –34° F with the wind chill.
January 15 – It was –21° F this morning. Didn’t write down the wind chill value. I take an express bus to and from downtown, and I walk about 0.7 miles to and from the bus stop near the house. Fortunately, my winter coat is an old ice fishing jacket from Cabela’s. It’s rated to some obscenely low temperature, like –50°, and it’s got an insulated snap-on hood. Incredibly ugly, but incredibly warm. Aside from my feet, I actually wasn’t too cold on the walks to and from the bus stop. And I really like that Minnesotans don’t care what your coat actually looks like, as long as it keeps you warm.

Mid January – Grandma turned 98, so Liz and I flew out to Washington DC for her birthday party. She turned 98 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, January 19th. Complicating matters slightly was the Presidential Inauguration, which was also in DC, on Tuesday, January 20th. The city was crowded but giddy, and we didn’t really see anyone in a bad mood anywhere.

Liz and I stayed with family, as did my brother and my mom, who all drove down from NY. Hotels were not a reasonable option, with everything being priced astronomically for the days before the Inauguration. Liz and I were extra pleased with ourselves for using only public transportation to get from our house to my cousin Heidi’s house: a local bus, a short ride on Minneapolis’s light rail to the airport, a flight to National Airport, and a short ride on the Metro that ended just up the block from Heidi’s house. On the way home, the exact same trip in reverse. The little east-west local bus that goes past my house is great – it’s bigger than a van and a little smaller than the mini-buses that airports use to take you to the rental car places. The bus pass that I have is for unlimited rides, so it’s like there’s always a free ride waiting for me. I like that.

While we were there, my cousin Heidi threw a cocktail party at her house, so we got to meet a lot of her friends. Turns out, she has very cool friends. All seem to be connected in some way or another with politics (it is DC after all), and all were looking forward to the new Obama administration. One of her friends had, at one point, been a staffer for impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. She had a few less-than-flattering stories about him, all of which seemed to say that Blago was far more concerned about his own image and how he was perceived than anything else. Fascinating, for those of us who don’t get to watch the Big Political Machine every day.

The city of DC itself was pretty bonkers for the Inauguration. There were custom Metro tickets for the month leading up to the Inauguration. All the restaurants had some sort of Inauguration special. T-shirts, hats, and every type of souvenir imaginable. I think our Metro tickets will be all the souvenirs we need.

Mid-January – Liz and I celebrated our second anniversary, which coincided with our trip to DC. My brother (Kenny) and his fiancée (Maria) gave us the best card ever.

February – We went bowling with a friend of Liz’s at Park Tavern in St. Louis Park. I bring this up only because the bowling alley was especially kid-friendly: they had bowling balls as light as four pounds! That’s FOUR (4) pounds! I had never seen one lighter than six pounds, anywhere, ever. I didn’t know they even made them that light. So I had to take a frame or two with the four-pound ball. Turns out that you can basically throw them side-arm without hurting yourself. Aiming is another matter, though. If you’re lucky enough to hit a pin, any pin, the ball will immediately bounce into the gutter with the most hilarious “THOCK” sound. There’s no way to knock down any appreciable number of pins with such a light ball, so the novelty wears off quick. If they made a novelty bowling ball that was extra heavy, like 28 pounds, I would be in for that.

March – I’d been having some trouble with the keys and the locks on my car. I tried making copies of the keys a long time ago, at least ten years back, but the originals were too blunted and the copies never worked. So I just toughed it out with the originals. In recent months, the trunk lock would put up a fight, and in recent weeks, the ignition would also put up a fight. Well, I learned a valuable lesson: the ignition of your car is a very delicate mechanical device. If the key is sticking, FOR GOD’S SAKE get a locksmith to look at it!

The last straw was after my radio show on a Friday night. I could get the key into the ignition, but no amount of jiggling could get the key to turn. So I couldn’t get the car started. I called Liz at around 12:30 am and she retrieved me and my CDs at the station. Did I mention this was during a snowstorm and the plows hadn't been out yet? The next morning I had a locksmith drive out to my car at the station and replace the whole ignition. So now my car has a key for the doors/trunk and a separate key for the new ignition. I tied a piece of string around the right side of the steering wheel to remind me to use the correct key. You always hear the story about tying a string around your finger to remind you to do something, but it actually works.

February – Coined a new word for the aches and pains of an old car: “Carthritis”.

February – My old home computer died. It had been Frankensteined together over the years from existing parts, and its death couldn’t have been more sudden if an anvil had fallen on it. Without any warning at all, the motherboard failed completely, as if someone had pulled the plug out of the wall. So I pulled out the hard drive, which was the only part worth saving, and brought the rest of the machine to the Hennepin County recycling center. I don’t know exactly how they recycle the parts, but I’d like to think that they process the stuff like the old car crushers, where my old machine was turned into a cube.

I checked with several of my many computer-geek friends, and bought a new machine. It’s a tiny little thing, sort of the computer equivalent of the Smart Cars. Here are some of the details: Hewlett Packard Compaq CQ2009F, Intel® Atom 230 processor, 1GB DDR2-533 RAM, 160GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive, SuperMulti DVD Burner, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition installed. And all for $269.99. Mind you, that’s the entire machine, including the XP operating system, for $269.99. Quite a deal.

It’s tiny. Official dimensions are 4.41" x 10.71" x 9.69", but if you have a hard time thinking in inches, it’s about the size of two three-ring binders stacked on top of each other. Weight: 8.16 lbs. The old case and power supply that I recycled was probably close to 40 pounds.

To give a sense of scale, here’s a picture of my computer and stereo setup on my desk. At the left edge of my desk is a Technics 1200 turntable. In front of the turntable is an external 100 GB hard drive, affectionately known to me as the hamburger drive, because it’s about the size of a hamburger. At the center is a small LCD monitor sitting on top of the computer. To the right of that is an external 500 GB hard drive. At the right edge of the desk is a small pile of old-school stereo equipment. From bottom up, that’s an early-‘80s era Realistic receiver, which should be immediately recognizable to my college friends – it still works! On top of that is a very old single-disc CD player, also from Realistic. I have about ten first-generation CD players, all of which still work. No particular reason why I use this one here. On top of that is a Technics AM/FM tuner, which I use to pick up 90.3 so I can record my own show. At the top of the heap is a little Realistic switchy box with an extra set of RCA jacks, so I can plug in whatever else I need, like a cassette deck or a VCR. To the left and right of the desk are a pair of fantastic Advent speakers. Note how tiny the actual computer is, compared to everything else on the desk!

One minor issue with the machine is that the CD drive is vertically oriented, which is not too practical for someone who uses the CD drive as much as I do. So I bought a set of four rubber feet, mounted them at the corners of the computer, and turned the whole machine on its side, so that the CD drawer opens properly. An easy fix.

The little package that held the rubber feet was extremely helpful, and recommended that I wear safety goggles when installing the rubber feet on my stereo equipment.
My friends told me that the Atom processor in my new computer was designed to be used in portable, battery-operated devices, and used very little power. I had to check this out, and I borrowed a friend’s voltmeter/ammeter/power meter to investigate.

The power meter is a cute little thing about the size of my carbon dioxide detector. It plugs into the wall, and you plug the device you’re testing into the power meter. It’s got a digital display that reads the power in watts used by your device. Cool toy! Naturally, I tested essentially everything in the house.

First, I tried some light bulbs to make sure the readout was in the ballpark. A 60 watt incandescent was 58 watts, a 24 watt compact fluorescent bulb read 25 watts, and a new LED bulb, which was supposed to use 1.5 watts, read between 1 and 2 watts.

Then I tried the new computer. When it’s on, it uses 28 watts. I wanted to see if thinking really hard uses more power, so I opened a bunch of programs all at once while I was burning a CD, and I got it up to 30 watts. That seems reasonable, although I don’t know how much power my old machine used. I tested the machine in standby mode, and it only uses 2 watts. Very nice! My small LCD monitor uses 15 watts when it’s on, and 3 watts in sleep mode. For comparison, the back of my big LCD monitor at work says it uses 1 amp, so that would be 120 watts. So my tiny little system at home is power efficient, too!

I then tested the rest of my stereo equipment, which shares desk space with the computer. The early ‘80s-era receiver uses 8 watts when it’s on, about 10 watts at a reasonable volume, and 15 watts when it’s deafeningly loud. The early ‘80s-era CD player uses 6 watts when it’s idle and between 9 and 12 watts when it’s playing. Making the servos jump around is what spikes the power to 12 watts. My mid-‘80s AM/FM tuner uses 2 watts. My Technics 1200 turntable uses 9 watts when it’s on, and 11 watts if you turn on the little lamp. Interestingly, the turntable uses the same amount of power when it’s running as when it’s idle – the bearings are efficient enough so that it takes basically no power to keep them running at 33-1/3 or 45 rpm. I assume that the power spikes a tiny bit when you power up from idle to full speed, but the power meter didn’t respond quickly enough to catch it.

Then I tested some other things in my basement office. My plug-in wall clock, which I got as surplus from my high school summer job in the maintenance department of a large office building in Montvale, NJ, uses a grand total of 1 watt. My little space heater, in stark contrast, uses 600 watts on low, and around 1200 watts on high! Yikes! To be used sparingly, for sure!

Then the kitchen. Toaster: 860 watts. Answering machine: 2 watts. Didn’t feel like rolling the fridge away from the wall, but I’d expect 1000-2000 watts. They say if you want to significantly cut down the overall energy consumption in your house, start with buying a new refrigerator. (That is, after you replace all the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, which use about ¼ the amount of power for the same light output.)

Then the bedroom. Big stand-alone fan: 58 watts on low, 75 watts on high. Little window fan: 28 watts on low, 36 watts on high. Cell phone charger: 0 watts if there’s no phone plugged into it, 3 watts when charging my phone. Laptop computer: 62 watts when it’s on, 39 watts when it’s off (I assume that the power goes to recharging the battery). Computer printer: 5 watts in idle mode, a whopping 900 watts when it powers up and when it’s printing! Holy moly! I can now see why it dims the lights when we print!

Walking around the house with the power meter was pretty enlightening (no pun intended), and served as a good reminder to unplug or turn off your electronic doodads when you’re not using them. My new computer has a “hibernate” mode, where it saves its state to the hard drive and then turns completely off. When you power back up, it picks up right where you left off. That’s even better than the low-power standby mode – it’s hard to argue with zero. And just like mom taught us, turn off the lights when you leave a room.

February – Liz and I found ourselves in the scary Wal-Mart in Bloomington. We’d only been in that store once before, and I can’t remember exactly why we were there for this visit, but we ended up buying a whole lot of cat food. We noticed that the store had a few self-checkout lines, so we pulled up to one of them with our 3 cases of cat food and began scanning. We didn’t know if there was a “quantity” button for the scanner, which would have allowed us to scan one can, and enter a quantity of 24. So we ended up individually scanning 72 cans of cat food, while the receipt and the angry queue behind us grew and grew. It took longer than you’d think. We haven’t been back since. Actually, I think the place is closed now. I wonder if we had anything to do with that...

March – I attended a Richfield City Council meeting, just for giggles. I had a few questions about houses and zoning, and thought it would be enlightening to sit in on a meeting. A few days later, I got in touch with our City Manager, who was able to look up the following for me:

In June 1964, my house was moved from its original location at 714 Lake Shore Drive to its current location at 7520 Washburn Avenue. How cool is that? I can’t quite pin it down to an exact lot, though. A check of the current maps shows that there is no 714 Lake Shore Drive, and it’s not clear where such a house number would be. If Lake Shore Drive is considered a north-south street, then the house number would be 7014, or 7140, or something like that, and the house would be right up against I-35W near 70th Street. It would make sense that the house was moved when the highway was put in. If Lake Shore Drive is an east-west street, then 714 might be on the edge of Wood Lake Nature Center Park. Either way, it was moved about 2 miles to where it is now, and we can pin it down to a particular month. Life is good.

April – Five months after the elections, we still don’t know who won one of Minnesota’s Senate races. 2.9 million votes cast, and at the end of election night, Norm Coleman ahead by 725 votes. That’s 725 out of nearly 3,000,000. State law triggers an automatic recount when the margins are that tight, so as the tallies came in on election night, it was officially too close to call, and we all knew that there would be a recount in the coming weeks.

Excerpted from Minnesota Public Radio, “Coleman declares win, recount looms”, November 6, 2008:

Coleman declared himself the winner of Tuesday's election but Franken said he would let the recount play out, hoping it would erase the incumbent's 439-vote lead out of nearly 2.9 million ballots. State officials said the recount wouldn't start until mid-November and would likely take weeks.

"Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed," Coleman said Wednesday at a news conference. He noted Franken could opt to waive the recount.

"It's up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct," Coleman said, telling reporters he would "step back" if he were in Franken's position. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the recount would cost 3 cents per ballot, or almost $90,000.

It’s nice that Mr. Coleman is so concerned about the $90,000 expense for the recount.

Excerpted from CNN, “Franken declares Senate race win after state ruling”, January 6, 2009:

The Minnesota State Canvassing Board on Monday certified the results of the recount of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's fight to retain his seat against Franken. The results showed Franken with a 225-vote lead.

Excerpted from MSNBC, “Coleman sues over Minnesota Senate recount”, January 7, 2009:

Republican Norm Coleman said Tuesday he is suing to challenge Democrat Al Franken's apparent recount victory in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, delaying a resolution of the contest for weeks or months.

At a Capitol news conference filled with cheering supporters, Coleman said he won't accept a board's determination a day earlier that Franken won 225 more votes in the November election. He had a seven-day window to file the lawsuit.

"We are filing this contest to make absolutely sure every valid vote was counted and no one's was counted more than anyone else's," Coleman said.

Excerpted from Minnesota Public Radio, “Who's paying for the Senate trial?”, March 8, 2009:

Republican Norm Coleman's Senate election lawsuit enters its seventh week today as attorneys for Democrat Al Franken continue to present his side of the case. The trial is costing the two campaigns millions of dollars. It is also placing extra costs on the state court system and on many counties around Minnesota.

Excerpted from The Star Tribune, “Senate recount trial: Judges' ruling is boon to Franken”, April 1, 2009:

Norm Coleman's lawyers all but conceded defeat Tuesday and promised to appeal after a panel of three judges ordered no more than 400 new absentee ballots opened and counted, far fewer than the Republican had sought to overcome the lead held by DFLer Al Franken.

I fully expect that Mr. Coleman will be appealing this decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court, although nothing is yet announced one way or the other at the time of this writing. Funny that Mr. Coleman, who said back in November he would "step back" if he were in Franken's position, seems to be doing quite the opposite nowadays. It should be interesting to see how this affects Mr. Coleman’s long-term national political aspirations. Stay tuned…

March – Saw a familiar-looking display hanging in the SuperTarget in Edina. Hmmm…

April – Couldn’t be a Big Life Update without cat pictures, right? Liz showed me one of the doodles from her class notes, which is her artistic impression of Noodge. We contrast that with an earlier sketch I did of Poohead, who hadn’t really been named at the time and was ignoring the name “Izzy”. It’s clear who is the artist in the family.

Hope spring springs sometime soon for all of you!

Ron & Liz Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - November 2008

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” – Rahm Emanuel

I don't think he's the first person to express this sentiment, but I like the quote.

Since my last Big Life Update in June, there has been a great deal of little importance, and a little of very great importance. It should be pretty easy to tell which is which...

July 4 – For the first time in many years, July 4 fell on a Friday. Liz and I avoided a potential conflict with my radio show by watching fireworks over the Mississippi from outside the radio station from 10:00-10:20pm, then wandered inside for my 10:30pm show. Painless.

late July – Threw Liz a birthday party at the house. All she wanted as a present from me was a good cake, so I got her a giant sheet cake from Wuollet's Bakery. It's supposed to feed 64 people, and we had about 32 servings left over after everyone went home. We ate birthday cake for dinner for an entire week!

Summer – Got to see more baseball games than usual this year. Usually, I try to get to a St. Paul Saints game (fine minor league goodness), and maybe a Twins game (overblown major league bigness). I don't care one bit who wins or loses, and I can't stand watching baseball on TV, but I do like being at the games. They're a good excuse to sit around, eat junk food, and watch other people run around and tire themselves out. It's exercise, Ron Style.

The Saints game came late in the season this year. I don't remember who won or lost, or who was even playing, but I do remember that the walking vendor guys were selling warm, freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies. Good that I retain the important details...

July 20 – We also got to two Twins games this year. For the first one, our friend Bob was supposed to be part of a large group singing the national anthem on the field at the beginning of the game. I say, "supposed to", because he didn't quite make it to the stadium on time. He took the light rail to the game, and got delayed by the thousands of other people who also took the light rail to the game. Oops... We also took the light rail to the game, but we left a ridiculous amount of time before the start of the game, and got there way before Bob did.

A word about the Minneapolis light rail system. It was largely the pet project of former Governor Jesse Ventura, who managed to get enough funding to get one line opened between downtown Minneapolis and the Airport/Mall of America. It opened in the summer of 2004, and ridership has been WAY beyond what anyone predicted. More lines are planned, and hopefully they'll be smarter about not screwing up the car traffic patterns around the train lines.

So we took the light rail back home from the game, along with thousands of other people. That may not have been such a good idea - the wait was close to an hour before we actually got on the train, and it was packed when we finally did get on. We ended up sitting right next to the unmanned conductor car at the back of the train (presumably, there was a person in the conductor car at the front of the train). Through the window, we could clearly see all the controls at the conductor's disposal. No steering wheel, but an impressive layout of dials, buttons, lights, and other doo-dads that big kids like me just love. It turns out that the train goes exactly 47 MPH in the straight outdoor stretches, and about 60 MPH inside the tunnels. Not exactly a bullet train, but it still beats driving. Plus, there's a button on the control panel labeled, "Car Wash". I really have no idea what a "Car Wash" would actually do, but the vision in my head is that inside the car, water would spray out from a zillion tiny nozzles, much like the inside of a dishwasher, and the fine music of Rose Royce would play in the background. Clap-ca-clap-clap-clap.

The actual game itself was a complete dud. A pitcher's duel (ugh!), with six hits total in the entire game. There was a solo home run for the Texas Rangers, and they wound up beating the Twins 1-0. One of the least exciting games I've seen in person.

August 19 – Went to another Twins game, this time with with a different group of friends. Before the game started, I was complaining to one of them about the snoozy July 20 game, and I told him that nothing makes me happier than sloppy baseball. Plenty going on on the field, runs hits errors galore, and lots to watch. The guy I was talking to was a true baseball fan, and seemed kinda horrified at my ideal version of a baseball game. To him, I must have come across like, "Oh, we just love to go to elegant dinner parties. Our favorite parties are where the cops show up with riot gear and tear gas, and everybody gets arrested."

Well, to this guy's dismay and much to my delight, the game was one of the best routings I've ever watched, on TV or in person. We didn't just stomp on the Oakland A's, we took a cab to the hardware store, bought a shovel, dug a hole in left field large enough to accommodate the entire city of Oakland, buried the A's, their mascot and all their equipment, and planted daisies on their heads. Complete, utter stompage. And because I have never witnessed such one-sided stompage before, I tore the box scores out the next day's paper, so I'll forever have some statistical memories of our day at the park.

For this game, we took a city bus to and from the game. On the way home from the game, around 10pm, Liz and I were the only passengers on the bus. It was infinitely better than the light rail, and from now on, it's nothing but the bus to and from any downtown activities.

August – Had a weird dream. It was in the form of an action movie, with the running and the shooting and all that. Don't really remember anything specific except the name of the bad guy: The Destructionator. I woke up laughing.

August – Managed to not watch any of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Avoided hearing anything about some American swimmer and some Jamaican sprinter. (If only Tetherball, Synchronized Running, and Octuples Tennis were real olympic events... God bless you, "30 Rock"!)

Late August – Went to the State Fair again. Ate too much, as predicted. For some reason, several of the new food items involved bacon, including, unimaginatively, a 1/4-pound slab of bacon, deep-fried, on a stick. I made the mistake of STARTING my fair day with that, and I felt kinda bleh for the entire day after that. Good times.

September – Avoided St. Paul during the 2008 Republican National Convention. (For those of you that aren't from here, St. Paul is a different city than Minneapolis. Their downtowns are about 10 miles apart, and the cities have very different feels to them.) From what I saw on the news, the police presence was more than a little excessive, with a bunch of journalists being arrested along with protesters. I feel bad for some of the local restaurants and storekeepers near the Excel Energy Center. They were promised that the convention would be huge boon for business, and in reality, it was exactly the opposite. Convention-goers had all their activities and meals completely, 100% scripted for them, so there was no time to wander around and play tourist. And the locals stayed completely away from the area for the week, knowing that the streets would be blocked by police or completely closed. I'm not sure what impression St. Paul made to the national audience, but many of us locals were not impressed by what we saw. It tied up traffic in Minneapolis as well, with many delegates staying in hotels over there. Roads were blockaded, police cars and escorts were everywhere, and it was just a pretty difficult week for folks working downtown.

The convention also introduced the world to the vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, a woman who doesn't believe in the theory of evolution. (From the Anchorage Times, October 27, 2006: The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said she thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the state's public classrooms. Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night's televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.") Oh dear.

Early September – Someone threw out my lunch at work. I responded with a sticky-note on the fridge.

September – Seems that there was a good-sized gap between the foundation and the siding in the northwest corner of the house, and I discovered a major bee problem. More specifically, it was bees outside the house and wasps inside the house. I learned pretty quickly that the wasps were easy to deal with. They were very slow and not very aggressive, so that you could easily squash them with a rolled up magazine. They didn't take any kind of evasive action, so you could just walk up to them and squash them. For a while we were in the routine of coming home from somewhere, then I'd grab my rolled-up magazine and check the main-level rooms for wasps. I'd usually find 3-5 of them by the windows. Squash them all, then go around with a spray bottle and paper towels to mop up the bug guts. A nuisance to be sure, but not much of a danger.

Mind you, I had a professional exterminator working on this the whole time. He was focusing his efforts on getting rid of the bees outside by using glue traps. Glue trap after glue trap after glue trap. He was replacing them daily, and they just kept filling up. After a month of this, and asking myself, "Who am I to question how the professional deals with this?", I finally questioned the professional and suggested that he used something a little stronger than glue traps. I also put in a call to the management at the exterminator company, and explained my dilemma. Whaddya know, within two days he'd sprayed whatever you spray into the gap in our siding, caulked up the cracks, and voila! No more bees. The wasps stuck around a bit longer, though, but the cold weather seems to have done a number on them. I still find about one per week, and I expect that to drop off when it gets REALLY cold outside. The important thing is that the house is sealed, so that any remaining wasps will starve and the hive will die - permanent end of problem.

October – I turned 40 on the 22nd. Liz gave me the bestest present ever - she spent a good five hours in the kitchen preparing a giant Cuban feast! She found some recipes on the web and made a few dishes reminiscent of what we got at La Teresita in Tampa, our favorite restaurant in the whole universe. Liz made about 12 servings each of arroz con pollo, ropa vieja, and yuca, and we have a lot still left in the freezer. Even caramelized pineapple for dessert! She's the greatest!

And my brother, Kenny, came out to visit and help me turn 40. I dragged him around downtown, showed him my office and my favorite lunch place (mmm... Zenbox...), walked him around the skyways, showed him construction on the new Twins baseball park at the west end of downtown, took him to the Mill City Museum (long history of milling in Minneapolis, with General Mills still having headquarters here), drove him to an apple orchard WAY outside of town so he could get some local non-city flavor, ate lunch at Wally's (awesome roast beef sammiches), showed him the Minnesota River at the south end of Lyndale Ave. (just across the river from us was a plant of sorts that seemed to be moving some weird-looking green powder into or out of a barge on the river; don't know what the green powder was - raw crayon ore?) That must have taken two days, since I don't remember eating lunch twice in one day.

We also went out with Kris & Marie and took Kenny to "David Fong's". I figured that Kenny can get great Chinese any time he wants in New York City, so I thought I'd give him something to talk about with his friends by dining at the worst Chinese restaurant in the entire midwest. It's 50 years old, and the menu hasn't changed at all since 1958. It says on the outside of the restaurant, "Chinese American Cuisine", so you know you're not in for an authentic Chinese meal. You will, however, get a good representation of the Chinese food that your grandparents might like. It's spotlessly clean, has a spiffy, well-maintained exterior and parking lot, and is always packed. Really, always crowded. Baffling, actually. We all ordered stuff that turned out to be dreadful. We actually had difficulty identifying one of the things that Kenny ordered. The consensus was that it was egg foo yung, but I don't think we'll ever really be sure. Unbeknown to me when I decided to take him there, "David Fong's" was having their 50th Anniversary, and we each got a set of really nice chopsticks in a really nice little box. A genuinely charming trinket, capping a genuinely awful meal. My chopsticks are now in the same display cabinet as my Twins and Saints baseball bats from Bat Day and my Green Giant Sprout telephone.

On Saturday, we threw a birthday/meet Kenny party at the house, with the theme being "eat like you're a kid again". We supplied ten pizzas from Papa John's and 36 juice boxes, and everyone else brought Zingers, Hostess cupcakes, Slim Jims, Chicken In A Biskit, Entenmann's Pop 'Ems, Dunk 'Ems, those sugar cookies with the really thick frosting, peanut M&Ms, pretzels, black licorice, Chuck Wagon sandwiches from the gas station, a seven-pound can of chocolate pudding, some really nasty cheezy poofs, a gallon of Lemon Lime Drink for a dollar, and so on. You get the idea. Very anti-gourmet. I felt kinda sick after it all (much like after the State Fair), but it was worth it. On Sunday, we threw a poker game at the house and polished off a good chunk of the leftovers. We did stuff on Monday, then Kenny flew out on Tuesday.

Overall, a really good birthday: surrounded by family, good friends and bad food. I hope the rest of the year is as much fun as Birthday Week.

Kenny and I both put on about five pounds that week. I've lost just about all of it, and I'm sure Kenny has as well. It's in the genes.

Early November – Presidential election. You may have heard something about this?

I started my first "Crap From The Past" show after the election by playing "Landslide" by The Dixie Chicks. (Wikipedia: Ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Natalie Maines said "We don't want this war, this violence; and, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas", (the Dixie Chicks' home State). The statement offended a huge number of people who supported an invasion and war in Iraq, and the ensuing controversy cost the group half of their concert audience attendance in the United States and led to charges of the three female bandmates being un-American, as well as hate mail and the destruction of their albums in protest.) The Dixie Chicks were poised to cross over big-time to the pop world, like Faith Hill and Shania Twain, but the remark got them blacklisted and it didn't happen. Funny how five years can take us from ruining a musical career by publicly criticizing the President to basing the entire presidential campaigns of both candidates on publicly criticizing the President. It felt really good to play "Landslide" on the air, and you can read into it as much as you like. It also felt really good to play "Chocolate City" by Parliament, and James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black And I'm Proud)". Quite a giddy week, I must say...

Early November – I redid the “Crap From The Past” logo in Scalable Vector Graphics format. I was inspired by, of all things, an issue of Liz’s “Aquarium Fish International” magazine. The font of one of the headlines on their cover exactly matched the font used in the “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo! Their friendly production coordinator told me which font it was, and I found it online as a free font: Eurostile-Black-DTC! Why-reka! I don’t have to settle for “close enough” anymore! I’m just excited that I can now save my logo in .emf format, which is the same format as most clip art. That’s right, the CFTP logo is clip art.

Mid-November – I have some tiny ceiling light fixtures in the basement that can barely accommodate an incandescent bulb, and are way too small to fit a normal-sized compact fluorescent bulb. I finally found a place in town that sells small-profile compact fluorescent light bulbs - Electric Craftsman in Hopkins, MN. These bulbs have the same size threads on the base, but a tiny little ballast, and a smaller-diameter tube that forms the coil. Except for the threads, it looks basically like a normal-sized compact fluorescent bulb that's shrunk down proportionally to half its size. Cute, really. I heartily endorse this store in Hopkins for all your lighting needs.

Mid-November – Liz and I were bored on a Sunday afternoon, so we drove down to Rochester, MN for some good barbecue at John Hardee's. It's a little less than two hours each way, but it's worth it. Along the way, we saw the strangest cloud formation - a big block of 20 or 30 stripes! How on earth does a cloud form in stripes? This is a question far too complicated for feeble minds like ours. On our drive, we were content to avoid all thought whatsoever and just sing along with the radio, whimsically butchering as many lyrics as possible. Liz sang, "He's a juice box hero/With straws in his eyes..." Liz rocks.

Stay warm!
Ron & Liz Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - June 2008

Hi, all. Hockey’s over – it must be June!

I’ll start with a minor disappointment from my little world, which started with a potentially good idea.

On Thursday, May 22, I was eating dinner with Liz at our kitchen table. The table is right next to a window that faces due west, and the sun was shining through our blinds right into my eyes. I didn’t want to close the blinds because it would darken the room, and then I got a flash of inspiration: Instead of having a single tilt controller that opened or closed all the slats in the blinds, what if the blinds came with two regions – a top half and a bottom half – where you could adjust the tilt of the top and bottom halves independently? You could have two tilt control wands and two tilt mechanisms. That way, you could close the top half to block the sun in your eyes, while keeping the bottom open to see your backyard and get some light in the room. As an even better example, it would be great to have one of these in the bathroom, where you could block the bottom half so you prevent the neighbors from looking in, and keep the top half open so you can use daylight to light the room.

Pretty good idea, eh? I thought so, too. Pretty obvious idea? Yeah, but only once somebody tells it to you. It’s like the paper towels with the perforations that let you tear off half-sheets. That’s a great idea – obvious in hindsight (well who WOULDN’T want half-sheets?), but requiring some sort of inspiration to come up with it the first time.

So I, being a patent agent, immediately saw the path in front of me: file a provisional patent application (which doesn’t cost big $ since I can write it myself), approach the major blinds manufacturers with my great idea, and get licensing agreements for them to use my patent in their products. All of these things are very easy to do – I do all the patent stuff every day, and I work with people who can easily do the licensing stuff.

Now normally, a solo guy with a patent to his name doesn’t really have a prayer selling his invention to big industry. I know this firsthand. I also know the reactions I got when I mentioned my idea to Liz and to the other patent attorneys I work with: “I’d buy one of those.” And I know that to implement this would require practically no effort from the manufacturers – an extra gear mechanism, an extra wand, and some extra string. It doesn’t even require additional holes in the slats. So I got to work…

I started by visiting a store in Hopkins, MN, called “The Little Blind Spot”. We’d bought some blinds there a few months ago, and the staff there was terrific. I thought they’d help me find out a few things. Within ten minutes, I had a list of the major blinds manufacturers, and the proper industry terminology for all the parts and options. I highly recommend the store – they’re the kind of people you want working with you when you’re redecorating.

So that took about one day.

Next, I wrote up a little bit for a provisional patent application. Now I know that none of you are patent experts, but I thought you might be interested to see what this idea looks like in legalese.

First, the figures. These were just draft sketches, but they get the point across. I think they’re kinda funny.
The last section of every patent is the “claim set”, and it’s a legal description of your invention. It’s analogous to a real estate claim, which sets the boundaries for the land you own. With patents, the claim set defines the edge of what’s yours; you’re entitled only to what’s inside the claim.

When you draft patents, you typically start with the claim set, and that’s what I did. This is a rough draft of my claim set:

We claim:

1. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
a first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset; and
a second tilt controller different from the first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset.

2. The window blind of claim 1, wherein the slats in the first slat subset are contiguous.

3. The window blind of claim 2, wherein the slats in the second slat subset are contiguous.

4. The window blind of claim 3, wherein the second slat subset is adjacent to the first slat subset.

5. The window blind of claim 4, wherein the first slat subset is disposed above the second slat subset.

6. The window blind of claim 5, wherein the first and second slat subsets include an equal number of slats.

7. The window blind of claim 5, wherein the first and second slat subsets include a different number of slats.

8. The window blind of claim 7, wherein the second slat subset includes at least twice as many slats as the first slat subset.

9. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
a first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset and the second slat subset; and
a second tilt controller different from the first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset but not the first slat subset.

10. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
wherein the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset is controllable; and
wherein the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset is controllable, independent of the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset.

11. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
wherein the first slat subset is contiguous;
wherein the second slat subset is contiguous and is adjacent to the first slat subset;
wherein the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset is controllable; and
wherein the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset is controllable, independent of the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset.

The legal requirements for writing claims require that I describe my invention in one sentence, which begins with a capital letter (technically, the sentence begins with “We claim” or the equivalent) and ends with a period. The words “comprising”, “wherein” and “plurality” all have very specific legal meanings (there are others, too, that didn’t show up in this claim set), and as a result, I try to avoid them at all costs in my daily conversation.

(Aside for those of you who wonder what my actual job is: I basically make patents happen. I take invention disclosures from the client, which are usually pretty brief, and flesh them out into complete patent applications. I write all the text, I sketch out most of the figures myself, and I get help from a professional draftsman for the difficult stuff. Plus, I interact with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to jump through the necessary hoops to get the patent issued. Most of the job is like a really specific writing exercise, where I’m describing a particular invention in a very specific writing style. The bulk of the patent is usually written in fairly straightforward language that an engineer should be able to understand; if it doesn’t read well to an engineer, then it’s a poorly written patent. The claim set should be unintelligible to basically everyone except patent people.)

So I was getting set to work on some more figures for my provisional patent application, when I came across this, just this morning:
Uh-oh…party’s over.

That figure from the 1986 patent is pretty much what I had in mind all along. It’s an expired patent, so it’s in the public domain, and anyone is free to use it. So there’s nothing legally stopping Hunter Douglas, Levolor, Bali, Graber, Kirsch and the other blinds manufacturers from offering this as a feature, today, with no royalties to anyone.

And that’s pretty much the end of the story. I didn’t file any patent application because my idea’s already been done. All the important features I came up with are right there in FIG. 8 of U.S. Patent No. 4,621,672, titled “Mechanism for window blind”, issued on Nov. 11, 1986 to Hsu. Oh well, my great idea lasted from May 22, 2008 to June 3, 2008. Fun while it lasted…

And now, to bring you all up to speed on what else has been going on since December…

January – Still enjoying being downtown for work. Got some better pictures from my office window. Quite a view, looking due east from 17 floors up.
I’ve set a goal for myself of eating at least one menu item from every restaurant in the Minneapolis skyways. To give you an idea of how ridiculous this is, there are allegedly 8 miles worth of skyways downtown. As of June, I’m probably 50% of the way there. I’ve attached a map of the skyways, just for giggles. I put a bright green dot on my building, the “US Bank Plaza”, formerly known as the “Pillsbury Building”. The express buses to my suburb, Richfield, run up and down 2nd Avenue, so I literally walk out the front the door of my building, walk across the street, and wait for a bus. It sure beats driving!

Mid-January – Grandma turned 97 on the 19th, so the whole family packed up and celebrated with her in Washington, DC. Coincidentally, Liz and I celebrated our 1st anniversary on the very same day.

Late January – Discovered a company that has an office here in the Minneapolis skyways. They’re called “OMG INC.” OMG! Their office is right by my dentist, and I’d walked past there a few times before I had the nerve to duck my head in and ask what they do. They’re a marketing group and they’ve been around for over 20 years. Oh.

Mid-February – Saw “Michael Clayton”, then sneaked into “Sweeney Todd” afterwards. Our illegal cinematic streak continues! We thought “Michael Clayton” was excellent, but I didn’t care much for “Sweeney Todd”. I don’t think we can see any more movies without sneaking into other movies…

February 25 – The last Krispy Kreme store in Minnesota closed, bringing an end to the era of ubiquitous Krispy Kreme donuts. They were EVERYWHERE, including gas stations, Target, and every fundraising function you can imagine. Liz really liked their Blueberry Cake donuts, but the rest of their lineup really didn’t thrill us all too much. And for whatever reason, be it corporate mismanagement, overcapacity, or just the novelty wearing off, the donut chain has come and gone in MN, leaving only indie donut shops, supermarkets and bakeries to fatten us up. (There really aren’t any Dunkin’ Donuts out here. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but that’s for another Big Life Update.)

R.I.P. Krispy Kreme in Minnesota: May 3, 2002 - February 25, 2008

Early March – Visited Liz’s family up in Ada, MN. For fun, we went with Liz’s brother to the “North Dakota Winter Show” in Valley City, ND, about 60 miles west of Fargo. I, as you know, know nothing about farming, so I was enthralled with the huge equipment they had there. For the price of my house, I could buy a GIGANTIC tractor, with wheels that are taller than me! Tempting… maybe for my birthday…

Late March – I overheard Liz talking about her car. She said, “I haven’t opened the moon roof at all since a bird pooped on my head.”

Late March – We had a boatload of work done on our house, and it finally wrapped up around the end of March. It started with a mold problem in the garage, which motivated me to hire a contractor to replace the old, leaky garage windows and rip out the insulation and drywall that was out there. (Detached garages shouldn’t have insulation and drywall at all; it violates new construction codes, as I understand it.) So I had the contractors paint the garage, and repair the soffits on the house.

Just so you know, the soffits are the wooden structure just beneath the roofline on the side of the house. We used to have gutters that were right next to the soffits. The problem we’d had is that there were squirrels that would run through the soffits and make a lot of noise. It got to be a real nuisance, since the soffits run the entire length of the house, right outside our bedroom windows. Many a time on a weekend morning, we tried to sleep in, but the squirrels woke us up. We vowed revenge…

The neighbors told me that the previous owners of the house had had the same squirrel problem (and that was over 11 years ago), where they chewed through a corner of the soffit and then stored food inside. Or whatever squirrels do.

So our contractor replaced the chewed-up wooden corner of the soffit. The very next morning, we heard an incredible amount of scratching outside our window. Apparently, the contractor had boarded up the squirrel inside the soffit, and, understandably, the squirrel freaked out and chewed his way out.

Later that week, the contractor came back and repeated the repairs. Only this time, the squirrel was locked out of the soffit, away from whatever he valued so much that was inside the soffit. This time, he chewed his way back INTO the soffit.

At this point, the contractor suggested that I call a particular pest control service. You know, to … ahem, control … a certain pest. Liz said that it was one particular squirrel, which was easy to identify because he didn’t look quite right. He had sort of a disheleved mohawk-like “haircut” on his squirrel head, and Liz said that his eyes looked crazy and didn’t point in the same direction. We referred to him as the deranged squirrel. And so we called The Guy to take out the deranged squirrel.

The Guy came to the house and set up two traps on our roof near the chewed-up soffits. Four days and two squirrels later (the guys removed the squirrel corpses from the traps, but they were up there long enough to terrorize the neighborhood kids), the problem seemed to have cleared up. The contractor finished up the soffits, and we’ve been squirrel-free ever since.

If you have a squirrel problem, I can recommend a Guy.

We also had a bunch of interior rooms painted, scraped the horrible popcorn ceiling off the kitchen and upstairs hallway ceilings, got new blinds and curtains in all the downstairs rooms, got new storm doors, and got new light fixtures, but none of those involved killing off any wildlife.

Early April – Liz took a short vacation to Seattle to visit her friend, Coral. Had a good time, too.

Mid-April – Liz did something strenuous. I can’t remember what it was, but afterwards I remember thinking it seemed like a silly thing to do. She was complaining that her back was sore, and I said something along the lines of “Well, of course you’re sore. Your back muscles are trying to get at your brain to strangle it!” Good husband, I am…

Mid-April – Liz took another short vacation, this time with her friend Melanie. They went to Key Largo, and did a whole lot of water stuff, like scuba diving and snorkeling. Liz bought a new camera with an underwater kit just for the occasion, and got some cool pictures.

Mid-April – I heard that New Kids On The Block were reuniting for the first time in 15 years. Believe it or not, I saw them many years ago as part of a Z-100 birthday bash-type party in New York. That would have been 1989 or 1990, and they shared the stage with acts like Stevie B, Cyndi Lauper, Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson, Was (Not Was) and Hall & Oates. Truth be told, I don’t remember much about their performance except that it was loud – WAY louder than some of the other acts. I was not impressed.

Over the years, I’d accumulated quite a bit of New Kids memorabilia. Not because I like the New Kids, because I don’t, but because people would give me their New Kids junk. Or I’d find something for a dime at a garage sale. And so on, to the point where I had three moving boxes worth of New Kids crap in the basement that had absolutely no sentimental value to me whatsoever.

KFAI’s pledge drive was in April, so I made my gigantic New Kids memorabilia collection a pledge drive premium. We did a lot of promotion for the giveaway, and Liz took photos of the collection so we’d have something to post on the web. The collection was so large that it took 14 pictures to fully document the whole thing – all 14 pictures are included below, for your snickering pleasure.

Donnie Action Figure, a Stage for Action Figure Concerts (with "moving disc for great dance moves") and three hats:Five 500-piece Jigsaw Puzzles: For the nighttime! A Pillow and Sleeping Bag:A pink Lunchbox, a white Wristwatch (still shrink-wrapped with K-Mart price tag!) and four fun facts Paperback Books:Three large framed pictures of the Kids (cute gray cat, Poohead, not included): Really large (huge, actually) silk-screened picture of the Kids in wooden frame (no, still can't have Poohead): Backstage Pass, plus an actual minted NKOTB Coin in fancy autographed sleeve: One side of the coin in its fancy sleeve:The other side of the coin in its fancy sleeve: Sixteen NKOTB books and scrapbooks of various sizes and shapes: Two NKOTB tourbooks and three Harvey Comics comic books: A set of playing cards - The New Kids On The Block Card Game: Dozens and dozens of NKOTB trading cards, all in a collector's book: NKOTB Buttons - 11 little ones and one really big one:Congratulations to my friends Matt & Janice, who won the whole thing and now have years and years of gag gifts at their disposal.

Mid-April – One of KFAI’s volunteers, Doug The Thug, has a natural gift for visuals, and took it upon himself to make posters for some of his favorite KFAI programs. I was one of the lucky programmers who got a poster, and “Crap From The Past” now has awesome posters. We’ll be giving these away for the Fall pledge drive at the station. I have one professionally framed on my office wall.

April 19 – I saw the German synth band Kraftwerk. I know, Kraftwerk! Hard to believe! They played exactly four shows in the entire U.S. – some place in California, Denver, Milwaukee, and Maplewood, MN. Not even Minneapolis proper, but Maplewood – a fairly distant, woefully unhip suburb in the northwest metro, which is also home to 3M. They played a venue I’d never heard of, called “Myth”. “Myth” is a gigantic club that used to be a really huge shoe store (“Just For Feet”, as I understand it), and it was completely packed.

They had a monstrous video screen behind the band, which showed some mighty cool video clips to go along with their songs. I think at one point I described it as the coolest PowerPoint presentation, ever.

I use the word “band” in a clean, minimalist, German way, rather than a sweaty, interactive, James Brown way. Each of the four guys in the band had his own little pedestal workstation, with a laptop and mouse. And they spent the entire concert doing stuff on their laptops – moving the mouse, clicking, occasionally typing something. They didn’t interact with the audience at all, and only barely interacted with each other with a word or two here and there. To me, it looked like they were in a coffee shop and we were watching them check their email and surf the web.

They did two encores. For one of them, all four guys were absent from the stage and were replaced by robots. That’s right, “We Are The Robots” indeed!

That’s not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable. It was indeed – the sound system was amazing, the videos were mighty cool, and we were just awestruck that Kraftwerk – Kraftwerk! – would come to our little town!

May 13 – Was (Not Was) came to town. You best know them for “Walk The Dinosaur” a goofy funk hit from early 1989. They’ve been off the map for the last 17 years or so, but they put out a new album in April 2008! And this was the tour to promote it. I’d seen them as part of that Z-100 thing, but I really don’t remember them – that whole concert was just a blur.

They played the Cabooze, a fairly small club here in town, which was a perfect way to see them. Liz and I were up front and way off to the right of the stage. We were so close that we could have shined Sir Harry Bowens’s shoes at any given point during the show. Don Was played bass about 6 feet right in front of us – the most laid-back, unpretentious, un-flashy bass player I’ve ever seen, but he can work a groove with the best of them. David Was was at the other end of the stage, with his flute and occasional vocals. And front and center was Sweet Pea Atkinson, a sharply-dressed soul singer to be reckoned with. They’re all from Detroit, and they show their soul/funk roots with pride.

They were tight. Probably as tight as any funk outfit I’ve seen, and I’ve seen the Average White Band and the whole Parliament/Funkadelic/George Clinton/19-people-on-stage show. Sweet Pea sounds as good as he ever did, and he’s been doing this for 30+ years. Afterwards, since it was such a small club, they stuck around for autographs and pictures and all that. I got autographs on some really obscure 12” singles from the early ‘80s. Truly a great show, and the album they’re promoting “Boo!” is just as good as “What Up Dog” from the ‘80s. Just plain awesome…

Mid-May – It turns out that April was a tough month for a few of my friends. Janice, Michael and Charles all lost parents in April, and our sympathies go out to all of them and their families. It was 10 years ago in April that I lost my stepfather, Phil. 10 years… where does the time go?

May was a considerably more upbeat month. My brother, Kenny, and my friend, Eric, both got engaged. To their respective girlfriends, not to each other. Congratulations all around! Liz and I are extra-thrilled to finally have Kenny’s girlfriend, Maria, as part of the family. She’s the greatest! Plus, her friends just love Liz, so it makes visiting family out east that much more fun.

Early May – I knew that here in Richfield, one can get rid of nearly anything by putting it out by the curb, and once the weather got nice, I used the curb extensively. We got rid of a TV stand, an extremely heavy exercise bike, a few plastic crates, a metal rack that was in the garage, a wheelbarrow, a baseball bat, and lots of other junk that was cluttering up the house and garage. I still don't know who grabs the stuff, but it always disappears from our property. Which, of course, makes us very happy indeed.

Early May – Probably the biggest lifestyle change for Liz is that she started grad school in May. She’s getting her Masters in Nurse Anesthesia. When she finished in August 2010, she’ll be a Nurse Anesthetist. That’s a very good thing to be, because there’s a lot of demand for Nurse Anesthetists, and the demand is only supposed to increase in the next few years. She stopped working at the VA, and she’s now a full-time student.

She’s adjusting to doing classwork again. It’s quite a change going back to classwork after you’ve been working full-time for years, but she seems to be coping well. She’s been taking the express bus downtown with me, then taking a connecting bus to the school, which is a mile or two away from downtown. She says the work is hard, but it’s still 1000 times more enjoyable than working full time. So far, so good…

Late June – We have our annual group camping trip coming up later this month. This is the same trip where Liz and I met four years ago. Four years already – where does the time go indeed! Should be fun.

One last event from late June – Earlier in the week, I’d driven past a “Baker’s Square”, which is a pretty bad chain restaurant that has OK pie but lousy everything else. I thought I’d seen a sign in their window that read “All you can eat pie – $5.99 after 8pm”, but I wasn’t sure. I called to confirm, and it turned out to be true, and valid for every day of the week.

So on Saturday, I dragged Liz on a bike ride. Her parents had gotten us a bike rack for Christmas, and we tried it out. It worked nicely, and we were able to start our ride from Hopkins, a suburb west of downtown Minneapolis. We rode a really nice crushed limestone bike trail due westward, and since I just HAD to know where it ends, we rode it all the way to the end, past Excelsior, past Lake Minnetonka, all the way to Victoria, MN. There’s nothing in Victoria, so we recharged our proverbial batteries at a Holiday gas station in Victoria, downed some beverages and junk food, and rode back to Hopkins. Total mileage – 33 miles. Much farther than we’d ever gone before, and I wore Liz out.

But I wore Liz out deliberately, and worked off a bunch of calories in advance. And so on Saturday night, we went with our friends, Kris and Marie, to all-you-can-eat pie at Baker’s Square.

Turns out that they have rules for this sort of thing. One whole piece, and all the rest are half-pieces. No brownies, no ice cream, no carrot cake. Just pies. And, above all else, no sharing. OK then.

My plan of attack was to go for the fruit pies, and try to go through as many as they had. I didn’t quite get there, and it was probably because I categorized “banana cream” as a fruit pie. Mistake. Each of us went through 6 half-pieces of pie, plus they were nice enough to give us our full piece, let us take a bite and decide that we couldn’t finish, and let us take it home. Bleh. I etted too much pie.

Have a good summer! Stay cool and dry!
Ron & Liz Gerber