Ron's Big Life Update - March 1999

Howdy and hello, or as our governor would say, "I ain't got time to bleed".

It's been a while since I last gave the Minnesota update, and actually quite a bit has happened. In January, our department at Seagate had a pretty severe cutback, and we reduced our headcount from around 80 to 20. (The remaining 60 or so were redistributed to other departments here in the Twin Cities.) Morale around the department was pretty bad for a while, as you might imagine. I'm still employed, and I still like the work I'm doing, but I wonder how much longer my project will exist. I give it about a year before the rest of us are sent scurrying to other departments. And so it goes.

Margaret found out about all this and got scared enough to get a job! She's now manning the repairs counter at JB Hudson, the fanciest jewelry store in one of the local malls. (Not the BIG mall - that's too scary.) She dresses super-fancy for work, and I tell her that's it weird to see her dressing in drag. Her co-workers seem pretty cool, and she likes the job. The only down side is that she has to work sporadic mall hours, which includes some evenings and weekends. Not the end of the world.

"Crap From The Past" FINALLY got its own weekly time slot on my tiny radio station out here. Sundays at midnight on KFAI, Minneapolis. Not the greatest time slot, but it's weekly and it's all mine. Finally! (After almost two years of waiting for a slot to open up.) I figured that the first order of business is self-promotion, so I ordered 500 "Crap From The Past" pens. They're Bic Stics, burgundy barrel, burgundy cap, white printing. And they're due in by next week! Oh boy! A box o' pens! All toward the goal of media saturation! Woo-hoo!

"Shakespeare In Love" won the big enchilada! I'm surprised that "Saving Private Ryan" didn't win, but I thought both films were outstanding, and I'd put them in a dead heat as my favorite films of the year. Of course, one of those movies was the feel-good-hit-of-the-year, and other, well... a bit of a downer. Saw "A Simple Plan", directed by Sam Raimi ("Darkman", "Evil Dead 2"), and done very well. Also saw "Elizabeth" - pretty overrated, but not bad.

I found one tiny bright patch in the musical wasteland - Jason Falkner. He writes, produces, and plays all the instruments on his 2 albums, and his songs are catchy pop tunes, similar to Aimee Mann's solo work. I'll be wonderfully surprised if anyone outside of my office hears his single, "Author Unknown". And who let former New Kid On The Block Joey McIntyre back on the radio? I demand a recount...

Gabe Kaplan's birthday is on March 30th. (My "Crap From The Past" tribute to Mr. Kotter airs until the 28th at kfai.org.)

Winter has been lame-o out here. (Which is good.) We got practically no snow in November and December, 1000000000 inches in January, nothing in February, and nothing in March until we got 15 inches all at once about three weeks ago. It was the largest single snowfall out here since Halloween 1991 (and I was here for that, too.) The weather turned mild right after that, and now the only snow left outside is right up close to buildings, where there is no exposure to direct sunlight. You can see a sharp edge near the bottom of the building here at work, and I think it's pretty entertaining. It hit around 60 degrees today, and I think Minnesota is getting restless for spring. I can't wait to start sleeping with the windows open (a bad idea right now because 1. it gets below freezing at night, and 2. Margaret would beat me senseless.)

Hope all is well in the portion of the world that I like to call non-Minnesota. (It's my New York heritage leaking through. You're either from New York, or Who Cares?)

Stay warm,

Ron and Margaret

Ron's Big Life Update - December 1998

Happy holidays! I apologize in advance for this mass e-mailing, but I figured that this is better than sending a chintzy card that doesn't say much. Plus I hate addressing envelopes. So with plenty of further adieu...

Margaret and I have had a mixed 1998. We both lost our fathers in the first half of the year, so we figured that it was gonna be a horrendous year start to finish. Actually, the second half of the year was pretty entertaining, and I will hit some highlights:

I got a solicitation to purchase the bestest book in the world: "The Gerbers in America: From 1790 to 1998!" Joy joy! "You'll go back in history and meet Gerbers like Francis, a farmer, who lived in Monroe County, Illinois in 1850." The author of the invitation, Eugene E. Gerber, "guarantees that once you've started this Gerber book, you won't want to put it down." Utterly spellbinding! "No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended;" I guess we're supposed to delight in the listing of our non-family namesakes. Well, at least "each heirloom quality Gerber book is handmade to order and elaborately illustrated," so that my $34.50 plus postage and handling would not be wasted if I actually cared about my namesakes. The publishers were nice enough to include a wholesome picture of three Gerber-looking people smiling at each other while flipping through a rather paltry-looking paperback book. Margaret got a similar solicitation to buy the book of Vonderwahls, but since there are only seven or so Vonderwahls on the planet, she passed it by.

Minnesota was probably the only place in the world that warmly embraced El Nino, which graced us with the warmest winter on record. It wrought havoc over the summer, though, and we had two monster storms in May, two weeks apart. The first one was a lovely hailstorm, and Margaret assures me from her Colorado upbringing that this was a serious hailstorm. And, courtesy of God and my homeowner's insurance, we had a new roof put on, and we'll be getting new aluminum siding on the side of the house in the spring. Two weeks after the hailstorm, we had hurricane-force winds that left us without power for five days and knocked a tree onto our garage. And thus, a new garage roof. All in all, the insurance companies paid out more for these two storms than they had in the past 31 years combined, and I believe the exact figure was around $848 million. Woo-ha.

We discovered something odd about a motion sensor that came with the house. For months after we moved in, we couldn't get the thing to work. The first time it came on was after our big hailstorm, so we figured that it jostled a loose wire or something. Well, at the end of the summer, Margaret replaced the motion sensor, and noticed that both old one and new one had a big warning printed on them that read, "Do not install upside down." Naturally, the old motion sensor was installed upside down, and I think it's very funny that the first time it ever came on was during the big hailstorm. As if to say, "AAAAAAAA!!!!! Something's moving all right!! Ow!!! Ow!!!"

Gas prices dropped to an absurdly low level recently. I paid 83.9 cents a gallon less than a month ago. Ridiculous, although I can't complain.

I had my teeth cleaned by the worst dentist in Minnesota. That is the last time I pick a name off the list that my insurance company gives me.

We turned in our idiot neighbor to The Man for illegally selling plants off her driveway in a "permanent" garage sale. It worked; no more of her stupid customers parking in front of our house. I will forever treasure the memories of her battles with the police officers that came to ask her a few questions. A helpful hint to those who feel like cursing out police officers: not terribly effective, although supremely entertaining for onlookers.

This past summer, Cindy Crawford married some guy named R. Gerber. Needless to say, this makes me very proud to be an R. Gerber.

Work has been nice and turbulent. Since last year, we've been reorganized three or four times, and we have a new CEO. For some reason, they're still paying me, so I can't complain. My first few patents went through in 1998, so I exist on the U.S. patents database. We finally got a cafeteria in November, after working in the building for over a year. Hoo-ray for lunch! I also took my first sick day ever because a flu shot got me very sick for exactly one day.

The Minnesota Vikings are obliterating everything in their path. It's about time.

Our free cable got turned off last week (Doh!), but it really isn't the end of the world. It appears that South Park has run its course, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 hasn't run any new episodes in months. Although Margaret has a bizarre attraction to The Discovery Channel and The History Channel, I won't be missing cable at all; The Simpsons is still the best-written show on the air, Friends is still funny, and we recently discovered Everybody Loves Raymond, which is excellent. I'm sure that Margaret will be lobbying for a paid cable service, but I stand by my big antenna.

I picked up a Vanilla Ice video for free. (Ron: "I'll give you a dollar." Other guy: "Just take it for free.") It's from 1991, and its only redeeming quality is that it's only about 11 minutes long.

We joined a casual bowling league with two friends of ours. Once every two weeks is plenty casual, and we don't take ourselves all too seriously. Which is good, because we've got last place pretty well locked up. I have a 135 average, which is close to what I used to bowl in college. Not too long ago, I had my best series ever: 180, 186, 185. I thought I had become Mr. Bowler until the next week: 131, 135, 139. Nope, I'm still the king of my 135 domain. Margaret has an excellent acid-green ball that we found in Rochester at an estate sale. The holes fit her hand exactly, and it came with a bag and shoes that fit her feet exactly. If Cinderella was a bowler...

As I write this, it's December 15th, and as of today, the Twin Cities have received exactly 0.1 inches of snow so far this year. Our weather guy says that statistically, it's something like only a 7% chance that we won't have received our first inch of snow by Christmas, but it looks like we'll be able to see the grass this year. Ho ho ho indeed. The ski places out here are getting hurt pretty bad, and I can't imagine snowblower and snowmobile sales are doing too well.

My biggest laugh of the year came from my newfound exposure to the stock market. I will 'splain. About two years ago, while I was still with Kodak, we watched Pinnacle Micro, an optical data storage company with a technical group in Colorado Springs, disintegrate. All the technical people left until it was just one guy, Chuck, who I knew personally. We watched the stock price plummet from a few bucks a share down to around 12 cents. Over the last two years, we'd check up on the stock price and it's been bouncing around between 10 cents and 20 cents a share. Well, I had to call a broker guy for some Seagate stock stuff, so I figured I'd buy about $50 worth of Pinnacle Micro stock as a joke. (Just like in Vegas - it's what I can afford to lose.) I ended up with 500 shares, and the purchase price came out to 11 cents a share. We laughed and laughed, and joked that I now had controlling interest in Pinnacle Micro. Well, that was November 4th. For some reason that I don't fully grasp, it appears that my silly transaction touched off a huge buying spree for Pinnacle Micro, and by November 9th, the stock got as high as 48 cents a share. I was clearly an investment GENIUS, having just quadrupled my investment in five days. Which is all completely absurd when you consider that Pinnacle Micro consists of Chuck, and maybe the desk that Chuck sits at. The crowning achievement came on November 11th, and I present to you the complete press release:

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IRVINE, Calif., Nov 11 (Reuters) - Pinnacle Micro said Wednesday that it has no explanation for the recent rise in the price and trading volume of its shares. Pinnacle said that as previously announced, its liquidity position continues to be severely constrained and that it is looking for sources of longer-term financing. The company said is operating under an informal moratorium on repayment of its trade debt with no defined termination date. The moratorium was granted by a creditors' committee representing a substantial portion of amounts owed to unsecured creditors. The company also said it continues to be in default under its agreement with its secured lender and that if it is declared in default under the secured line of credit by the lender and demand for payment is made, the company would likely be required to seek protection under the Federal bankruptcy laws.

-----

The stock has since decayed slowly to 13 cents a share, and unless somebody drops another 50 bucks on PNCL, it looks like my little joke is just about over. I'd like to think that I was responsible for all this, and that my puny little self caused some wild fluctuations on the stock market. Margaret laughed, too.

My radio show is in syndication, which is nice. It airs on exactly one radio station, and it's not even the one I work at here in Minneapolis. If you're driving around Rochester, NY at 3 PM on Wednesdays, you'll hear me, as if I never left Rah-chester. If you're not near Rah-chester, the show has a permanent home on the KFAI website, and it's updated weekly in the RealAudio format. (Do a search on "Crap From The Past" with the quotes, and you'll end up at my little web page.) My year-end special airs on the webiste until January 3rd, and I think it's pretty good.

We had a tiny Hanukkah party, and Margaret made a huge gingerbread dreidel! It's the greatest thing ever, so I took about a thousand pictures of it, and we donated it to an old folks' home here in town.

Oh yeah, we elected a former pro wrestler as our new Governor. And you can find your "Our governor can beat up your governor" T-shirts at the world's largest mall in Bloomington, MN. (No, I'm not kidding.)

Have a safe and happy Hanukkah, a merry Christmas, an amiable Festivus, and a Happy New Year.

Ron, Margaret, Stinky, and Pukehead (our two cats; pray that we never have kids!) Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - October 1998

"I love cheesy poofs/You love cheesy poofs/If we didn’t like cheesy poofs/We’d be lame" - Cheesy Poofs jingle from South Park, sung (oddly enough) to the tune of NPR’s "All Things Considered" theme music

The Minnesota Vikings are kicking butt, the top 40 radio station out here just started running Casey Kasem’s "American Top 40" on Sunday mornings, I finally found a pizza place in the Twin Cities that makes New York City-style pizza, my house has a new roof courtesy of my homeowner’s insurance and a May hailstorm, and the Barenaked Ladies finally have a #1 song. Life is very good indeed.

Aside from all that, not much is happening out here. Margaret just turned 30, so now I’m married to an old lady. I can just see her driving around at 10 MPH, with only her knuckles showing over the dashboard. (At least until I turn 30. Then life will be back to normal.)

I had my first adverse reaction to a vaccine of any kind: my recent flu shot got me very sick for exactly one day. I had a fever, an elevated pulse, and a headache all over my body. Woo-hoo! And one day later I was back to normal. Very odd. I don’t know what they put in those vaccines, but it caused me to take my first sick day ever. Bleh.

We rented a bunch of movies (not all at once). I can heartily recommend Wag The Dog, Donnie Brasco, and Drugstore Cowboy, and I could go either way on Copland (Stallone was far and away the most interesting thing about the movie. The other characters and the plot are ho-hum, but Sly put it a good performance.)

I caught Deliverance on TV a few days ago, and it’s still a remarkably scary movie. Coincidentally, I picked up a horrible album from 1973 called "Banjo Barons", which features banjo versions of then-current songs, like "You’re So Vain", "I Can See Clearly Now", and "Song Sung Blue". Not for the faint of stomach.

Later this month, "Crap From The Past" will be airing a two-part special on the Stars on 45 medley craze from 1981-82, called "Keep Your Feet On The Ground And Keep Reaching For The Stars On 45".

If you check the U.S. Patents database, you’ll see that I have three patents to my name. Nobody is more surprised at this than I am, because all of them were issued for my Kodak work, and since I left Kodak a year and a half ago, the whole department has been dissolved. Well, if nothing else, I’ve left my tiny mark on history. Along with the other 5.7 million patents that have been issued.

We expect snow on Wednesday. Life is back to normal...

Stay warm,

Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - July 1998

"Summer blondes, revealing tan lines/I'll make more moves than Allied Van Lines." - Blotto, from "I Wanna Be A Lifeguard", 1980

Hope you had a good July 4th - beer and pyrotechnics all around.

Not much exciting is going on out here. We're having a large tree removed from our backyard. This is the tree that dropped a branch on our garage in May, and it's a very large, dead tree. I don't know the exact dimension, but I most definitely can't put my arms all the way around it. Maybe half-way around it, if I'm lucky. Margaret got to watch the guys in the cherry-picker, which they drove onto our backyard. (Part of it is paved in concrete, put there by a former owner who presumably wanted a nice place to park his Winnebago. Very Minnesotan.) I haven't seen so much dead wood since I left Kodak. (Badda-BING thank you very much...) It will be nice to have a sunny backyard now.

Insurance companies paid out $848 million to Twin Cities homeowners in the first half of 1998 - more than the last 31 years combined. I guess the storms really were a fluke. We'll be having our roof replaced and the side of the house re-sided in the fall, when the demand dies down and hopefully, the quality of the repairs goes back up.

You might have noticed that everyone's favorite supermodel, Cindy Crawford, married some guy named R. Gerber. Needless to say, this makes me very proud to be an R. Gerber.

In one of the more surreal occurrences in my life, my friend Mia-from-Tucson showed up at our house a few Wednesdays ago. Ding-dong... HI! I was just in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by! (!!!) Most surprising, since it's something like an 1800-mile drive to Tucson. She was driving across the country, and thought she'd say HI before she drove off to Chicago. She took pictures, had some lemonade, watched South Park with us, and drove off toward Chicago. Very very surreal.

Margaret and I spent the last few days in NY with mom. Grandma was coming in from Florida, so my brother and I had orders to come home to see Grandma. We ate lots of black-and-whites (the same cookies once featured on Seinfeld) and NY pizza, replaced the faucets in mom's bathroom, and saw Grandma. We also made into Chinatown one night, and Margaret bought a $10 watch from some guy who sells watches on Mulberry Street. What a hoot! And despite the fact that my mom's car hit 77,777 miles at precisely 4:44 PM on 7/28 (no joke!), I did not win $290 million in the PowerBall lottery.

We recently spent a day at ValleyFair - the local amusement park. Seagate picked up the tab - it's their annual "Appease The Masses" day. Most excellent, if you go on a weekday. The numbers from "The Wild Thing", their new rolley-coaster are as follows. Maximum velocity: 74 MPH. First drop > 200 feet. Altitude: Highest thing around for quite a few towns. Color: Green, the scariest of all colors. Margaret and I had a very good time, even though she punched me when I kidded her about the "you must be THIS tall" thingy. She's 5 foot 4, and she'll hurt you pretty good.

Rented "The Sweet Hereafter" and "When We Were Kings" - both excellent. Saw "Lost In Space" in the cheapie theater - stinky. There is a cheapie theather within walking distance to our house that's undergone some renovations recently, so it's now the "Cinema Grill". You sit at tables, just like at TGIFriday's, and you order food that's just like at TGIFriday's for prices comparable to TGIFriday's. I don't know if this food-at-film will start a national craze, but it's an interesting experiment. It's good as long as it's not a super-serious movie. ("Shindler's List" with potato chips? I think not.)

I have a friend working in radio in Boston who recently commissioned me to put together some CDs with the worst possible music I could find. I mean jaw-dropping, nausea-inducing, bad music. It's part of a Chinese water torture-type contest for his morning show. No problem! I've sent off 2 CDs already, and I can't even imagine the bodily harm that would come from (a) listening to the discs straight through, or (b) the retribution that one would take from being made to listen to the discs straight through. "Pac Man Fever", Milli Vanilli, the two guys from Milli Vanilli actually singing, "Rock Me Jerry Lewis" (sorry Mike, he asked for it by name), The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" massacred by Barry White, the Shaggs, and many many more. Plus a whole CD devoted to horrible medleys like "Stars on 45" and "Hooked On Classics"! I am beaming with pride that these atrocities are getting airplay, and I am very proud to be the unofficial Godfather of Crap. (Tune in to WFNX Boston to hear the Pain firsthand, and tune in to "Crap From The Past" at www.kfai.org to hear my own show. It hurts real bad.)

In the last two weeks, my organization chart at work has changed twice. We now have a new CEO, and I don't know what effect this will have on my day to day routines. If I have to eat lunch at a time other than 11:30, I'm gonna get mad.

Hope all is well in your far-away places. Stay warm...

Ron "There's a lot of crap on the radio, but there's only one Crap From The Past" G

Ron's Big Life Update - June 1998

Hi, all. First, and most importantly, Crap From The Past now has its own webpage as well as on-line audio (RealAudio for you propellerheads.) Go to www.kfai.org and find the Crap From The Past stuff. I have old playlists, too. Boy, am I keeping up with technology or what?

Well, Mother Nature has been totally wacked out for the last few weeks. I'll explain.

Friday, May 15th: Around 4 PM it got dark enough outside so that the lights in the parking lot went on, which is not a good sign because it's usually light until 9 PM this time of year. I heard rumors that a storm was moving in, so I just drove home. And it's a good thing I did, because Minneapolis got hit with a serious hailstorm. (Margaret confirms the seriousness of it, and she grew up in hailstorm country in eastern Colorado.) The skies got kinda greenish, then pitch black dark, then the winds started to blow pretty hard, then for about sixty seconds, the Twin Cities got pummelled with hailstones the size of melon-balls. (If you have a melon-baller, they looked like translucent pieces of canteloupe.) This may not sound like much, but it was enough to dent nearly all the cars that were parked outside (think ball-peen hammer dent every few inches on every car in town). Not mine, though, because I was a chicken and went home. It also dented the heck out of our aluminum siding on the south side of the house, and broke one window. The insurance appraisial: New roof, new siding on one side of house, new window, four new screens. (Woo-hoo! I would've needed a new roof in a few years anyway!) I saved a few of the hailstones in my freezer.

Two weeks later...

Saturday, May 30: It started to rain in the evening. Margaret and I were over at some friends' house. We got some serious lightning, and decided we better check in with the Weather Channel. (Cliff Claven's favorite!) We managed to see severe thunderstorm warnings all over the state briefly before cable went out. We decided that it was time go home before it got any worse, but nature had other plans for us, as evidenced by the wall of rain, the severe bendage of large tree on our friends' lawn, and the emergency sirens that went off. We spent a few minutes in their basement with a radio on, and carefully drove home about a half hour later during rain that was merely torrential. During the drive home, we heard that there were some large trees down and some power outages, but we had no idea what we were in for when we got home. We found a large branch about 10 inches in diameter resting on our garage, and an even larger branch about 12-15 inches in diameter resting between our house and the neighbor's garage. (It actually squashed a bunch of plants on her driveway, but I'll get to that in a minute.) It turned out that there were straight-line wind gusts over 80 MPH that took down lots and lots of big trees around the city, including the oldest tree in the state, which was something like 122 feet high. My house was without power from Saturday to Thursday, so we ate out a lot and I dropeed the leftovers at the fridge at work. The insurance appraisal: New roof on the garage. (More woo-hoo! That needed a new roof, too!) Needless to say, we lost the hailstones from the last storm.

So what about the neighbor's plants? Well, our neighbor is nuts. Literally crazy, we think. If nothing else, she's an idiot. She's in her 50's and she sells plants in an illegal garage sale from her driveway all summer. We wouldn't mind much if we liked her, but she's an idiot. (Too many instances to describe here. I'm sure Margaret could go on and on for hours, but suffice it to say that she's an idiot and Margaret and I wish nothing but evil on her and her stupid plants.) Well, when the huge branch fell off our tree, it missed everything structural and landed squarely on her plants. We think that God must be pushing the "smite" button.

So we got fed up with the idiot-neighbor's illegal garage sale and we called the IRS on her. (We figured that the Man would be more responsive than the police.) And sure enough, we watched with giddy kid-excitement as a Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic yelling at the officer. Good plan! I'm sure the yelling part will look good in the police report. Well, that was two weeks ago, and we decided that since the officer's visit had no effect on her plant business (signs still up, etc.), that we'd call again. And sure enough, the Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic again. Ooh - this is so much fun!!! The plan is to call a third time this Sunday when idiot-lady is in full swing, because this time they can cite her for a bunch of violations like not obeying the first two warnings, not paying taxes on her illegal business, and all sorts of good stuff! We hope she goes to jail. Stupid neighbor...

I have to say that the weather and the idiot-lady next door have totally dominated our lives for the last few weeks. I have seen two excellent movies and I will give them quick reviews here:

• "The Truman Show". I read a review that called it an 80 million dollar art film with Jim Carrey. I thought it was excellent, and unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I'd compare it to "Forrest Gump", but I thought Gump wasn't all that great. Two thumbs way up, and I hope it wins some Oscars next year.
• "In The Company Of Men" (on video). An indie film from last year about two scumbag business guys who try to both seduce and then dump a girl. That's pretty much the whole plot, but it doesn't convey just how scummy these two guys are. I don't think I have ever seen such despicable characters on the big screen (and I saw "They Saved Hitler's Brain"...) An excellent, thoroughly original, and deeply disturbing film. I loved it.

What if there was a stuffed animal store? Literally, a store where you could buy animals, stuffed.

We have riding lawn mowers. So why not a riding vacuum cleaner? Could you think of anything more fun than driving around the house on your riding vacuum cleaner?

I had a dream not too long ago in which I was at some garage sale and was looking through some kids' toys and found one of those old Fisher-Price "record" players, which has the mechanism for a music box in the little "tone arm" and plays those fake plastic records, each with a different "song" on them. I was looking through the records (as I have been known to do in real life) and looking at the titles, and I remember seeing some mundane songs like "Edelweiss" right next to a record by Parliament. PARLIAMENT?!?!? I imaged "Make my funk the P-Funk/I wants to get funked up" played in tinkly music box sounds, and I woke up laughing.

I just remembered my brother telling me about a body-builder friend of his who occasionally refers to people as "Quadzilla", "Tyrannosaurus Pects", and "Rippopotamus". I don't know why such things creep into my mind...

So be sure to tune into CFTP if you have a sound card and an internet connection on your computer. The website has statistics to tell me how many people are listening, and frankly the numbers are pretty puny right now. www.kfai.org

And be sure to wish evil on the idiot-lady next door,

Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - April 1998 (II)

So I want to find out if I can get my teeth cleaned by a particular dentist whose office is one block away from my house. So I check the big list of eligible dentists, which says to call this particular toll-free number to find out if he's still participating in the health plan. So I try the number and it's busy. So I try sporadically over the next hour, and it's still busy. Miraculously, I get through, but right around quitting time for me. So I've been on hold for at least twenty minutes, and I figure that this is as good a time as any to write an e-letter.

Well, things are settling down after our stay with mom in NY. We were in NY for about two weeks, and now we've been home for almost two weeks. The outpouring of support for mom has been remarkable; she's gotten over a hundred sympathy cards, and friends are still calling and stopping by all the time. Since we spent two weeks with family, we naturally accumulated a whole lot of family stories, some of which I will share with you now.

I have known for years that my stepsister Debbie has a great sense of humor. I found out during this trip that when she was in college, she used to celebrate her friends' birthdays by hitting them in the face with a pie. Just like in the cartoons. Apparently, she very quickly became notorious for this, and sometimes had to go to great lengths to make sure that the person got hit in the face with a pie, like hiding in a dorm room, etc. While reminiscing fondly about one particular encounter, she remarked, "They had to take up the carpet." I laughed.

I found out that my grandfather used to breed pugs. (For those of you that are as inorganic as I am, Margaret tells me that pugs are dogs. Ugly little smelly dogs.) I hate dogs. Up until recently, I thought I was following very closely in my grandfather's footsteps. Well, apparently not any more.

I got a bunch of great stories about my brother Kenny, most of which are directly from Kenny himself. I distinctly remember him yelling "Somebody get me out of this stupid crib!" at a very early age, and I think I taught him that.

Kenny loves to eat (even more than I do), and nearly all of his stories involve (1) food or (2) his car, a 1983 Chevy Celebrity, which is known for breaking down in the worst possible places and for being nearly filled with old food. I could recall the incident in which the mice living off the old food in his car escaped through the garage and infested the house, but I'll do that some other time.

A few summers ago, Kenny and some friends were driving to New Orleans, and had stopped at Taco Bell somewhere in Mississippi. Somehow, there were some leftover tacos and the guys just left them in the car. After they had ripened in the car in the hot summer sun for two full days, Kenny decided to eat them. As he put it, he got a little case of "The Botch", and was plenty sick.

Then there was the time that he and five or six other guys decided to go to Taco Bell and order one of everything on the menu. Kenny wanted to be the one to actually place the order at the drive-thru, naturally using his car. The guys pulled up to the drive-thru at about the same time as another car. Kenny waved the other car ahead of them, knowing that they were about to place a fairly substantial order. The other car insisted that Kenny go first. Well, OK. Kenny pulled up to the little speaker and began to go down the menu item by item. "I'd like one taco." "Soft or hard shell?" "One of each. I'd like one chicken burrito." "Regular or deluxe?" "One of each." The woman at the other end of the speaker figured out pretty quickly what they were doing and naturally got very upset. Kenny reassured her that this was all legitimate, and that they did indeed want all this food. They held up handfuls of money for the little camera to see. Well, Kenny worked his way down the entire menu, including cinnamon twists, hot chocolate, and one of every soft drink. The bill came to about $51, and it was a fairly large effort to get all the food from the little window into the car. The woman gave Kenny an entire box of hot sauce packets. It took quite a few hours for the six or seven of them to eat all the food, but they did it. The worst was the sour cream that was on some of the items; apparently sour cream isn't too good after it's been at room temperature for a few hours. Kenny tells the story with a twinkle in his eye, especially when he recalls how when the car behind him pulled up to the window, the woman told them that they were closed for the next fifteen minutes. Those guys were pissed.

I think the best story was from Phil's days in the navy. He was in the navy in the early '50s, and only told us one story about his navy days during the entire time we knew him. He was brand new to the navy, on a ship at sea somewhere, and was in charge of being the timekeeper guy. (I'm sure there's a better term for that job, but I forget what it is.) Every hour on the hour, Phil was supposed to ring a bell to let the crew know what time it is. He'd ring it once, then twice the next hour, three times the hour after that, and so on. What Phil didn't know is that when you get to eight bells, the next hour resets to one bell. Well, Phil was a picture of enthusiasm. He rang his one bell, then his two bells, then three. He was proud of his job, and he rang the bells loudly and clearly. Then six, then seven, then eight. Then, on the ninth bell, he "wound up and gave it such a ZETZ!" (a wonderful Yiddish word meaning OY! I hit it so HARD!) The captain looked up, then walked over to Phil. "Sailor, how long have you been in the navy?" "Six months, sir." "Well, I have been in the navy twenty-five years, and in all my years as captain, I have NEVER heard NINE BELLS!" I still laugh when I think of nine bells...

Ron "thank you for holding" G

P.S. I got taken off hold halfway through the Taco Bell Menu story.

Ron's Big Life Update - April 1998 (I)

More bad news from the Gerber household: After battling leukemia for a few months, my stepfather Phil passed away this morning. Most of you had met Phil at some point, and you know that he was my "dad", even if not by blood relation; we were very close. The funeral will be on Thursday , and we'll be sitting shiva (sp?) until Sunday. Margaret and my brother are already in NY with my mom, and I'll be flying out this evening. We'll certainly miss him.

If you need to get in touch with me between now and Sunday, I'll be at my mom's house.

Hope all is well in your neck of the woods. Say a little prayer for my mom...

Ron