Ron's Big Life Update - April 2010

A sample conversation as we drove across Minnesota to Liz's parents' house for Thanksgiving:
Ron: "Look! Cow-shaped horses!"
Liz: "You're an idiot-shaped idiot!"
- - - -
Imagine the Goffin/King classic from 1967, made famous by Aretha Franklin, except sung robotically by a voice-synthesized computer:

Cuz you make me feel
You make me feel
You make me feel
Like a super computer...

It's clearly not the best idea I've ever had. It doesn't even compare with my new stage name: Rod Pretzels.
- - - -

November - Liz colored her hair. She bought a box of a color called "Dark Ash Blond", and worked her magic in the sink. Unfortunately, that was the exact natural color of her hair, and no one, including me, could tell the difference.

We joked that Liz's natural hair color is greenish gray, which nicely complements her eye color of grayish green. She thinks that the coloring might have taken out a little of the green.

Dec 16 - In September, Liz had gotten a parking ticket on one of the side streets near her school in Minneapolis. I told her to take pictures on her cell phone, and offered to take care of everything here in town for her. I work one building over from the Government Center, so it was much easier for me to deal with things than for Liz to do the same.

I printed out the pictures from Liz's cell phone and walked the paperwork over to the Government Center. The appropriate clerk scheduled an appointment with a hearing examiner for Dec 16, which was over three months out. OK then.

Be at the appropriate office in the government center at least five minutes before my scheduled appointment. Check. Check in with woman at desk. Check. Take a seat. Check.

Literally about 90 seconds later (the TV in the waiting area never even came out of its block of commercials), the hearing examiner called me in. He had a modest, unpretentious office, and told me to take a seat.

I explained that my wife had gotten a parking ticket, but she's currently in school in Wisconsin, and I work in the building next door so I'm here instead. Here are the pictures she took from her cell phone.

The hearing examiner said that officially, she's the one that has to appear in court, not me, but that it wasn't really a problem and we'll most likely be able to resolve the matter without her.

He took a quick look at the pictures. He then explained that the law is that you need five feet of clearance beyond where the curved part of the curb meets the straight part (i.e., five feet beyond where the curvature of the curb starts). Think of a fire truck turning into the driveway. Based on how they measure it, Liz didn't leave any clearance at all, and the picture clearly shows that her car even extends into the curved part of the curb. Hmm.

He then asked me what I think is fair. He added that he knew what I'd like, of course, but what did I think was fair. I asked what the fine is, and he said $32. I then suggested paying, maybe, half that? He replied that since there's no history of parking violations for Liz or her car, that he'd let it go - no fine. He said that Liz effectively pleaded guilty, but it was pretty meaningless and wouldn't go on her record. I told him that I'd pass on what he said to Liz, thanked him for his time, and walked back to my office.

The whole process took maybe five minutes in the government center, and took maybe fifteen minutes of my time. Looks like the system works!

So remember, five feet of clearance from where the curvature of the curb begins. And being on-time and polite doesn't hurt, either.

Early January - You know those ubiquitous, cylindrical tins of butter cookies that always appear during the holidays? A conversation with a co-worker affirmed that the pretzel shapes always taste better than the other shapes, even though they're made from exactly the same stuff. We don't know why. They just do.

November and December - The holidays were fun. Spent them in Ada with Liz's family, which is always relaxing. For Christmas, there was a monstrous snowstorm bearing down on the midwest, so drove up to Ada a little early. The last 40 miles of the drive were on Highway 9, which is a perfectly straight two-lane highway.
It was snowing pretty hard with essentially no visibility when we got to Highway 9, and we wound up driving the entire stretch in the exact center of the road, since that was where the ditch was least likely to be.

Liz's parents had gotten a new kitten, so we had to take pictures. Good thing we have a high-speed camera, because we got some fearsome action shots of the little terror! Zoom!
Early January - Got a Sonicare electric toothbrush, on the advice of my dentist. That thing is amazing! I've never had an electric toothbrush before, and the few that I'd played with before weren't all that special. But this thing can shake the enamel off your teeth! In a good way! Highly recommended! But don't try to talk while you're using it, or you'll get toothpaste all over the bathroom.

Early January - Liz and I were watching TV when we got the craving for cookie dough ice cream. Liz went one better, and whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough from scratch. While most people would probably bake it into actual cookies, we just ate the whole thing out of the bowl with spoons. Liz is clearly the girl for me.

Mid-January - Liz got a new betta fish, to replace the one I let die when she first moved to Wisconsin. (Doh! Liz said it was really old and would have died anyway, but I still feel bad that it died on my watch.) The new one is cute. Liz named it "Sushi".

Mid-January - Discovered that the word "jewelry" is spelled as "jewellery" in the UK. Guess I should stop making fun of that book that I routinely see in Half Price Books with the word "Jewellery" in the title...

Mid-January - Things weren't going all that well at work. I didn't have enough to do, because there wasn't enough work coming in the door. It's never a good sign when you have to invent tasks to do to keep yourself busy at work. I really didn't mind all that much, until they scaled my salary back to be commensurate with the amount of billable work I was doing - that was the last straw.

So I went to monster.com and typed in "Patent Agent" in Minneapolis, MN. And much to my surprise, two openings showed up. One was at Crompton, Seager & Tufte. Why did that sound familiar? Hey! My friend Paul works there! So I called him up. The conversation went something like this: "Hey, Paul. You guys have a Patent Agent position posted on monster.com." "We do?? Let me ask around, and I'll get back to you." The next day, I had lunch with Paul. A few days after that, I had lunch with one of the partners. The next week, I went in for a more formal interview, where I wore the Interview Suit. You know, the suit that only gets worn for job interviews, and has been untouched for so long in the closet that it gets a ring of dust around the collar in the portion that isn't covered by the plastic wrap. 15 years and counting with that suit. (Thank you, Franklin's of Tucson!) Interview went very smoothly, they emailed me an offer, I OKed it via email (and cc'ed Liz), gave my two weeks notice later that day, and that was that.

It was the most relaxed job-hunt process that I've ever heard of, for anybody, ever since the very dawn of work itself. I spent the last day at Altera wheeling my books and artwork from my old office to my new office, which was at the other end of downtown. You can get from one to the other in the Minneapolis skyways, without ever going outside. And that's just what I did. It's a 30-minute walk from my old office (green dot) to my new office (red dot) in the skyways, with a cart full of books. It took three trips, one of them with artwork tucked under my arm.
The new office is at the very south end of the Minneapolis skyways. Literally, the end of the skyways - there's a sign on the building that reads, "Skyway Ends".

My last day of work at Altera was Friday, Feb 26. My first day of work at CS&T was Monday, Mar 1. People asked if I was going to take any time off between jobs. Time off from what? I felt like I hadn't done any real work in months, so vacation time was kinda pointless.

The new firm has about 10 attorneys and 4 other patent agents, making me agent number 5. This firm is considered "small", as opposed to Altera, which I would classify as "tiny". Most importantly, the new firm had too much work coming in, hence the job opening.

About 90% of my work is for two very large clients, which have used the firm for 15+ years. It's like there's an endless stream of work from these clients, which is really fabulous for me. It's SO nice knowing that when I get to work, there's stuff on my desk waiting to be done.

At the new firm, the partners are responsible for bringing in the work and making sure that there's enough of it to go around. The agents, like me, have no marketing duties or any responsibilities whatsoever regarding drumming up new business, which is a welcome change from the old firm. Turns out the rest of the world works on the assumption that the partners worry about bringing in the work, not the non-partners. And that's just fine by me, since I'm terrible at drumming up new business.

The new office is nicer than the old one. I'm eight floors up, instead of 17, and now I'm looking at the south end of downtown instead of down on the Metrodome.
And the transition into the new job has been completely effortless. I take the same bus to and from downtown, at the same times. I get off at the same stop as before, but to go home I get on at a different stop. Not much of a change at all. And I stay later downtown, because I'm actually working until 5:30.

Liz was thrilled about the new job. The little raise I got didn't hurt, but the most important thing to her was my job security. Here, I'm actually doing something useful instead of being another mouth to feed at Altera. I stayed at Altera six years to the day.

March - I came up with a real life physics problem, suitable for an undergrad mechanics class.

You're at the airport, you checked in a little late, and you have to get from security to the gate as fast as you can. The airport has a few moving sidewalks in certain places to help speed you along.

You walk at a constant velocity while on the sidewalk(s), and walk at the same speed on land (off the sidewalk).

You're in a hurry, but you're in lousy shape and you're bogged down with carry-on luggage, so you're allowed one burst of speed where you can run instead of walk. The burst of speed lasts only for a fixed duration, so that you can only run for, say, five seconds. The running duration and running speed are the same if you run on the moving sidewalk or if you run on land (off the sidewalk).

The question is this: In order to get to the gate the fastest, should you use your burst of speed while you're on the moving sidewalk, or while you're on land (off the sidewalk)? Or doesn't it matter?

And an analogous question: If you have to stop for five seconds to check to make sure you have your keys, should you stop while you're on the moving sidewalk, while you're on land (off the sidewalk), or doesn't it matter?

It's not a trick question. It has a real answer, which you can figure out with real math, but I can't figure out an intuitive way to explain the answer.

Think about it, make some sketches, do some math, and check out the real answer at the end of this Big Life Update.

March - For the first time in something like 150 years, Minneapolis got no snow at all in March. Freaky.

Early April - Liz had a few days off for Easter, so we visited her family in Ada. The new toy on the farm was an old road grader - a giant snowplow-like thing that you drive down a dirt road to make it smooth. It's a got a huge blade on it that you can control with something like 12 or 14 levers. That's a lot of control! Liz's brother, Eric, fired it up and drove me around on it for a few feet in the dirt behind the house. Best Toy Ever.

April - Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced their "Double Down" sandwich. It sounded like a joke - no bun, just two fried chicken breasts with bacon, cheese and some sauce inside.

Which means that somebody inside the KFC organization consciously decided that what was wrong with their sandwiches was THE BUN.

I had one, so you don't have to. I'll just write this one off as "taking one for the team". It's almost as bad as their "Famous Bowl" - mashed potatoes, corn, fried chicken bits, cheese, and gravy over the whole thing. I probably mentioned that our friend Janice dubbed that the "Bowl Of Crap". I don't think I'll be having another one of those.

April - At work, I encountered two of the most hilarious patents ever.

The first was an automotive patent, which used windpower to turn a propeller that recharges a battery. Clearly, not the product of a physicist. (It's the equivalent of bringing an electric fan onto your sailboat, and running the fan against the sail to make your boat go REALLY FAST. Just like in the cartoons.) That's the beauty of patents - they have to be novel and non-obvious, but they don't actually have to work.
The second was a published patent application (it didn't issue), also along the same lines as the windpowered car. Only this one was not written by a patent professional; aspiring inventors are allowed to write them up themselves, but the results are usually disastrous. The odds were really stacked against this one, in particular, and I heartily recommend reading it start to finish.
April - Was involved with a scheduling change at KFAI. Basically, our ratings/listenership numbers were dangerously low, with a falloff of about 50% since 2005. I'm a member of the program committee, so I helped put together a revised program grid that rearranged the shows and added a new morning show. After a brutal rollout process that ticked off the displaced morning show hosts and a sizable chunk of the volunteers, we finally voted on and passed the new grid. I'm proud of the new grid itself, but getting to that point sucked rocks. The whole process was completely draining for the volunteers, the staff, and members of the committee like myself. At a volunteer organization, communication is really important; you have to engage the volunteers at every stage to let them know what you're planning on doing and why, and get their feedback and suggestions. I think we came up seriously short on the communication end of things, and it was pretty hellacious. My term on the committee ends in December, and I'll be more than happy to turn over the reins to some new blood.

I think that the reality is that music programming on FM radio is dying, and is completely dead for younger listeners. I get the sense that young kids still like the thrill of new music, and still bring over their favorite songs to their friends' houses, but instead of a stack of 45s and albums like my childhood friends and I had, they bring over their iPods and plug in. I get the sense that they discover new music through friends and the internet, but not at all through FM radio. We are no longer the tastemakers, and haven't been in that role in years. Sad, really. I also think that in 10 years, the internet will be completely ubiquitous in car radios, and will kill off music on FM. There will still be FM stations around, but they'll be all talk - essentially what AM radio is now. Not encouraging for us FM radio guys...

I also think that in community radio, where at 41 I'm considered one of the younger music programmers, our audience is unsustainably old and isn't getting any younger. Basically, we volunteer programmers program our shows as if we were our own target audiences. So my target audience is me, plus or minus 10 years. There's nothing I can possibly play to attract a 20-year-old to the show. And I think that's the problem our station is facing - none of our music programmers are young. Plenty of older folks, but nobody I'd call youthful.

Late April - Realized that next month will mark 20 years since I graduated from college. I can't say I'm all too pleased about that. That means that most of the college students in the world, right now, weren't even born when I graduated from college. See? Pretty discouraging.

And one final thought - an ad from the early '80s:
Stay springy!
Ron & Liz

--
Are you ready for some physics?

Let's assign some parameters here.

The length of the moving sidewalk is X_sidewalk. (I apologize for my lack of subscripts...)
The length of the land (the non-sidewalk portion) is X_land.
The speed at which you walk is V_walk.
The speed at which you run is V_run.
The speed of the moving sidewalk is V_sidewalk.
The duration of your burst of speed is T_run.

The one physics equation we'll use repeatedly is X=VT, or length = velocity times time.

First, let's treat the uninteresting case, where we don't run at all, but walk on both the moving sidewalk and the land - no running at all.

The speed at which you're moving while walking on the moving sidewalk is (V_sidewalk + V_walk).
The total distance on the moving sidewalk is (X_sidewalk).
The time spent walking on the moving sidewalk is (X_sidewalk) / (V_sidewalk + V_walk).

The speed at which you're moving while walking on land is (V_walk).
The total distance on land is (X_land).
The time spent walking on land is (X_land) / (V_walk).

The total time spent on both moving sidewalk and land is:
(X_sidewalk) / (V_sidewalk + V_walk) + (X_land) / (V_walk).

That's not all that interesting by itself.

Next, let's treat the case where the burst of speed is on land:

The total time spent on the moving sidewalk is unchanged from the previous case, and is:
(X_sidewalk) / (V_sidewalk + V_walk).

The time spent running on land is (T_run).
The speed at which you're moving while running is (V_run).
The distance covered by the time spent running is (V_run) (T_run).
The total distance on land is (X_land).
The distance on land that you need to walk is (X_land) - (V_run)(T_run).
The speed at which you're moving while walking is (V_walk).
The time spent walking on land is [(X_land - (V_run)(T_run)] / (V_walk).
The total time spent on land is:
(T_run) + [(X_land - (V_run)(T_run)] / (V_walk).

The total time spent on both the moving sidewalk and land is:
(X_sidewalk) / (V_sidewalk + V_walk) + (T_run) + [(X_land - (V_run)(T_run)] / (V_walk).

The time saved by the burst of speed on land is, after algebra:
(T_run) ((V_run / V_walk) - 1)

Finally, let's treat the case where the burst of speed is on the moving sidewalk:

The time spent running on the moving sidewalk is (T_run).
The speed at which you're moving while running is (V_run + V_sidewalk).
The distance covered by the time spent running is (V_run + V_sidewalk)(T_run).
The total distance on the moving sidewalk is (X_sidewalk).
The distance on the moving sidewalk that you need to walk is (X-sidewalk) - (V_run + V_sidewalk)(T_run).
The speed at which you're moving while walking is (V_walk + V_sidewalk).
The time spent walking on the moving sidewalk is [(X-sidewalk) - (V_run + V_sidewalk)(T_run)] / (V_walk + V_sidewalk).
The total time spent on the moving sidewalk is:
(T_run) + [(X-sidewalk) - (V_run + V_sidewalk)(T_run)] / (V_walk + V_sidewalk).

The total time spent on land is unchanged from the first case, and is:
(X_land) / (V_walk).

The total time spent on both the moving sidewalk and land is:
(T_run) + [(X-sidewalk) - (V_run + V_sidewalk)(T_run)] / (V_walk + V_sidewalk) + (X_land) / (V_walk).

The time saved by the burst of speed on the moving sidewalk is, after algebra:
(T_run) [(V_run + V_sidewalk) / (V_walk + V_sidewalk) - 1]

Subtract: (time saved by burst of speed on land) - (time saved by burst of speed on moving sidewalk) is, after algebra:
(T_run) [(V_run - V_walk)(V_sidewalk)] / [(V_walk)(V_walk + V_sidewalk)]

Assuming you run faster than you walk, the above line is a positive number.

So, you'll get there faster if you use your burst of speed on land, rather than on the moving sidewalk.

We can check the above result by esnuring that it goes to zero in three limiting cases:
(1)T_run = 0, (2) V_run = V_walk, or (3) V_sidewalk = 0.
It does go to zero in each of these cases. All is well.

What about the case of V_run = 0? Physically, this means that instead of running, you need to stop dead in your tracks for a period of time, as if you were checking your pockets to make sure you have your keys. Should you stop on the moving sidewalk, or on the land?

Forcing V_run = 0 flips the sign of the above quantity. So, if you need to stop for a period of time to check your keys, you'll get there faster if you stop on the moving sidewalk, rather than on the land.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any direct applications of all this in the real world, but it's an interesting undergrad-level exercise in physics.

Ron's Big Life Update - October 2009

For those that can’t afford Acupuncture, I propose a less expensive, and far less rigorous treatment: Approxipuncture. More painful, yet less effective, than Smooth Jazzercise. Cake-boxing? I thought you said kick-boxing! Also came up with another potential stage name, Dustin D’Wind, but couldn’t figure out how to work it into this incoherent introductory paragraph.

If a friend should ever call you up and ask, “Want to launch a rocket?”, the answer should be “Yes!” Our friend, Marie, got her husband, Kris, a giant inflatable Titan Blast Rocket for his birthday in September. It’s powered by water and air pressure – you pump it up until the little gauge reads in the target range, and squeeze a little ball to launch.



Yeah, it was pretty amazing. We got 9 or 10 decent launches in, with all of us taking turns squeezing the launch ball and running after it when it eventually returned to earth. Quite the perfect fall activity.

It’s been a good six months since the last Big Life Update in April, so some of the specifics have gotten a little hazy since then.

May 16th: 38° F in the morning. May 19th: 97° F in the afternoon. Yikes!

June 5 – The beloved radio trade publication, Radio & Records (R&R), published its last issue. Just another reminder that the Radio industry and the Records industry are far from healthy, and couldn’t sustain having two competing trade journals. No good news here…

June featured three consecutive road trips to the corners of the state.

June 6 – Drove up to Ada, MN for a wedding. One of Liz’s cousins got married. Normally I don’t comment on the work of other professionals, but the DJ from Fargo that they used was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. We were there no more than five minutes when I said to Liz, “I bet you $35 that he plays ‘Old Time Rock And Roll’.” If Liz had actually taken that bet (she didn’t), it would have been the easiest $35 I ever made. Aside from the endless stream of musical clichés he played, the worst aspect of the whole performance was that he seemed to think that he was part of the band, and gleefully added inappropriate percussion instruments to many of the songs. Tambourine, cowbell, you name it, all where they didn’t quite belong. Dare I say, TOO MUCH cowbell?

June 13 – Our yearly camping trip with friends was condensed down to a day trip to Lanesboro, MN. The rest of the group camped overnight, but Liz’s work/school schedule didn’t allow that much time off. We drove down with the bikes on the back of the car, ate, rode en masse to the pie shop in the next town, ate pie, rode back en masse, ate some more, and drove home. On the way home, we stopped at John Hardy’s in Rochester MN for barbeque. A terrific day, complete with pie and John Hardy’s. Life is very good indeed.

June 20 – Drove up to Duluth to visit one of Liz’s classmates. Coincidentally, it just happened to be the weekend of Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, so we got to see the tail end of the race. We hung around the finish line for a while around the 7-hour mark, and applauded for some truly exhausted runners. Then we partook in the parties afterward, which included a concert from a really good disco/funk cover band. How do all these 20-somethings know all the words to songs that are older than they are?

We essentially used up all our summer travel in June, and stayed put for the rest of the summer.

July – Got fed up with Qwest, the provider for my land line phone. Too much static on the line, poor customer service, time for a change. So I dropped Qwest, dropped my basic cable TV from Comcast, picked up local phone service from Comcast, and had Comcast deliberately slow my internet connection down to the lowest (cheapest) level. I’m now saving a boatload of money every month, which is very nice indeed.

Because I dumped cable TV, I had to figure out how to best receive the over-the-air HD TV signals. Our TV is ancient, but works just fine for the room, so I got one of the converter boxes and bought an HD antenna. The signal was pretty weak, so I returned the antenna and bought a stronger antenna. Still too weak, so I returned that one and bought a monstrously huge powered antenna. Still too weak! At this point, I decided to experiment, so I attached the converter box to the coaxial cable that ran outside, so I could dink around with setting up an antenna outside. I was quite surprised to find that the bare coax cable, outside, with no proper antenna at all, gave me a better signal than anything I could set up inside the house. In hindsight, it’s obvious – the aluminum siding on my house is a giant cage, and there’s nothing I can do to get decent reception unless I go outside the cage. I wound up attaching an old FM dipole antenna to the outside of the house around one of the upstairs window frames, so it’s barely visible, and that has been working great. I returned the third and final expensive antenna with no questions asked and, ultimately, no money spent.

I’m glad I chose to buy the antennas at Ultimate Electronics, a small chain that’s completely dwarfed by Best Buy here in town. The staff at Ultimate was genuinely helpful (most unlike the Best Buy staff I’ve encountered over the years), and their return policy was very generous. After buying, then returning, three different antennas over the course of a weekend, I sent a letter to Ultimate Electronics headquarters, praising the staff of the Edina store. I didn’t end up buying anything from them for this project, but I will most assuredly start there first for my next project.

Mid-July – A bunch of my commercial radio friends were in town for The Conclave, a yearly conference here in Minneapolis. This year, I invited all of them down to KFAI to sit in on my show, and it was glorious chaos! Eight radio pros all sitting in with me, and one of them (Art Vuolo) professionally videotaping the whole thing! Art has been videotaping radio personalities for a good 30 years, and he has some amazing footage of literally every radio DJ you’ve ever heard of. He even had the home phone numbers of Casey Kasem and Ryan Seacrest with him, and those are just two random people that came up in the conversations! I’m honored that he chose to work his magic on “Crap From The Past”, and I now have an entry in the same library as many of my radio heroes! Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.

Early August – Threw a joint birthday party at the house for Liz and for our friend Marie. Combined, they turned 60 this summer, so this was a biggie.

Mid August – Bought a new mattress. Did not buy it from an actual store here in town, called Mattress Liquidators. That’s quite an unfortunate name for the store, since I would think that liquidation would be one of the reasons for getting a new mattress in the first place.

Mid-August – Played hooky from work and went with friends to Valleyfair, an amusement park in the southwest suburbs. Heather’s suggestion of stopping first for donuts was a really good idea, even though you’d think that being shaken and turned upside down would not be optimal for donuts. The day we picked turned out to be cold and rainy, which meant that we essentially had free reign of the park. We got soaked, but not having to wait in lines for anything more than made up for it. I will say that getting pelted by heavy rain on a 70 mile-per-hour roller coaster stings a bit, but what are you gonna do?

Liz and I can wholeheartedly endorse Valleyfair’s newest roller coaster, the Renegade. Unlike most roller coasters, the Renegade is made up almost entirely of short, tight turns. From the opening drop, the ride is really unexpected and is quite a different experience than the typical roller coaster ups and down basically along a single direction. The park expects this one to be a huge hit, and the serpentine waiting area that they set up for this ride seems to be far larger than for any other rides in the park.

We did not go on any of the water rides at the park, since we were already soaked to the bone from the rain. I think we tallied up 21 rides for the day.

Immediately after Valleyfair, we drove to the Costco in Eden Prairie. We plan on joining in November when our Sam’s Club membership expires, and this was our first time in one of the stores. It’s the same general idea as Sam’s, but the merchandise seems to be a tiny bit better quality, overall, and the employees seem to be happier to be there. And as a bonus, hard rain hitting the corrugated metal roof of the building may be the loudest sound you’ll ever hear.

August – Four (count ‘em, four!) sets of friends all closed on new houses here in town. Wow!

Late August – Liz began a clinical rotation in Neillsville, Wisconsin, which is about 2.5 hours away by car. During the week, she stays in a call room inside the hospital itself, which makes for a very easy commute to start her workday. The call rooms are a lot like dorm rooms, and Liz even has a little plastic crate to carry her toiletries to and from the bathroom down the hall. She’s been driving home about two out of every three weekends, so she gets to spend some time with me and the cats.

During her first week out there, her elderly fish died. He was a little blue betta that had far exceeded his expected lifetime, and unfortunately he expired on my watch. I’ve had better luck keeping the cats alive, for which Liz is extremely grateful.

She has a few more weeks in Neillsville, then transfers to much bigger Marshfield, Wisconsin, where she’ll be until the end of 2009. That’s a three hour drive each way. At least we’ll get to see each other on most weekends.

Early September – Went to the State Fair with Kris and Marie, and our friend Jill. The full food tally for us five, as compiled by Kris: 2 Foot Long Hot Dogs, 2 Deep Fried Snickers Bars, 2 Dole Whips, 1 Breakfast Pretzel (bacon and eggs baked in), Peaches and Something, 1 Cheese Curds, 1 Pronto Pup, 2 Cokes, 3 Strawberries and Cream, 4 Corn on the Cobs, 2 Cream Puffs, 1 Popcorn, 1 Root Beer, 1 Bucket of Sweet Martha’s Cookies, 3 Giant Pretzels, 1 Pork Sandwich, 1 Turkey Sandwich, and 2 More Pork Sandwiches.

Obviously, we ate a lot. To show you the ferocity of our consumption power, Kris took pictures of the Sweet Martha’s chocolate chip cookie bucket, before and after we got to it. The pictures were taken six minutes and 57 seconds apart.

On the way home from the Fair, Jill stopped at Culver’s for a cheeseburger, fries and a malt – now THAT’s a trooper!

September 9 – While the rest of the world rejoiced in the remastering and rerelease of the Beatles’ back catalog, I took a different approach on “Crap From The Past” by celebrating the genius of the Stars On 45. That’s right, the guys who hit #1 in 1981 with their imitation-of-the-Beatles medley.

Those of you that didn’t live through it can’t fully appreciate the impact that the Stars On 45 had back in their day. I had all the 45s and the albums, and I knew all the words to everything they ever recorded. Even the tribute records: “We love you Stars On 45/Oh yes we do!” Other kids might have been lured in by the Hooked On Classics guys (the bad boys of the medley world), but for me it was the squeaky-clean Stars On 45, all the way. To this day, they’ve done more for my appreciation of medleys of hit songs set to a thud/clap disco beat than any other group I know.

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking with a guy at the office, and he’d never heard the Stars On 45-album-with-some-songs-from-Revolver. Never heard Stars On 45-album-with-some-songs-from-Revolver?? So I sent him home with a copy of the album, with instructions to listen to ignore the dated production (distracting vocals-that-sound-like-the-Beatles in one channel and thud-clap instrumentation in the other channel), and just try to hear the music as simple medleys of pop songs, strung together with more wit and sophistication than had been ever done before. If he bites, I’ll introduce him to the mono mixes – the joyful strains of what I heard in my childhood on AM radio coming through the speaker in the middle of the dashboard of our 1979 Chevy Caprice.

Of course, the Stars On 45-mania eventually faded, and nowadays you just have to roll your eyes when you hear an oldster talk about how the Stars On 45 were all the rage back then, man. The hits have been played to the point of numbness on oldies radio, and the subsequent solo careers have tarnished the reputation of the band a bit (the guy-who-sounds-like-Ringo solo records, anyone?). But the music will live on forever.

September – Business at work picked up briefly. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when a potential client called. I almost never get cold calls, and it just worked out that I had lots of technical expertise in the field that he needed, so he brought us on board for huge project that consumed almost every waking minute in September.

For the introductory meeting, he wanted me out in California the next day. So I took a local bus home from work right after lunch, threw one day’s worth of clothes in a knapsack, drove to the airport, ran up to the American Airlines counter and asked them, “How quick can you get me to Burbank?” One would think that I had a screenplay burning a hole in my pocket, and if I didn’t get it to the director in time, the whole deal with the studio might fall through…

I spent one full, exhausting, day with the client, breakfast-to-sushi, and headed home the next day. I did have my celebrity sighting at the Burbank airport on the way home. On the security line, there was a very attractive woman a few people ahead of me that looked a lot like actress Wendie Malick (the only worthwhile thing about “Just Shoot Me”). She was wearing a casual pink/purple sweater, jeans, and sunglasses. Not pretentious sunglasses, but normal-looking sunglasses that you’d use to keep the sun out of your eyes. It was pretty bright out there, after all. She was with another adult and a young teenage girl, and I overheard her talking a bit – she had this wonderful, deep voice, just like Wendie Malick. So since we were waiting in a line for security, where you had to show your ticket and driver’s license, I sneaked a peek at her license. Hey! It really was Wendie Malick! And that’s her real name, too!

Now I just assume that there’s an unwritten code of conduct out there that says that you’re not supposed to make a fuss when you see someone you recognize. “HEY! YOU’RE WENDIE MALICK!”, screamed at the top of one’s lungs, would probably be frowned upon. So I didn’t say anything. There’s no need to make someone uncomfortable, just because her job makes her easily recognizable. In case you were wondering, if you were to see her in the airport, she doesn’t come across as a Big Star or anything like that. She just looks, acts, and dresses like a normal person. An attractive one, to be sure, but one with normal social skills who laughs and jokes with her companions and with the airport security people.

Obviously, celebrity sightings are pretty rare in Minneapolis.

So the work itself for this project was good. For the first time that I can remember, I worked 12-hour days and weekends, and it was all billable. It calmed down in early October, we got everything filed before a particular critical date, and now I’m back to normal. But all I really remember about September is that I worked my tail off.

Early October – The Twins and Vikings momentarily made sports fans out of everyone in the entire city. The Vikings’ new quarterback, Brett Favre (you’ve heard of him?), beat the Green Bay Packers in their first face-off against his old team. Favre is now the only NFL player ever to beat every team in the entire league, which is pretty cool. And, after being out of first place from May onward, the Twins went on a rampage at the end of the season and snatched the division title from Detroit. Then, they got clobbered by the Yankees, which was expected.

I was in New York (more on this in a second) for the last two playoff games, where I silently rooted for the Twins. It’s a miracle that the Twins made it as far as they did. And it’s easy to see why they didn’t stand a chance against the Yankees, whose batboys probably earn more than the entire Twins franchise. After the Yankees finished off the Twins, the newspaper headlines in New York were all happy, reading something along the lines of “Yankees now off to destroy the Angels”. When I got back to Minnesota, the headlines here were all sad, sort of like “Twins last morsel of hope crushed by insolent Yankees”. Very amusing to me to see both perspectives on the same day.

Got a Kia Rio as a rental car for the New York visit. I asked the guy for the tiniest tin can they have. Ford Focus? Do you have anything smaller? Then the guy pointed at a little gray car waaaaaaaaaay at the end of the parking lot, which appeared to have never been touched by human hands. That’s a Kia Rio, you say? I’ll take it! For a tiny little tin can with no electric door locks and roll-up windows, it did just fine. It felt sturdier and handled better than all of the small American cars I’ve driven. I don’t think I’d actually own one, but I’d certainly rent one again.

While in New York, I got to see my friend Tracy, whom I know from my days in Rochester, and whom I hadn’t seen in about 12 years. Her parents were selling their house in Thiells, NY (at the north end of Rockland County), and she was paying them a last visit in NY before they move out to Seattle to be close to Tracy. Tracy got married around the same time that Liz and I got married, and she and her husband have a 15-month-old girl. What a coincidence that she and I were both going to be in NY at the same time!

We stopped by during an open house at Tracy’s parents’ house, and got to hang out with Tracy, her husband, her little girl, her parents, and some of her parents’ friends. It was a pretty delightful afternoon – they were all warm, funny people, and we laughed ourselves silly.

Tracy’s little girl, Olivia, insisted that I hold a particular piece of rolled-up cardboard. Don’t know why she chose me, but she had her mind made up. We experimented a bit by putting the cardboard down at different places on the floor in the living room next to different people, and each time she’d pick it up and carry it over to me. Once, while I was holding it, she walked by me, looked at the cardboard, looked up at me, and nodded her approval. Very nice!

At one point, they had to go change Olivia’s diaper. They apologized, and remarked that it was the third time today they had to call for a cleanup on aisle number two. This provoked a comment: “Third time today? It’s a retiree’s dream!” Later in the afternoon, for the fourth time, Olivia was dubbed the “miracle baby”.

Obviously, the whole visit was baby-centric, and there were many, many baby stories. At one point, Tracy and her mom were describing an encounter with a young mother and her rather unattractive baby. Tracy said that upon seeing this baby, she was completely speechless. Her mom felt like she had to say something, and made the save with the comment, “He’s such a BIG BOY!” Again, we laughed ourselves silly.

So why was I in New York? Because my brother, Kenny, got married. Sorry ladies, he’s now spoken for, and all of us Gerbers are now taken.

I learned that literally everyone outside of family calls him “Gerber”. Not “Ken”, “Kenny”, “Kenny G”, “Special K”, or anything that involves a first name. Just “Gerber”. Most of the bride’s extended family didn’t even know his first name. The wedding vows completely avoided his actual first name: “Do you, Gerber, take Maria…” So for the entire weekend, he was “Gerber” and I was “Gerber’s brother”. Liz’s was “Gerber’s sister in law”.

One of my responsibilities as Best Man was to give a toast at the reception. I whittled it down to be incredibly short, and I probably got it down to under 30 seconds. I told a story of how when Ken was 6, and I was 12, our aunt and uncle took us to a Chinese restaurant. I dared him to eat a spoonful of hot mustard, he replied ‘OH YEAH?’, took a big spoonful, then started crying. Afterward, he said he couldn’t taste anything for the rest of the meal, or the Carvel ice cream we had for dessert. I told Maria that the moral of the story was that she could get him to do anything she wanted, as long as she dared him.

Too bad I had to cut so much out of the toast, since the BETCHA CAN’T DO SOMETHING RIDICULOUS / OH YEAH? had, over the years, lead to Kenny eating a shot glass full of ground pepper, a hot dog that had been sent to him in the mail, a seven-pound can of chocolate pudding (over the course of one full day), and a taco that had been sitting in the roof liner of his ’83 Chevy Celebrity in the hot Oklahoma sun for three days. That last one gave him “a little case of the botch”. The Botch is truly one of my favorite stories, but it didn’t fit in the toast.

Wedding day went smoothly except for one significant glitch. At the very start of the day at the hotel, the photographer was getting shots of the groom, the best man, and the three groomsmen. We five guys did some posed shots in the hotel lobby and on the hotel grounds. The photographer thought it would be cool to get a mid-air action shot, and had us jump off a small stone ledge onto a grassy patch about two feet below. Normally, this would have been fine, but upon landing, one of the groomsmen, Randy, bonked his nose against the back of Ken’s head, and broke his nose. Yes, Randy broke his nose during the first batch of pictures for the wedding day.

We got paper towels and ice pretty quickly from the hotel staff, so we were able to control the bleeding and swelling. At that point, we were a little unsure what to do, so we piled us five guys in the Hummer limo (as was planned) and drove to the church. The limo dropped us five guys off at the church, then went back to retrieve the ladies (also as was planned).

We were at the church maybe a half hour, with Randy reclined in the passenger’s seat of someone’s car with ice on his nose, and the other four of us trying to stay calm. Guests and family started showing up at the church, well before the limo returned with the bride and ladies in the wedding party. As fate would have it, the husband of one of the bride’s cousins was an ear/nose/throat surgeon. That’s right, Rob was an ENT specialist and was at the church with the rest of us.

We brought him over to Randy, and he said he could reset Randy’s nose if he had something shaped like a butter knife. Well, the four of us had just been wandering around the church, including their kitchenette! Hey, we knew where there was a butter knife! I ran to the kitchenette, wrapped a flatware knife in a paper towel so I wouldn’t call too much attention to it, and delivered it to Rob, who said the blunt end would work just fine. He then told Randy there would be a quick moment of pain, and that it would subside quickly. I then walked away, not really wanting to see Rob reset Randy’s nose right there in the passenger’s seat of the car. It took just a few seconds, apparently, and was captured on video on Pete’s cell phone. Good as new! Or at least it looked that way from the outside. We loaded Randy up with ibuprofen, and he made it through the rest of the day just fine. Rob said that Randy should get it looked at in a few days, and probably wouldn’t need anything else done to get it to heal properly. They say that if you break your nose, the quicker you get it set, the easier it is to heal. This was set within an hour or two, which is pretty ideal. I can’t imagine any better coincidence for Randy than having an ear/nose/throat surgeon as one of the guests.

And then, after all this was done, the ladies showed up at the church, and the wedding ceremony went on as scheduled. Now THAT’s an unusual chain of events for a wedding...

At the reception, the food was good, and the band was tight. The food was cocktail-style, with a bunch of themed tables set up around the perimeter of the room. Much more interesting than the usual course-after-course wedding reception meal.

I got a chance to catch up with my cousins, Heidi and Beth, who I hadn’t seen since Grandma’s 98th birthday party earlier in the year. And with Aunt Amy and Uncle Arthur, who were the ones who had taken Kenny and me to that particular Chinese restaurant from the toast. Grandma made it to the wedding, too, and we’ll be gathering in DC for her 99th birthday party in January! Ken and Maria are taking a few days to visit some wineries out on Long Island, then the thank-you notes, and then back to normal.

Yeah, once you’ve been to a wedding where one of the groomsmen breaks his nose and has it reset before the ceremony, without any delays to the proceedings, the day-to-day tasks at work can seem a little mundane. That’s what I’m going through now.

I have a wedding in town to DJ on Halloween, and I’m bringing a butter knife just in case.

Stay warm!
Ron & Liz Gerber

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