Well, I think four months is certainly long enough between these giant life updates. So happy holidays, and a safe and happy new year to you all. If that doesn't qualify me for the latest holiday greetings in history, just wait until next year...
The last time I wrote was in November, when I was in danger of being downsized by my company, ADC. Well, I'm still at ADC, and it looks like we're free and clear until May, which is when any layoffs would occur on the calendar. Living fiscal quarter-to-fiscal-quarter is not the way to run a business, and for a while last year, we were living layoffs-to-layoffs. The telecom industry is still far from healthy overall, but it looks like we hit rock bottom late in 2001, and at least we've stabilized there for a while. So I'm just happy to be working at all.
My day-to-day activities have changed quite a bit over the last few months. During our last "reorganization" late last year, I was essentially traded to another ADC facility, about 40 miles from the old building, and 25 miles from my house. The change doubled my commute, and now I'm in a building with no cafeteria (oh GREAT!), doing computer modeling for telecom lasers. Our product looks like a computer chip with a fiber coming out of it, so it doesn't have the whiz-bang cool look of a laser pointer or a CD. Drat! But there's plenty of work to be done, and I'm just happy to be working at all.
And the irony of me working on lasers is plentiful; every time I took a lasers class in grad school (spanning two schools and three time zones), I always got the lowest grade in the class. Without fail. I tried hard, but I couldn't make it sink in. And now I'm exposed to it every day...
On the plus side, I get to do a bit of corporate travel, and I leave Monday for SWEDEN! I have a few days in Stockholm, and I'll be traveling with two other guys from ADC. I wanted to bring Margaret along (a perfect Valentine's Day present), but the three of us are staying in somebody's house over there, and Margaret got vetoed. I still feel pretty bad about not bringing her, so we'll probably take a trip somewhere this spring to appease my conscience.
So the big news: Last year's Emergency Room competition ended in a tie, 1-1. Margaret got stitches in her thumb, and I had The Plague. Personally, I think The Plague beats stitches hands down, but a tie is still a tie. So far, 2002 is tied up at 0-0. Dull...
"Crap From The Past" turned 10 years old in January. I have the longest-running retro show on the Twin Cities airwaves, and (as expected) my anniversary was virtually ignored by everyone in the business. Oh well. I'll be making fancy CFTP shirts next month for pledge drive premiums, which should be sty-lin'!
There have been quite a few holidays since the last time I wrote, so I'll retrace my steps.
We celebrated Thanksgiving with my family in New York. Mom made turkey (yay!), my brother Kenny flew into town (yay!), and we et and et and et. Mom inadvertently cooked the turkey upside down, and it was the best turkey we've ever had anywhere, so I heartily endorse cooking your next turkey upside down. Juuuuuuuuuuicy...
And immediately after we finished eating with Mom, Kenny went out with his friends to go eat some more. Ain't life sweet?
Kenny had some nice stories about the pearls of wisdom he's received over the years from convenience store clerks. A Dunkin' Donuts guy in New Jersey once told him, "You must learn to live with disappointment." Which is unquestionably the most dignified way of saying Tough Patooty that I've ever heard.
Kenny recalled an incident at a 7-11 in New York that sounds exactly like Apu from The Simpsons. Kenny wanted a fountain drink, and was pointing at one of the sample cups on top of the machine. "Do you want this one?" and the clerk pointed to the 12-ounce cup. No, bigger. "This one?" to the 16-ounce cup. No, bigger. 20-ounce? Bigger. The clerk's expression got more and more surprised as he worked his way down the line. 32-ounce? 44-ounce? 64-ounce? Finally, Kenny reached the end of the line, much to the horror of the clerk: 96-ounces. He told Kenny, "This will make you very happy," and it indeed made Kenny very happy. Those guys know everything.
The weather was perfect in NY last November, and we spent 3 or 4 full days driving around New York and north Jersey visiting friends I haven't seen in a while. We had brunch with Karen and Brian, the couple whose wedding we missed when Margaret had her gall bladder removed two summers ago. (Gall stones are still in our fridge, and still look unpleasantly like old hard-boiled egg yolks.) The running joke during the brunch was that Karen offered to make pancakes if we wanted them, but there was so much other yummitude that we politely declined. A few days after we got back, I told Karen that we changed our minds - we'd like pancakes after all. Ha-ha's all the way around. Well, about a week later, we got a priority mail box from Karen and Brian: a pancake and strawberry syrup, sealed in a ziplock bag! Big HA-HA's all the way around. I kept the pancake for a few months, sealed inside a few concentric ziplock bags, but I finally tossed it when it looked like the green pancake creatures wanted out. A joke is only funny until the EPA gets involved...
I noticed an unfortunate trend in suburban NYC - the replacement of small local stores with giant national chains. Granted, some of the old stores were all that terrific (Caldor, Pergament, and dozens of others that Kenny and I didn't work at when we were kids, like Rickels, Bamberger's, Rock Bottom), but at least they had some sort of personality of their own. Now, virtually all of them are gone, replaced by Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and the 2nd biggest mall in the country (right behind Minnesota's own Mall Of America - joy!) Case in point: While at Mom's house, I needed to buy shaving cream, packing tape, and a set of Allan wrenches. These are three fairly unrelated items, and while I could see finding all of them under one roof at a Target/Wal-Mart store, I just wanted to stay away from traffic (on the day after Thanksgiving, mind you) and pick them up at a small mom & pop place. Once I thought about what was still left in the county, I realized that there just aren't any more mom & pop places. I couldn't think of a single drugstore or hardware store that didn't involve a trip to the giant mall. So I trekked out to the Target at the giant mall on the day after Thanksgiving, cursing and swearing at the poorly-designed traffic patterns and trying to avoid the thousands of other disgruntled shoppers who also ran out of packing tape, shaving cream, and Allan wrenches. If the New York City area is an indicator of what the rest of the country will be like in 20 years (as I read somewhere), then wave goodbye to local culture and say hello to giant, impersonal corporate Americana. Quick easy shopping at the huge Wal-Mart, fancy dining at the Subway, Applebee's, and Starbuck's, and nary a dissenting voice left to be heard. I was appalled.
Unfortunately, that's the very same issue that I've been dealing with in the radio world for years. I work for a tiny, local station that's run by community people. The contrast between my station and the corporate-run commercial stations gets more apparent every year, and I think people are wising up to their cookie-cutter mentality. I say, go local, and I'll step down off my soapbox now.
While we were in NY, we drove into Manhattan for a day, and hooked up with some old friends (Charles and J) who've lived there almost as long as I've known them. J lives on a little-traveled street, and there's always parking in front of his apartment (yes, that's FREE parking in Manhattan). J, you can't ever move from that apartment! We did all the things that New Yorkers do - ride the subway, eat pizza, and curse and swear a lot. (I'm kidding about that last one. To be fair, Manhattanites are some of the most polite city dwellers I've run across anywhere. The Big Apple has come a long way since the dark days of the '80s.) We also went down to the World Trade Center site to see how the cleanup was going. It's been hard to describe to Minnesotans just how big those buildings were. It's probably three times bigger than anything in Minneapolis, and I mean three times bigger in all three dimensions. (Total volume - 27 times larger than anything out here.)
While I had a pretty good knowledge of Manhattan, most of my experience was farther north than the WTC site, and I didn't know the surrounding streets very well. It's at the southwest corner of Manhattan, with nothing to the west but the Hudson River, and only a few blocks to the south. Unless you were on an elementary school field trip to the financial district, there wasn't much of a draw to locations that far south in Manhattan. J knows the area much better than I do - he used to cycle along some of the west side streets that have been closed since September.
We took the subway down to a stop a few blocks south of the site, then walked north. At the time, the streets had barricades so that you couldn't get within three or four blocks of the cleanup. What a mess! We'd all seen the pictures on TV, but it was very humbling to see just how far and wide the damage spread. If you were to follow the barricades around all three sides (the fourth side would have been at the Hudson River), you'd walk about a mile. A few of the surrounding side streets were completely torn up to expose the utility lines underneath. (That was fascinating all by itself - nobody ever gets to see all the stuff two feet underneath the pavement, and I can easily see why local utility service has been spotty since September. Lotsa pipes. LOTSA pipes...) And it's still tough for me to get a sense of scale, since I hadn't spent much time gazing upward from the base of the buildings. There were some 30-story buildings just adjacent to the site, and it was very difficult for me to imagine the two towers, THREE TIMES TALLER than these giant 30-story buildings that were standing in front of me. God bless the New Yorkers - those folks have been through a lot lately, and still rank as the most polite of all the big-city people I've run across.
So Thanksgiving was in New York, which was nice. Christmas was in Florida, which was even nicer. We flew into Tampa, rented a car and drove down to Fort Lauderdale to spend a few days with my grandmother (now 91) and Kenny, who flew in for the weekend. After a few days in Fort Lauderdale, we drove back up to Tampa to spend Christmas at Margaret's sister's house with her side of the family. Seven days in Florida does a Minnesota-body good...
We rented the smallest tin can we could get - a brand new 2002 Kia with 900 miles on it. (We would put another 900 on it before we gave it back.) The gas mileage was fine and it drove OK, but I wouldn't want to own one.
Tampa was fun - family and gifts are always a good time. Margaret and I ate at our favorite Cuban restaurant again (Viva "La Teresita"!), twice. It would be wonderful to go there with the whole family, but I don't think something like that will ever happen until the nieces and nephews are grown and out of the house. Aside from the time that Margaret and I sneaked away, Tampa was a kid-centric visit, to say the least.
Fort Lauderdale was a blast. We drove out there through one of the two-lane highways right through the Everglades. Margaret loves the weird nature stuff, so we stopped at a pull-out deep in the heart of the Everglades to check out nature. Margaret found two feathers while she was wandering around. ("I'd say they were from some type of bird." "Thanks, Ron. You've been very helpful.") We showed up at Grandma's house, and Grandma was waiting for us, along with an anniversary card from my aunt and uncle! (Six years already? We keep forgetting our anniversary because it falls so close to the holidays.)
Naturally, we were given a short list of little chores around Grandma's house. (Last year, we bought some furnace filters and changed the battery in the smoke detector. Very easy for us, not so easy for Grandma.) She wanted one of her lamps re-wired, so after an easy trip to Home Depot (I know, don't get me started), and five minutes with a screwdriver, I delivered a perfectly-functioning lamp. She also wanted some flowers planted in the front yard, so Margaret used the same trip to HD to buy one of every color for some particular kind of flower (I forget which kind - she's the gardener in the family). I re-wired, Margaret planted, and Grandma was very happy indeed.
When my grandparents moved down to Florida in 1972, one of the first decorations on their lawn was a ceramic mushroom that my grandmother had painted by hand. It sat on the lawn uneventfully for 29 years, until it mysteriously disappeared in 2001. Someone took Grandma's ceramic mushroom?!? Why?!? Margaret and I thought that was pretty funny, so when we found an incredibly ugly ceramic mushroom at a dollar store near Grandma's house, we bought it, and Margaret planted it right next to the new flower bed without telling Grandma. As Grandma was inspecting her new flowers, the resulting conversation was priceless: "Margaret, where did that come from?" "Well, mushrooms sometimes just sprout up." That seemed to make everybody happy.
Then Kenny showed up. We let him replace a curtain in the garage, because he's the tallest. (You want to be the tallest one in the family? Then, fine. YOU get the tall jobs...) Then the eating began, as it always does at these family gatherings. My grandmother took us to a local Italian restaurant, where the "lighter fare" section of the menu included eggplant parmesan. (No joke.) Tasty, and heavy.
The next day, Grandma wanted us to take her to the restaurant of our choice. We weren't so sure this was a good idea, since I couldn't see her really enjoying the Cuban-style food of the local places. But we found a Colombian restaurant about a mile from her house (walking distance!), and it looked promising enough, so we brought her there. The restaurant was probably new, and still had the sheen of people trying really hard to please. Very friendly wait staff, huge portions, and even live music (a guy playing a little keyboard and singing). They were putting in the effort, and we appreciated it. Margaret, Kenny, and I got sort of a sampler plate - one of everything. Slab of meat, slab of different kind of meat, pork rind thing, beans. All in all, mighty tasty, and a bit similar to Cuban food. (I'd never had Colombian food before.) Fortunately, Grandma found something on the menu that was closer to her tastes - a grilled chicken breast, tossed salad, white rice, french fries. She said her food was very bland. She said that a couple of times, until we realized that being bland was a good thing for her. Well, if she didn't like it, then she was a good sport about it, and we probably won't take there the next time we visit. (We'll go without her and eat ourselves silly!)
We got some good stories out of her during the visit. One time, she went to use a pay phone, put in a dime, and essentially hit the jackpot - a flood of dimes came out the coin return! Wow! Just like in the cartoons! Another story was from our childhood, from when we used to visit the grandparents as kids. There were always plastic pitchers of lemonade and iced tea in the fridge, and the way that we could tell them apart was that the lemonade pitcher had a big masking tape "T" on it. The tea pitcher had no distinguishing features, but the lemonade was "T". I still don't know why.
We were told to pack our bathing suits, because we'd have to go to the pool. It's the law. As kids, when my folks would bring us down to visit, the highlight would always be trips to the community pool. The residents were all senior citizens (it was a senior community, after all), the younger adults were children of the residents, and the only kids running around were somebody's grandkids - just like us. Just adjacent to the pool were the shuffleboard courts, and there were always people playing shuffleboard. If you've never seen shuffleboard, the goal is to give your little plastic disc (about the size of a small frisbee) a shove with a big stick, and try and get the disc to land in one of some painted squares at the other end of the court. A leisurely game, to say the least. The different squares had different point values, and you'd keep score on some small blackboards at one end of the courts with a piece of big, oversized chalk. (Why was the chalk always so big?) I remember shuffleboard being a big deal back then, and Grandma tells me that everyone played; there were shuffleboard leagues that would compete pretty seriously, and I remember having to wait my turn on the courts to play against Kenny. Well, this time, after we dried off from the pool, we showed Margaret the shuffleboard courts. She'd never seen the game before, and it was fun for Kenny and me to explain the significance of the game from our childhood.
The equipment was still in the creaky little closet - the wire racks that held a series of mismatched discs (so that you always had to mix and match to get a full set of your color), the poles that were coming apart just enough so that they always need to be screwed back together, some bowling pins that we never figured out how to incorporate, and a set of erasers and oversized chalk. Kenny and I marveled that it was just like we remembered it - we even joked that our scores were probably still on the blackboards from our last visit in 1982.
Except that this time, there was no one on the courts. It slowly sunk in that all the people who played this sport 20 years ago have passed on. Shuffleboard, apparently, belonged to a particular age group at a particular point in time, and was not something that got passed from generation to generation. I can't speak for Kenny, but I felt a very real sense of loss as we played our first game of shuffleboard in 20 years, knowing that we were probably the only people to touch the equipment in eons, and that we would probably be the last people to play until another set of full-grown grandkids wandered onto the courts out of curiosity. However, it didn't stop us from playing the kind of game that would have gotten us kicked off the courts instantly, 20 years ago...
So we had an afternoon to kill, and Margaret and I decided to drag Kenny to the giant swap meet in Fort Lauderdale. Back in Tucson, we used to go to the swap meet to get our fill of sunburn and cheap junk, so we thought we'd check out the local flavors in Fort Lauderdale. It was HUGE - probably 4 times the size of the Tucson swap meet. I don't think we bought anything, but we ate chili dogs and ice cream, and spent too much time in the sun: it's the True Meaning of the Swap Meet. We used to joke that you could get everything you need in life at the swap meet, and that was certainly true here. Margaret found a guy who sold jewelry tools. She was looking for a tiny anvil, but his English wasn't so good, and the only way she could convey what she wanted was to draw it. He immediately recognized the drawing as "Oh! Poosnya! I don't have." I don't know what language the word "poosnya" is, but it clearly meant "anvil", and he clearly didn't have any. I was most fascinated by the vast array knock-off products, like the "Halo Kitty" items. There were even two different knock-offs of Crest toothpaste - Chance and Crescent, both with artwork in the same Crest font. Bizarre! And now that we've seen it, we probably won't go back. That thing ties up traffic for miles in all directions.
On our last afternoon there, we had a few hours before we were to meet Grandma for dinner, I had a bizarre idea. I must have been in a reflective mood from the shuffleboard, and I wanted to drive up to West Palm Beach to go see the apartment where my other set of grandparents used to live (they passed away many years ago). I hadn't been up there since I was 12, and although I didn't remember much about how to get there, I figured my keen Gerber sense of direction would guide us there intact. Kenny hadn't been up there since he was 12 either, and he seemed up for the ride. Margaret didn't object, so the three of us piled into the Kia, and off we went.
From my childhood, I remembered only sketchy details about the drive up there. I knew you get on the Florida Turnpike north, and I remembered something about the distance 37 miles, and that was all. I figured that there was a ticket you got when you got on the Turnpike, and the distance between exits must have been 37 miles. But beyond that, I was putting my faith in that tiny bit of directional instinct - the same instinct that lets a cat find its way home from hundreds of miles away.
So we drove north, and the Turnpike looked completely unfamiliar. Maybe it's because I used to sleep on the drive, or maybe it really has changed in the 20 years since I last rode on it. But either way, when I saw the sign for "Okeechobee Blvd", I knew immediately that was the exit. Kenny agreed. And sure enough, it was 37 miles from when we got on the Turnpike.
The exit ramp looked completely unfamiliar, and when we came to a traffic light at the end, we just guessed, uh... let's turn left. We drove only about 100 feet when Kenny pointed and said, "There it is!" Yup, we'd just passed a sign on the left side of the road for "Century Village", the large retirement community whose name we'd completely forgotten, but a name that Kenny recognized immediately. We turned around and drove up to the gate.
I was unprepared to talk to the person manning the gate. (The gate was unmanned back when we were kids.) He asked who I was visiting, and rather than explain that the people I knew in Century Village had been gone for 15 years and that I just wanted to drive around and see if it still looks the same, I gave him the names of my grandparents, knowing full well that they wouldn't be on the directory. I'm a terrible liar (I probably should have given the just-driving-around explanation) and we got turned away at the gate. Kenny and I remembered that there was another gate around the corner, so we got back on Okeechobee Blvd. and marveled at how large Century Village was. We turned left at the first light, and Kenny predicted that there would be a Dairy Queen right...THERE! How did he remember that? He was right, of course, and a short distance later we found the other gate and turned into the driveway. It, too, had a gatekeeper, and since I didn't want to bother anybody, we just sat in the car on the driveway for a minute, looking in and trying to remember what it looked like on the inside.
Seeing the second gate brought back all sorts of memories for me, and although our Kia remained parked at the driveway, my mind's eye could travel vividly past the gate to the square perimeter road that encircles the entire community, where you turn right at the pool, go all the way around to the northwest corner of the complex, turn right, then right, then left, onto streets whose names escape me, then you park in the visitor's spaces, walk up the concrete staircase (which had big side rails - big enough to house a bee's nest; I got stung once), turn left at the top of the stairs, and Lila and Dave, my grandparents, lived in the first apartment on the left. "208 Dorchester I". (Kenny, how on earth did you remember that?) I remembered their cozy little apartment, with the sliding doors on the bathrooms and another one that separated the living room from the bedroom, as if there weren't enough room for hinged doors. I remembered the little screened-in balcony outside the bedroom, with the green astroturf carpeting. I remembered their little radio and record player, with their copy of Bobby Freeman's "C'mon And Swim" album. I could picture it all clear as day, and from the few glances I caught over the wall, it all looked exactly the same, just like the shuffleboard courts.
With little else to do in West Palm Beach, I pulled out of the Century Village driveway and headed back toward Fort Lauderdale. We were very quiet during the drive back. I felt stupid for driving all the way up there and then getting stopped at the gate, and I think Kenny and I were both lost in Century Village, circa 1980. Maybe I'll go back the next time I visit Florida and try to smooth-talk the guard at the gate. Or maybe I won't, knowing that Century Village will probably still be there, looking like it did when I was a kid. Except that there won't be anybody on the shuffleboard courts.
Well, I hope you and yours have a happy holiday season, and a happy new year. (!) We're on pace for the warmest winter on record here in Minneapolis, and I'm not complaining one peep.
Stay warm,
Ron & Margaret
Friday, February 8, 2002
Friday, November 2, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - November 2001
"em·pur´ple, v.t. To tinge or color purple." - the dictionary. I'm not making this up.
"WRIGLEY SCANDINAVIA AB, BOX 3024, 183 03 TÄBY, SWEDEN. SOCKERFRITT TUGGUMMI. INGREDIENSER: SÖTNINGSMEDEL (XYLITOL 34%, SORBITOL, MANNITOL, ASPARTAM, ACESULFAM K), GUMMIBAS, AMMONIUMKLORID, FÖRTJOCKNINGSMEDEL E414, FUKTIGHETSBEVARANDE MEDEL E422, AROMER, FÄRGÄMNE E171, YTBEHANDLINGSMEDEL E903, ANTIOXIDATIONSMEDEL E320. INHÅLLER FENYLALANINKÄLLA. ÖVERDRIVEN KONSUMTION KAN HA LAXERANDE EFFEKT. NÄRINGSINNEHÅLL/100 g: ENERGI 665 kJ/160 kcal, PROTEIN 0g, KOLHYDRATER 62g, (VARAV SOCKER 0g, POLYOLER/SUKKERALKOHOLER 62g, STÄRKELSE/STIVELSE 0g), FETT 0g, (VARAV MÄTTADE FETTSYROR 0g), KOSTFIBRER 0g, NATRIUM 0g. NETTOVIKT: 14g" - the ingredients list and nutrition information from a Swedish package of Extra gum, "salty licorice" flavor. I thought it was pretty tasty, but based on the reactions of everyone else who tried it, I am the only one in America who thinks so.
You can almost understand the warning: "ÖVERDRIVEN KONSUMTION KAN HA LAXERANDE EFFEKT."
Along the same lines, a company address from a label of "Future Drink", a strawberry juice drink that Margaret found at her favorite Asian market:
"VICTOR INDUSTRY CO., LTD.
19 MOO 2 LIABKLONGPASICHAROENFANGTAI RD.
NONGKHAM, BANGKOK 10160"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I wrote the bulk of this giant e-mail about a month ago, expecting that our entire group at ADC would be laid off. I'm sure there will be cuts, but the rumors have dragged on for almost a month and I'm getting a little fatigued waiting for the axe to fall. So while I'm still employed as of November 2nd, I don't plan to be employed here much longer. Keeping that in mind...
Well, if you're receiving this message, then I'm no longer an ADC employee. The whole telecommunications field has been hurting lately, and now my group is the latest casualty. Our group didn't have any orders from customers, and is not currently shipping any product, so we were an easy target for downsizing. (Or is the new term "right-sizing"? Oh, who cares?)
We've seen this coming for quite a while, so we weren't terribly surprised. I think you can rate a company's health by some tell-tale details. Margaret loves one example of a company that had cut back on the tampon dispenser in the ladies' room (soon to be an ex-company). For us, our company cafeteria turned out to be an accurate barometer of how ADC was doing. Up until the end of August, the food was excellent, and I was the happiest camper on the planet (because food is my life, as you know.) On August 27, they got rid of the hot entree/veggies and scaled back the hours, leaving only a grill, salad bar, and sandwich bar until 1:00. No more 2nd and 3rd shift meals, and no late afternoon cookie runs. Bad news. Well, on October 1st, they raised the prices, presumably to offset some of the cost of the corporate subsidy. Insult to injury, as I see it. And if the company is trying to skimp on the cost of FOOD, there are much bigger problems at hand.
ADC also announced that they were downsizing the photocopier/printer near my cube to a smaller one that has the same resolution but prints slower. They downsized a COPIER?!?!?
I don't have a new job lined up, but our whole group is watching Ed, my three-time boss from ADC/Seagate/Kodak. He's hired me three times already, and together we've burned down the department three times! As I write this, I'm sure Ed is looking for another optics company in the Twin Cities to destroy, and we'll be right behind him basking in the low stock prices and layoffs.
In other news, Margaret has tied up the ER game, with a trip to the emergency room on September 8. (We're now tied for the year 2001, 1-1.) We were at a friend's party on the north side of town, and she cut her right thumb on a pair of scissors: 6 stitches in an urgent care center, one hour before they closed for they day on a Saturday. Pretty bold - winning games on the road now, while I have to rely on the home-field advantage. She's still favoring the other fingers on her right hand, and even learned to use utensils without her thumb. (She's useless with her left hand; no ambidextrous-ness whatsoever. We joked that without her right thumb, she's about as mobile as the cats!)
I found out that if it's 98 degrees outside with 90% relative humidity (as it was during some record-setting days in August), then there is about 5 tablespoons of water in the air inside your car. How much water is there inside your car when it's 70 degrees and 30% humidity? I forgot to ask Tom, and I don't want to bother him. We may never know.
The word "racecar" is a palindrome. This has not significantly affected the lives of anyone I know.
We saw some worthwhile films on video (not in the theaters, which has been nothing but garbage and sequels-of-garbage since "Memento" passed through.) For those of you into the blaxploitation films of the '70s, I can wholeheartedly recommend "Dolemite" from 1975. Rudy Rae Moore was a foul-mouthed stand-up comedian in the '70s, and starred in the Dolemite films as a foul-mouthed butt-kickin' neighborhood-do-gooder. The whole film is astoundingly inept on many many levels, and the costumes alone are worth the video rental fee. Mighty bad, mighty good.
I can also recommend "Rubin and Ed" from 1991. It's got Crispin Glover and Howard Hessman, and it's a thoroughly charming, small movie. It might have played in theaters for a week or two, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. Sample non-sequitor dialogue: "My cat can eat a whole watermelon." Mighty good, mighty good. (Thanx to Joel, who's been a fearless and uncomplaining host for Moooovie Night.)
In other other news, the Crap From The Past Mobile DJ service has kept me busy with about one wedding a month for the summer. It's a nice pace, and it strikes a good balance between personal burn-out and accumulation of dust on the equipment. Plus, I'll need the $ now more than ever...
The radio show continues to break new ground, and now it actually made the ratings! In my second hour, I pulled a 1.6 share, meaning that 1.6% of all the radios that are on are tuned in to me. It may not sound like a lot, but for a teensy 250-watt non-commercial FM station, it's enormous. I'd compare it to having some guy with a camcorder competing with Conan O'Brien. Utterly ridiculous, and yet I actually beat KS95 and V-105, two corporate (and boring) FM stations in my time slot. Woo-hoo!
And does this carry any weight to help me get a better time slot? Of course not; our little radio station has an "every man for himself" attitude, despite the claims of those in charge. And more often than not, I get the impression that no one's in charge at all; no one makes any big changes, for fearing of disturbing the equilibrium (even if some of the equilibrium sounds crappy).
And now, a misanthropic rant: For those of you who don't pick up Twin Cities radio, there is a superb '70s show on Sunday afternoons called "Cosmic Slop". (www.stitzel.com) The hosts (Chuck and Joel) are terrific, the music is terrific, and the show has earned a justifiably fanatical fan base out here. I've been on their show, they've been on Crap From The Past, and we all get along great and send piles of music back and forth on a regular basis. We're all part of the radio solution, not the radio problem. Cosmic Slop has much bigger exposure than my show, and I have no problems being the #2 "retro" show in town, since Cosmic Slop is put together so well. Living in the shadow of another show motivates me to expand the boundaries of what a two-hour radio show can do; when you're #2 you try harder. And KFAI certainly treats my show like #2.
In other other other news, the Minnesota State Fair came and went at the end of August. They say it's the 2nd largest state fair in the country, and it is indeed something we Minnesotans look forward to all summer. It's got something for everyone (do I sound like a commercial yet?) Margaret likes the animals (chickenz, piggz, horsies, dux, cowz, and other misspelt farm creatures), but my favorite is what the State Fair is known for: Food on a stick! It's legendary - the wide variety of foods on-a-stick. This year, I had the pork chop on a stick, pizza on a stick, elk burger (disappointingly not on a stick), and the bucket o' chocolate chip cookies (again - no stick). The big feature this year was a new food item - deep-fried candy bars. Yes, you read that right, deep-friend candy bars. The guy would bread the candy bar of your choice, then plunk it in the oil for a minute or two. I heard many a food critic saying that the only reason you'd really want to eat one of these is so you could tell your grandchildren that you once had a deep-friend candy bar back in '01. No candy bar for me, thank you, and I chickened out only because the line was way entirely too long for them. (Plus I'd just eaten the better part of a bucket o' chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmmm...cookies...)
About two years ago, I bought $50 worth of Pinnacle Micro stock, and I described the whole event in these e-mails before. Pinnacle Micro was a reputable data storage company in Colorado Springs, but they had suffered a mass exodus of their technical staff, and in November 1999 there were only 23 people left at the company. Back then, I decided to buy a few shares of their stock, which were priced at 11 cents each at the time. Well, the stock rose to 49 cents the next day and I looked like a Financial Genius! But over the next two years, the stock price fell to below a penny (How can it do that? No fair!), and Pinnacle Micro eventually ceased to exist as a company. In the name of closure, I present the final words of Pinnacle Micro, taken from their website:
"Pinnacle Micro was a leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of optical storage systems for general data storage and data intensive applications such as network storage, imaging, desktop publishing and prepress, as well as emerging applications such as digital audio/video and commercial multimedia. Pinnacle was the first company to develop and market a 4.6 GB magneto-optical drive (Apex 4.6) and was instrumental in developing the consumer market for CD recordable products.
"Pinnacle’s product line included magneto-optical drives and jukebox systems, writable DVD drives, CD recorders, media and accessories.
"Founded in 1987, Pinnacle Micro’s world headquarters was located in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, USA.
"At the end of 2000, Pinnacle Micro went bankrupt and its assets were liquidated. In July, of 2001, EZ Systems.com purchased from Pinnacle's bank this web site and their trademarks. EZ Systems, a distributor of computers and data storage products did not assume any liabilities from this transaction."
My $50 rode for two years, which is much longer than it would have lasted in Las Vegas.
Speaking of Vegas, there are casinos out here on the Indian reservations, just a few miles south of ADC. After hearing great things about Mystic Lake Casino's lunch buffet, we decided to check it out in person, in what has now become a Labor Day tradition: "Eat until something bad happens." Last year, it was a phenomenal barbeque place in Rochester, MN. This year, we fell prey to the overpowering quantity of excellent food at Mystic Lake. We surrendered, but we're regrouping and I'm confident that we will eventually show them who's boss (providing that my brother Kenny comes to visit sometime soon). And if I play my cards right (no pun intended), I can combine the eat-fest with an emergency room visit, making me the Champion Of All There Is To Be Champion Of!
I found out that a Bic Round Stic pen will last exactly 7 months at work, if it is the only pen at your desk. Then it runs out of ink.
So here's a thoroughly strange incident: A few days ago, Margaret got a call from some telemarketer. Usually, she just yells and screams at them and hangs up (or asks them politely to be taken off their list), but Margaret said that the telemarketer girl had such a cute innocent voice that she just had to hear out the pitch. Would we be interested in previewing a new TV show that was being considered for production? Would we ever! That means I get to invite my media-savvy friends over and we could all rip it to shreds! Woo-hoo!
The telemarketer girl told Margaret that we'd get a videotape in the mail along with a questionnaire, we'd watch it that night, and that the telemarketer girl would call back the next day and retrieve the answers from the questionnaire. OK then. Monday night, a big UPS envelope showed up, complete with all as promised. The tape had big instructions on it, though, and warned us that it was a special tape that would erase itself if you fast-forward or rewound it. (How can this be? we asked. Details to follow; keep reading.)
The pre-viewing questionnaire was basically a marketing survey. Which brand of batteries/shampoo/peanut butter/etc. do you use? There were about 20 different product types, and Margaret gave legitimate answers to all of them. But why would this TV company care what brand of xxx we use? Obviously we were being used to test something other than the TV show itself, but it wasn't clear what yet. The pre-viewing survey was given under the premise of a sweepstakes: Out of all the households participating in this program, the company was going to give one of them $75 worth of products as compensation for their time, and the company wanted to know which products the lucky household could use. Sure. We noticed in the fine print that the odds of winning "depended on the number participants"; I think that if the number of participants is greater than 1, then my odds of winning are 0.
So then my TV-savvy friend, Mike, came over. He knows literally everything there is to know about old TV, actors, producers, etc., and we knew he'd enjoy this and could probably fill in some motivational details for us. The three of us started the tape, which gave us a stern warning not to rewind or fast-forward, because the tape would erase itself. (Sounds a little too Mission: Impossible to be true, but we accepted it at face value.) For the next half-hour, we sat through "Dads", a (presumably) failed TV pilot from 1997, with commercials included (a-ha! Motivation become more clear! Keep reading.) The show itself was sub-Lifetime-network brutality, starring three useless male leads and their kindergarten-age kids. Margaret saw the whole thing as a Full House rip-off (irritating kids, annoying Bob Sagat-esque character), and I saw elements of a Friends rip-off (bad Joey Tribiani impersonation, plus one of the actresses - a divorced "mom" - really played Ross's lesbian ex-wife on Friends). Rue McLanahan (Golden Girls) played an annoying schoolteacher, doing her best Madeline Kahn-playing-Lili Von Shtupp. Senseless torture for the unsuspecting viewer, who would certainly lapse into a saccharin-induced coma in seconds. We three were prepared for the worst, though, and we could actually see how in 1997, this might have been pitched to the UPN as an antidote to the sharp writing from Friends.
Of course, the underlying message of the show was "Pay attention to the commercials!", and although "Dads" was from 1997, the commercials were all current. A contact lens ad, a battery ad, a few others. We watched it until the tape told us to stop, Margaret filled out the post-viewing questionnaire (a handful of questions about the program, a boatload of questions about products), and they did indeed call back the next night as promised.
So what about the tape that would erase itself? Well, it really did erase itself, so I had to take it apart. I found a small rectangular magnet (About 1/8" by 1/8" by 1/2") attached to the outside of the housing under the plastic flap with a small piece of black electrical tape, right before the tape enters the take-up reel. So you watch the tape, and it gets erased right before it enters the take-up reel. Voila! Technically, that doesn't prevent you from fast-forwarding, but we didn't know that at the time. And if you rewind, everything you've already seen is erased! Cool! It's a pretty slick idea, and an elegant way to produce a view-only-once program. (Not too useful for day-to-day use; you can't record on it because the tape gets erased 1 second after it's recorded. Plus it would get erased if you rewound it. Come to think of it, I can't imagine why anybody would use this at home, ever.) Good old marketing...
The week before Halloween was the most sleep-deprived week I've ever had, including all of college. On Wednesday 10/24, Margaret threw me with a surprise birthday party, and I was indeed surprised beyond comprehension. Some sample dialog from the days preceding the surprise party:
Ron: "Why are you cleaning the floor? Not that I'm complaining."
Margaret: "Because it needs cleaning. Stop complaining."
Ron: "OK."
Ron: "Why is there another cake in the fridge? Not that I'm complaining."
Margaret: "Because I had extra chocolate left over from the last cake. Stop complaining."
Ron: "OK."
So Margaret scheduled an eye doctor appointment for me on Wednesday evening, and I drove off to it without suspecting that while I was reading DEFPOTEC, evil wife would be inviting over a bunch of friends and throwing me a party.
The optometrist dilated my pupils, which wasn't much of a problem for the drive home, since the sun had already set. I remember a conversation I once had with my friend George, who drove back to work during the day right after an eye exam. "George, are you sure you can drive after they put those drops in your eyes?" "Sure! I can't focus very well on things that are close, but I can see objects that are far away just fine." "But you never crash into things that are far away..."
So I drove home and walked up to the house without suspecting a thing. I only figured it out once I saw Margaret lighting candles in the dining room. Evil wife... So Margaret and I are both 33 now, and I can't say that I like it. You round up to 35 instead of down to 30, and I don't like the big numbers anymore. I was up plenty late on Wednesday after the party.
Thursday night - mooooooovie night, a tradition since the spring. Up plenty late.
Friday night - on the radio helping with the KFAI pledge drive. Up plenty late.
Saturday night - DJed a wedding. Up obscenely late. (More about this shortly.)
Sunday night - Did my own show on the radio. Up plenty late again. I was a zombie for days after all this.
So this wedding I mentioned was in the southeast corner of Minnesota, in a little town called Winona ("winn-OH-nah", like Winnohnah Ryder). It's a 2-and-a-half hour drive from Minneapolis to Winona, but it was very pleasant, since I've never traveled that route before. The wedding had a Halloween theme, and nearly all the guests came in costume! What a hoot!
So the wedding ended, everyone helped clean up, and I had the car loaded and hit the road about 1:15 AM. I had two cans of highly-caffeinated bevvies ready, and I was pretty invincible, as far as driving long distances go. Well, about 30 seconds into my drive, once I'd left the small number of Winona's "city lights" behind me, I saw the most spectacular display of Northern Lights that I've ever seen. Giant green streaks everywhere in the sky, and I can't imagine a more perfect place to watch them - on a deserted highway pointing northwest, with the Mississippi River to my right, without a cloud in the sky, and not a single thing obscuring my view. For about 45 minutes, I kept 1.8 eyes on the sky and the other 0.2 eyes on the road, and I was simply awe-struck. It was as if "At this time, God concludes His broadcasting day." Nature is Cool. The rest of the drive zipped by uneventfully, even though I did get to hear both 2 AM's from the end of daylight savings time on the radio.
On a more serious note, I hope your family and friends are all OK after the September 11 incidents in NY and DC. My family was fine, but I lost two friends in the World Trade Center, and I was the only Minnesotan I've run across who knew people personally out there. I delivered what became a short, improvised eulogy to them on my first CFTP show after the attacks. Equipped with only a short outline to make sure that I got from point A to point B, I began the show with a 13-minute talk break, just talking about Ken and Craig. It came out better than I expected. Ken and Craig, we'll miss ya.
Stay warm,
Ron & Mah-gret
"WRIGLEY SCANDINAVIA AB, BOX 3024, 183 03 TÄBY, SWEDEN. SOCKERFRITT TUGGUMMI. INGREDIENSER: SÖTNINGSMEDEL (XYLITOL 34%, SORBITOL, MANNITOL, ASPARTAM, ACESULFAM K), GUMMIBAS, AMMONIUMKLORID, FÖRTJOCKNINGSMEDEL E414, FUKTIGHETSBEVARANDE MEDEL E422, AROMER, FÄRGÄMNE E171, YTBEHANDLINGSMEDEL E903, ANTIOXIDATIONSMEDEL E320. INHÅLLER FENYLALANINKÄLLA. ÖVERDRIVEN KONSUMTION KAN HA LAXERANDE EFFEKT. NÄRINGSINNEHÅLL/100 g: ENERGI 665 kJ/160 kcal, PROTEIN 0g, KOLHYDRATER 62g, (VARAV SOCKER 0g, POLYOLER/SUKKERALKOHOLER 62g, STÄRKELSE/STIVELSE 0g), FETT 0g, (VARAV MÄTTADE FETTSYROR 0g), KOSTFIBRER 0g, NATRIUM 0g. NETTOVIKT: 14g" - the ingredients list and nutrition information from a Swedish package of Extra gum, "salty licorice" flavor. I thought it was pretty tasty, but based on the reactions of everyone else who tried it, I am the only one in America who thinks so.
You can almost understand the warning: "ÖVERDRIVEN KONSUMTION KAN HA LAXERANDE EFFEKT."
Along the same lines, a company address from a label of "Future Drink", a strawberry juice drink that Margaret found at her favorite Asian market:
"VICTOR INDUSTRY CO., LTD.
19 MOO 2 LIABKLONGPASICHAROENFANGTAI RD.
NONGKHAM, BANGKOK 10160"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I wrote the bulk of this giant e-mail about a month ago, expecting that our entire group at ADC would be laid off. I'm sure there will be cuts, but the rumors have dragged on for almost a month and I'm getting a little fatigued waiting for the axe to fall. So while I'm still employed as of November 2nd, I don't plan to be employed here much longer. Keeping that in mind...
Well, if you're receiving this message, then I'm no longer an ADC employee. The whole telecommunications field has been hurting lately, and now my group is the latest casualty. Our group didn't have any orders from customers, and is not currently shipping any product, so we were an easy target for downsizing. (Or is the new term "right-sizing"? Oh, who cares?)
We've seen this coming for quite a while, so we weren't terribly surprised. I think you can rate a company's health by some tell-tale details. Margaret loves one example of a company that had cut back on the tampon dispenser in the ladies' room (soon to be an ex-company). For us, our company cafeteria turned out to be an accurate barometer of how ADC was doing. Up until the end of August, the food was excellent, and I was the happiest camper on the planet (because food is my life, as you know.) On August 27, they got rid of the hot entree/veggies and scaled back the hours, leaving only a grill, salad bar, and sandwich bar until 1:00. No more 2nd and 3rd shift meals, and no late afternoon cookie runs. Bad news. Well, on October 1st, they raised the prices, presumably to offset some of the cost of the corporate subsidy. Insult to injury, as I see it. And if the company is trying to skimp on the cost of FOOD, there are much bigger problems at hand.
ADC also announced that they were downsizing the photocopier/printer near my cube to a smaller one that has the same resolution but prints slower. They downsized a COPIER?!?!?
I don't have a new job lined up, but our whole group is watching Ed, my three-time boss from ADC/Seagate/Kodak. He's hired me three times already, and together we've burned down the department three times! As I write this, I'm sure Ed is looking for another optics company in the Twin Cities to destroy, and we'll be right behind him basking in the low stock prices and layoffs.
In other news, Margaret has tied up the ER game, with a trip to the emergency room on September 8. (We're now tied for the year 2001, 1-1.) We were at a friend's party on the north side of town, and she cut her right thumb on a pair of scissors: 6 stitches in an urgent care center, one hour before they closed for they day on a Saturday. Pretty bold - winning games on the road now, while I have to rely on the home-field advantage. She's still favoring the other fingers on her right hand, and even learned to use utensils without her thumb. (She's useless with her left hand; no ambidextrous-ness whatsoever. We joked that without her right thumb, she's about as mobile as the cats!)
I found out that if it's 98 degrees outside with 90% relative humidity (as it was during some record-setting days in August), then there is about 5 tablespoons of water in the air inside your car. How much water is there inside your car when it's 70 degrees and 30% humidity? I forgot to ask Tom, and I don't want to bother him. We may never know.
The word "racecar" is a palindrome. This has not significantly affected the lives of anyone I know.
We saw some worthwhile films on video (not in the theaters, which has been nothing but garbage and sequels-of-garbage since "Memento" passed through.) For those of you into the blaxploitation films of the '70s, I can wholeheartedly recommend "Dolemite" from 1975. Rudy Rae Moore was a foul-mouthed stand-up comedian in the '70s, and starred in the Dolemite films as a foul-mouthed butt-kickin' neighborhood-do-gooder. The whole film is astoundingly inept on many many levels, and the costumes alone are worth the video rental fee. Mighty bad, mighty good.
I can also recommend "Rubin and Ed" from 1991. It's got Crispin Glover and Howard Hessman, and it's a thoroughly charming, small movie. It might have played in theaters for a week or two, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. Sample non-sequitor dialogue: "My cat can eat a whole watermelon." Mighty good, mighty good. (Thanx to Joel, who's been a fearless and uncomplaining host for Moooovie Night.)
In other other news, the Crap From The Past Mobile DJ service has kept me busy with about one wedding a month for the summer. It's a nice pace, and it strikes a good balance between personal burn-out and accumulation of dust on the equipment. Plus, I'll need the $ now more than ever...
The radio show continues to break new ground, and now it actually made the ratings! In my second hour, I pulled a 1.6 share, meaning that 1.6% of all the radios that are on are tuned in to me. It may not sound like a lot, but for a teensy 250-watt non-commercial FM station, it's enormous. I'd compare it to having some guy with a camcorder competing with Conan O'Brien. Utterly ridiculous, and yet I actually beat KS95 and V-105, two corporate (and boring) FM stations in my time slot. Woo-hoo!
And does this carry any weight to help me get a better time slot? Of course not; our little radio station has an "every man for himself" attitude, despite the claims of those in charge. And more often than not, I get the impression that no one's in charge at all; no one makes any big changes, for fearing of disturbing the equilibrium (even if some of the equilibrium sounds crappy).
And now, a misanthropic rant: For those of you who don't pick up Twin Cities radio, there is a superb '70s show on Sunday afternoons called "Cosmic Slop". (www.stitzel.com) The hosts (Chuck and Joel) are terrific, the music is terrific, and the show has earned a justifiably fanatical fan base out here. I've been on their show, they've been on Crap From The Past, and we all get along great and send piles of music back and forth on a regular basis. We're all part of the radio solution, not the radio problem. Cosmic Slop has much bigger exposure than my show, and I have no problems being the #2 "retro" show in town, since Cosmic Slop is put together so well. Living in the shadow of another show motivates me to expand the boundaries of what a two-hour radio show can do; when you're #2 you try harder. And KFAI certainly treats my show like #2.
In other other other news, the Minnesota State Fair came and went at the end of August. They say it's the 2nd largest state fair in the country, and it is indeed something we Minnesotans look forward to all summer. It's got something for everyone (do I sound like a commercial yet?) Margaret likes the animals (chickenz, piggz, horsies, dux, cowz, and other misspelt farm creatures), but my favorite is what the State Fair is known for: Food on a stick! It's legendary - the wide variety of foods on-a-stick. This year, I had the pork chop on a stick, pizza on a stick, elk burger (disappointingly not on a stick), and the bucket o' chocolate chip cookies (again - no stick). The big feature this year was a new food item - deep-fried candy bars. Yes, you read that right, deep-friend candy bars. The guy would bread the candy bar of your choice, then plunk it in the oil for a minute or two. I heard many a food critic saying that the only reason you'd really want to eat one of these is so you could tell your grandchildren that you once had a deep-friend candy bar back in '01. No candy bar for me, thank you, and I chickened out only because the line was way entirely too long for them. (Plus I'd just eaten the better part of a bucket o' chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmmm...cookies...)
About two years ago, I bought $50 worth of Pinnacle Micro stock, and I described the whole event in these e-mails before. Pinnacle Micro was a reputable data storage company in Colorado Springs, but they had suffered a mass exodus of their technical staff, and in November 1999 there were only 23 people left at the company. Back then, I decided to buy a few shares of their stock, which were priced at 11 cents each at the time. Well, the stock rose to 49 cents the next day and I looked like a Financial Genius! But over the next two years, the stock price fell to below a penny (How can it do that? No fair!), and Pinnacle Micro eventually ceased to exist as a company. In the name of closure, I present the final words of Pinnacle Micro, taken from their website:
"Pinnacle Micro was a leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of optical storage systems for general data storage and data intensive applications such as network storage, imaging, desktop publishing and prepress, as well as emerging applications such as digital audio/video and commercial multimedia. Pinnacle was the first company to develop and market a 4.6 GB magneto-optical drive (Apex 4.6) and was instrumental in developing the consumer market for CD recordable products.
"Pinnacle’s product line included magneto-optical drives and jukebox systems, writable DVD drives, CD recorders, media and accessories.
"Founded in 1987, Pinnacle Micro’s world headquarters was located in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, USA.
"At the end of 2000, Pinnacle Micro went bankrupt and its assets were liquidated. In July, of 2001, EZ Systems.com purchased from Pinnacle's bank this web site and their trademarks. EZ Systems, a distributor of computers and data storage products did not assume any liabilities from this transaction."
My $50 rode for two years, which is much longer than it would have lasted in Las Vegas.
Speaking of Vegas, there are casinos out here on the Indian reservations, just a few miles south of ADC. After hearing great things about Mystic Lake Casino's lunch buffet, we decided to check it out in person, in what has now become a Labor Day tradition: "Eat until something bad happens." Last year, it was a phenomenal barbeque place in Rochester, MN. This year, we fell prey to the overpowering quantity of excellent food at Mystic Lake. We surrendered, but we're regrouping and I'm confident that we will eventually show them who's boss (providing that my brother Kenny comes to visit sometime soon). And if I play my cards right (no pun intended), I can combine the eat-fest with an emergency room visit, making me the Champion Of All There Is To Be Champion Of!
I found out that a Bic Round Stic pen will last exactly 7 months at work, if it is the only pen at your desk. Then it runs out of ink.
So here's a thoroughly strange incident: A few days ago, Margaret got a call from some telemarketer. Usually, she just yells and screams at them and hangs up (or asks them politely to be taken off their list), but Margaret said that the telemarketer girl had such a cute innocent voice that she just had to hear out the pitch. Would we be interested in previewing a new TV show that was being considered for production? Would we ever! That means I get to invite my media-savvy friends over and we could all rip it to shreds! Woo-hoo!
The telemarketer girl told Margaret that we'd get a videotape in the mail along with a questionnaire, we'd watch it that night, and that the telemarketer girl would call back the next day and retrieve the answers from the questionnaire. OK then. Monday night, a big UPS envelope showed up, complete with all as promised. The tape had big instructions on it, though, and warned us that it was a special tape that would erase itself if you fast-forward or rewound it. (How can this be? we asked. Details to follow; keep reading.)
The pre-viewing questionnaire was basically a marketing survey. Which brand of batteries/shampoo/peanut butter/etc. do you use? There were about 20 different product types, and Margaret gave legitimate answers to all of them. But why would this TV company care what brand of xxx we use? Obviously we were being used to test something other than the TV show itself, but it wasn't clear what yet. The pre-viewing survey was given under the premise of a sweepstakes: Out of all the households participating in this program, the company was going to give one of them $75 worth of products as compensation for their time, and the company wanted to know which products the lucky household could use. Sure. We noticed in the fine print that the odds of winning "depended on the number participants"; I think that if the number of participants is greater than 1, then my odds of winning are 0.
So then my TV-savvy friend, Mike, came over. He knows literally everything there is to know about old TV, actors, producers, etc., and we knew he'd enjoy this and could probably fill in some motivational details for us. The three of us started the tape, which gave us a stern warning not to rewind or fast-forward, because the tape would erase itself. (Sounds a little too Mission: Impossible to be true, but we accepted it at face value.) For the next half-hour, we sat through "Dads", a (presumably) failed TV pilot from 1997, with commercials included (a-ha! Motivation become more clear! Keep reading.) The show itself was sub-Lifetime-network brutality, starring three useless male leads and their kindergarten-age kids. Margaret saw the whole thing as a Full House rip-off (irritating kids, annoying Bob Sagat-esque character), and I saw elements of a Friends rip-off (bad Joey Tribiani impersonation, plus one of the actresses - a divorced "mom" - really played Ross's lesbian ex-wife on Friends). Rue McLanahan (Golden Girls) played an annoying schoolteacher, doing her best Madeline Kahn-playing-Lili Von Shtupp. Senseless torture for the unsuspecting viewer, who would certainly lapse into a saccharin-induced coma in seconds. We three were prepared for the worst, though, and we could actually see how in 1997, this might have been pitched to the UPN as an antidote to the sharp writing from Friends.
Of course, the underlying message of the show was "Pay attention to the commercials!", and although "Dads" was from 1997, the commercials were all current. A contact lens ad, a battery ad, a few others. We watched it until the tape told us to stop, Margaret filled out the post-viewing questionnaire (a handful of questions about the program, a boatload of questions about products), and they did indeed call back the next night as promised.
So what about the tape that would erase itself? Well, it really did erase itself, so I had to take it apart. I found a small rectangular magnet (About 1/8" by 1/8" by 1/2") attached to the outside of the housing under the plastic flap with a small piece of black electrical tape, right before the tape enters the take-up reel. So you watch the tape, and it gets erased right before it enters the take-up reel. Voila! Technically, that doesn't prevent you from fast-forwarding, but we didn't know that at the time. And if you rewind, everything you've already seen is erased! Cool! It's a pretty slick idea, and an elegant way to produce a view-only-once program. (Not too useful for day-to-day use; you can't record on it because the tape gets erased 1 second after it's recorded. Plus it would get erased if you rewound it. Come to think of it, I can't imagine why anybody would use this at home, ever.) Good old marketing...
The week before Halloween was the most sleep-deprived week I've ever had, including all of college. On Wednesday 10/24, Margaret threw me with a surprise birthday party, and I was indeed surprised beyond comprehension. Some sample dialog from the days preceding the surprise party:
Ron: "Why are you cleaning the floor? Not that I'm complaining."
Margaret: "Because it needs cleaning. Stop complaining."
Ron: "OK."
Ron: "Why is there another cake in the fridge? Not that I'm complaining."
Margaret: "Because I had extra chocolate left over from the last cake. Stop complaining."
Ron: "OK."
So Margaret scheduled an eye doctor appointment for me on Wednesday evening, and I drove off to it without suspecting that while I was reading DEFPOTEC, evil wife would be inviting over a bunch of friends and throwing me a party.
The optometrist dilated my pupils, which wasn't much of a problem for the drive home, since the sun had already set. I remember a conversation I once had with my friend George, who drove back to work during the day right after an eye exam. "George, are you sure you can drive after they put those drops in your eyes?" "Sure! I can't focus very well on things that are close, but I can see objects that are far away just fine." "But you never crash into things that are far away..."
So I drove home and walked up to the house without suspecting a thing. I only figured it out once I saw Margaret lighting candles in the dining room. Evil wife... So Margaret and I are both 33 now, and I can't say that I like it. You round up to 35 instead of down to 30, and I don't like the big numbers anymore. I was up plenty late on Wednesday after the party.
Thursday night - mooooooovie night, a tradition since the spring. Up plenty late.
Friday night - on the radio helping with the KFAI pledge drive. Up plenty late.
Saturday night - DJed a wedding. Up obscenely late. (More about this shortly.)
Sunday night - Did my own show on the radio. Up plenty late again. I was a zombie for days after all this.
So this wedding I mentioned was in the southeast corner of Minnesota, in a little town called Winona ("winn-OH-nah", like Winnohnah Ryder). It's a 2-and-a-half hour drive from Minneapolis to Winona, but it was very pleasant, since I've never traveled that route before. The wedding had a Halloween theme, and nearly all the guests came in costume! What a hoot!
So the wedding ended, everyone helped clean up, and I had the car loaded and hit the road about 1:15 AM. I had two cans of highly-caffeinated bevvies ready, and I was pretty invincible, as far as driving long distances go. Well, about 30 seconds into my drive, once I'd left the small number of Winona's "city lights" behind me, I saw the most spectacular display of Northern Lights that I've ever seen. Giant green streaks everywhere in the sky, and I can't imagine a more perfect place to watch them - on a deserted highway pointing northwest, with the Mississippi River to my right, without a cloud in the sky, and not a single thing obscuring my view. For about 45 minutes, I kept 1.8 eyes on the sky and the other 0.2 eyes on the road, and I was simply awe-struck. It was as if "At this time, God concludes His broadcasting day." Nature is Cool. The rest of the drive zipped by uneventfully, even though I did get to hear both 2 AM's from the end of daylight savings time on the radio.
On a more serious note, I hope your family and friends are all OK after the September 11 incidents in NY and DC. My family was fine, but I lost two friends in the World Trade Center, and I was the only Minnesotan I've run across who knew people personally out there. I delivered what became a short, improvised eulogy to them on my first CFTP show after the attacks. Equipped with only a short outline to make sure that I got from point A to point B, I began the show with a 13-minute talk break, just talking about Ken and Craig. It came out better than I expected. Ken and Craig, we'll miss ya.
Stay warm,
Ron & Mah-gret
Thursday, August 2, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - August 2001
Hi, all. First order of business: I'm still employed by ADC, after a large series of layoffs that have reduced our work force by 40% since last November. Yesterday morning, ADC downsized by 2500 worldwide, and about 800 here in Minnesota. We lost about half the people in our building yesterday, and it's more than a little eerie around here. But they're still paying me, and I'm in no position to complain. (If you're playing along at home, we're in the same business as Lucent and JDSU, and we've had the same problems as them. Now is not a good time to be in telecommunications.)
So here's what we've been up to since April:
My band (Thinland) broke up. Our cellist called it quits from performing, and we never quite recovered. We played a fun but lackluster gig in May and a painful coffeehouse gig in June, then dissolved the band. It was fun while it lasted, and I got to be a big-time rock drummer for a few live shows. Oh well.
Wedding season kicked in, and I DJed a few weddings in June with a few weddings left in the summer. Not really much to report on, except that after 16 years I'm still at the top of my game, and my authentic '70s-era blue denim leisure suit still fits nicely.
We redid our bathroom, which turned out to be a major undertaking. We'd had an inexpensive textured ceiling (sometimes called "popcorn") in the bathroom, and the humidity from showers would cause some of the paint and texture to flake off. I got sick of the falling paint flakes, so one weekend in May, I spent four hours on a stepladder with a putty knife scraping off the ceiling texture. Well, it got out of hand from there. While I was on the ladder, I jostled the old light fixture and knocked loose the wires, so we now had an excuse to replace the light fixture (one of Margaret's projects that she's been saving). All in all, we replaced the mirror with a medicine cabinet, put in new light fixtures, repainted, and replaced the shower curtain rod with an industrial-strength closet rod (in case I want to do chin-ups in the bath). Margaret did the bulk of the work, and it came out pretty fine-looking.
We did learn a bit about wiring up something with a switch, though. After we unhooked the old fixture, we wired up the new fixture with all the white wires connected together, and all the black wires together. Wrong! It was pretty entertaining, though. We wired everything up, set the switch to OFF, then ran downstairs to turn on the breaker. When we came upstairs to the bathroom, the light was ON, and the switch was OFF. Unsure of what to do at this point, I turned the switch to ON, which promptly shut off the light and tripped the breaker. After a great deal of wire-following, we figured out how it should be hooked up, which involves one connection of black wire to white wire. So now OFF is OFF, ON is ON, and all is well.
July 4th fell on a Wednesday, which didn't give any of us a 4-day weekend. Fooey, as you know. "Crap From The Past" had its own July 4th celebration, and rather than celebrate the usual Happy Birthday America, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Bicentennial. After all, isn't the real Spirit of '76 rooted in custom quarters and the metric system? The show turned out to be a high point in my radio "career", and over the course of the two-hour show, we played seven different versions of a spoken-word piece from 1974 called "The Americans". Absurd on every level, and pure radio gold. (I will assume that my Pulitzer, Nobel, and Grammy awards all got lost in the mail.)
So the weekend after July 4th, my brother Kenny came out for a visit. I'd set the bar pretty high for Kenny, and had endlessly recounted the stories of mass food consumption, including the eating-the-entire-seven-pound-can-of-chocolate-pudding-over-the-course-of-one-Sunday story and the Kenny-and-his-friends-ordering-one-of-every-menu-item-from-Taco-Bell. Kenny was a legend here in Minneapolis, and he'd never even met most of my friends.
Friday afternoon, we brought him to a Twins game. Kenny and I ate massive amounts of Metrodome food, I spilled mustard on my best jeans, the Twins beat Cincinnati, and Margaret even had a good time. Isn't Cincinnati in the wrong league? Why are these two teams playing each other? Who screwed up baseball without telling me?
We just happened to go to a game on one of those special give-away days. The first 10,000 people get a Rod Carew bobble-head doll. We didn't show up four hours early like the first 10,000 people did, so we were bobble-headless. Until... they flashed some additional winning ticket numbers up on the big screen, and lo and behold, Margaret won one! She's the most unlucky person I know (heck - she's married to ME! That's some bad luck...), and she got the big prize of the evening. The doll was a pretty elaborate hand-painted ceramic thing, and now lives in one of our display cabinets of priceless stuff.
We introduced Kenny to a few friends at the house, and they were genuinely impressed, even considering the enormous hype beforehand. He still eats a LOT (although I eat more than he does, just don't mention it to him). Ah, sweet food...
So at the end of Kenny's weekend with us, we dropped him at the airport, then hit the road for a road trip to Denver to visit Margaret's family. It's about 950 miles from Minneapolis to Denver. Unless you're superhuman and can drive it straight through, that's an easy two-day drive each way, so we took our time noodling westward across Nebraska. We drove through Oxford and Cambridge, and felt all the smarter having passed through such studious towns. We also passed a sign for a highway that would take you to two towns, Max and Benkelman. "Max Benkelman, Private Eye"! But all pales in comparison with indescribably small Funk, Nebraska. I don't think Funk is incorporated, so it doesn't appear on maps. We took pictures of us in front of the Funk water tower, and in front of a little utility building labeled "Funk Utilities". The pictures didn't turn out too hot, mostly because the disposable camera got too hot and humid. (Sorry, that's a "single-use" camera; your pictures don't turn out too well if you just throw out the camera.) We'll know for next time.
The visit was fun - we saw family for a few days, I hit my favorite record store in the world (Don's Discs), and we got to drive up into the mountains west of Denver, which I'd never seen before. Gorgeous terrain, and all new to me.
Man, Denver radio is even more screwed up than Minneapolis radio. I heard 95.7 KISS-FM, right next to 96.1 KISS-FM, with nearly identical formats. How can this be? I'm guessing that one of those is from a nearby city other than Denver, but you wouldn't know which one by listening to them. Plus there are two stations using "Today's Best Music". Shouldn't one of them be "Today's Second-Best Music"? Makes no sense to my little brain...
On the way back, we spent a few days with Margaret's mom in Yuma, Colorado, the tiny farm town where Margaret grew up. (Margaret grew up on a farm, and got to show me cows, corn and combines up close. Woo-hoo!) At the farm, we noticed the tiniest baby bunny we'd ever seen, sitting on the edge of the driveway. We stood around and watched it for a little while, then grew alarmed at (1) the fact that it wasn't running away, and (2) it appeared to have a tick stuck on its ear. Over the course of the next two days, we noticed that the baby bunny was actively shunned by an adult rabbit, and was driven away from nests and any other rabbit shelter by the adult. We surmised that the bunny was diseased, and was exiled from the rest of the herd. Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that "that bunny ain't right". Interesting...
Well, to make matters more interesting, the weekly Yuma newspaper reported an outbreak of bubonic plague among a prairie dog colony out there, and advised people to avoid contact with rodents like rabbits and mice. Oh! Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that baby bunny had THE PLAGUE, and didn't want the rest of the herd infected! Interesting...
Well, to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, I got bitten by a tick while I was out in Yuma. I don't know squat about ticks, except that this one just came right off with a tissue, so it didn't get much of a chance to do whatever burrowing biting gnawing thing that ticks do. It just left a little dot on my leg where I plucked him off - a tickey hickey.
So we drove back, and had a pretty uneventful drive at that. I found out that Margaret's little Civic gets around 38 MPG with the air conditioning at full blast if you keep it below 70 MPH, but beyond that one piece of information, I can't remember much else about the drive home. Oh yeah, we ate at Arby's. Mmmmm...Arby's...
After a week out of town and 2000 miles on the car, we arrived home on Saturday afternoon (7/14), unpacked, and enjoyed the air conditioning and the incredibly affectionate cats.
Sunday morning, I felt kinda sick. Fever, headache, sore throat, chills, random aches-other-than-headache, and some other symptoms that I can't remember. A simple Tylenol wasn't cutting it. So... (yes, you knew this was inevitable) a trip to the emergency room! It was early on a Sunday morning and nothing else was open, so by default we had to go to the good-ol' ER and get my frequent-patient card stamped. I'm now beating Margaret in the emergency room battle of 2001, one to nothing.
So we told the ER people all the facts: I'd been bitten by a tick about three days earlier, I felt fine the night before, and oh yes, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the county where I got the tick bite. Although all of these were perfectly true, they must have sounded ridiculous to the ER staff, and I'd like to think I made their day. Some wacko coming in claiming to have a medieval disease...
So my fever was 101.3 when I checked in, 102.8 about an hour and a half later when a nurse checked me into an examination room, and was probably around 104 by the time they got an IV in me to bring the fever down. I wasn't quite delirious (too bad - I was looking forward to seeing things), but I was pretty shaky and irritable. They took blood - lots of blood - and left bruises on both hands and both arms as they tried to find a cooperative vein. From the tests they ran, I found out that (1) I wasn't pregnant, (2) I didn't have strep throat, and (3) they didn't know what was causing the fever. They said that the bubonic plague test took a week, and they would have to have it sent out to the department of health (no joke).
My prescribed treatment: If it was a virus, then it would run its course (or I would die). Either way, you can't treat it. If it was a bacteria bug, then they would kill it to death with the most head-blastin' antibiotics known to mankind. They prescribed me three weeks' worth of doxycycline - big blue pills that make you pukey, kill your appetite, and make you extremely sensitive to sun exposure. These things are what they use to treat lyme disease, and will easily kill off the bubonic plague. So I have a few days left on the Big Pills, and I'll be glad when it's over.
All in all, I missed three days of work (a rarity for me - I didn't miss any full work days even when I had pneumonia last year), and I missed a Crap From The Past show (an even greater rarity - I'd never missed a show due to illness in almost 15 years of radio). I was SIKK! I lost 8 pounds, and my pants don't fit right anymore. I'm sure I'll bulk up to normal after I'm done with the Big Pills, and I can't wait.
Most importantly, I'm beating Margaret this year - one emergency room visit to zero.
We had one of the wettest springs on record out here, with one of the rainiest Mays. There was some serious flooding on the rivers out here, and some of the bridges around Shakopee (where I work) were closed for about 6 weeks. What a mess!
Then, it got hot. We had the driest 1st-two-weeks-of-July on record, ever. It was 110 with the heat index two days ago, and as I'm sure you've heard, Korey Stringer, one of the Minnesota Vikings, died from heatstroke complications yesterday! My oh my! And boy did we pick the right year to get a new furnace, complete with central A/C. The greatest invention ever, except for maybe the dehumidifier in the basement. That's good too.
I got a new logo for Crap From The Past, and I'll probably be making bumper stickers and T-shirts. Did you know that white T-shirts are cheaper than all the other colors? Why does everyone know that except me?
The CFTP website got a major upgrade, and you music geeks can keep yourselves entertained for hours with this page: www.crapfromthepast.com/favorites
Apparently, the CFTP site is now one of the world's leading authorities on Milli Vanilli. If you go to Google and search on Girl You Know It's True, Baby Don't Forget My Number, or any other Milli Vanilli hits, my site comes up first! I rule!
Finally, I'll wrap this up with more music geekery. There was a legendary live recording from 1974 of the band Steely Dan. The song "Bodhisattva" began with a 2-1/2 minute-long rambling introduction by a thoroughly-inebriated Jerome Aniton, who eventually introduced the band as Mr. Steely Dan.
I suggested to my friend Chuck, "Jerome Aniton ordering lunch in the cafeteria". He came up with this:
"Well, look at all the fine people here....haaa....I think we're in for one....damn fine lunch here today....haaa....you can tell all your friends...hell you can tell 'em over in Watts.....haaa....that they missed out on a....damn good lunch. And all you...little....little pretty ones....haaa...can have lunch too...I don't know...whatever. Because in this here cafeteria right now....Mister...whatever...is gonna fix up a sandwich and chip combo plate that's gonna make you say that....haaa...this cafeteria in Santamonnica....haaa....is def-nitly....on fi-ya...."
Nicely done, Chuck.
That's all from our end. Hope all is well, and we'll talk to you soon!
Ron & Margaret
So here's what we've been up to since April:
My band (Thinland) broke up. Our cellist called it quits from performing, and we never quite recovered. We played a fun but lackluster gig in May and a painful coffeehouse gig in June, then dissolved the band. It was fun while it lasted, and I got to be a big-time rock drummer for a few live shows. Oh well.
Wedding season kicked in, and I DJed a few weddings in June with a few weddings left in the summer. Not really much to report on, except that after 16 years I'm still at the top of my game, and my authentic '70s-era blue denim leisure suit still fits nicely.
We redid our bathroom, which turned out to be a major undertaking. We'd had an inexpensive textured ceiling (sometimes called "popcorn") in the bathroom, and the humidity from showers would cause some of the paint and texture to flake off. I got sick of the falling paint flakes, so one weekend in May, I spent four hours on a stepladder with a putty knife scraping off the ceiling texture. Well, it got out of hand from there. While I was on the ladder, I jostled the old light fixture and knocked loose the wires, so we now had an excuse to replace the light fixture (one of Margaret's projects that she's been saving). All in all, we replaced the mirror with a medicine cabinet, put in new light fixtures, repainted, and replaced the shower curtain rod with an industrial-strength closet rod (in case I want to do chin-ups in the bath). Margaret did the bulk of the work, and it came out pretty fine-looking.
We did learn a bit about wiring up something with a switch, though. After we unhooked the old fixture, we wired up the new fixture with all the white wires connected together, and all the black wires together. Wrong! It was pretty entertaining, though. We wired everything up, set the switch to OFF, then ran downstairs to turn on the breaker. When we came upstairs to the bathroom, the light was ON, and the switch was OFF. Unsure of what to do at this point, I turned the switch to ON, which promptly shut off the light and tripped the breaker. After a great deal of wire-following, we figured out how it should be hooked up, which involves one connection of black wire to white wire. So now OFF is OFF, ON is ON, and all is well.
July 4th fell on a Wednesday, which didn't give any of us a 4-day weekend. Fooey, as you know. "Crap From The Past" had its own July 4th celebration, and rather than celebrate the usual Happy Birthday America, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Bicentennial. After all, isn't the real Spirit of '76 rooted in custom quarters and the metric system? The show turned out to be a high point in my radio "career", and over the course of the two-hour show, we played seven different versions of a spoken-word piece from 1974 called "The Americans". Absurd on every level, and pure radio gold. (I will assume that my Pulitzer, Nobel, and Grammy awards all got lost in the mail.)
So the weekend after July 4th, my brother Kenny came out for a visit. I'd set the bar pretty high for Kenny, and had endlessly recounted the stories of mass food consumption, including the eating-the-entire-seven-pound-can-of-chocolate-pudding-over-the-course-of-one-Sunday story and the Kenny-and-his-friends-ordering-one-of-every-menu-item-from-Taco-Bell. Kenny was a legend here in Minneapolis, and he'd never even met most of my friends.
Friday afternoon, we brought him to a Twins game. Kenny and I ate massive amounts of Metrodome food, I spilled mustard on my best jeans, the Twins beat Cincinnati, and Margaret even had a good time. Isn't Cincinnati in the wrong league? Why are these two teams playing each other? Who screwed up baseball without telling me?
We just happened to go to a game on one of those special give-away days. The first 10,000 people get a Rod Carew bobble-head doll. We didn't show up four hours early like the first 10,000 people did, so we were bobble-headless. Until... they flashed some additional winning ticket numbers up on the big screen, and lo and behold, Margaret won one! She's the most unlucky person I know (heck - she's married to ME! That's some bad luck...), and she got the big prize of the evening. The doll was a pretty elaborate hand-painted ceramic thing, and now lives in one of our display cabinets of priceless stuff.
We introduced Kenny to a few friends at the house, and they were genuinely impressed, even considering the enormous hype beforehand. He still eats a LOT (although I eat more than he does, just don't mention it to him). Ah, sweet food...
So at the end of Kenny's weekend with us, we dropped him at the airport, then hit the road for a road trip to Denver to visit Margaret's family. It's about 950 miles from Minneapolis to Denver. Unless you're superhuman and can drive it straight through, that's an easy two-day drive each way, so we took our time noodling westward across Nebraska. We drove through Oxford and Cambridge, and felt all the smarter having passed through such studious towns. We also passed a sign for a highway that would take you to two towns, Max and Benkelman. "Max Benkelman, Private Eye"! But all pales in comparison with indescribably small Funk, Nebraska. I don't think Funk is incorporated, so it doesn't appear on maps. We took pictures of us in front of the Funk water tower, and in front of a little utility building labeled "Funk Utilities". The pictures didn't turn out too hot, mostly because the disposable camera got too hot and humid. (Sorry, that's a "single-use" camera; your pictures don't turn out too well if you just throw out the camera.) We'll know for next time.
The visit was fun - we saw family for a few days, I hit my favorite record store in the world (Don's Discs), and we got to drive up into the mountains west of Denver, which I'd never seen before. Gorgeous terrain, and all new to me.
Man, Denver radio is even more screwed up than Minneapolis radio. I heard 95.7 KISS-FM, right next to 96.1 KISS-FM, with nearly identical formats. How can this be? I'm guessing that one of those is from a nearby city other than Denver, but you wouldn't know which one by listening to them. Plus there are two stations using "Today's Best Music". Shouldn't one of them be "Today's Second-Best Music"? Makes no sense to my little brain...
On the way back, we spent a few days with Margaret's mom in Yuma, Colorado, the tiny farm town where Margaret grew up. (Margaret grew up on a farm, and got to show me cows, corn and combines up close. Woo-hoo!) At the farm, we noticed the tiniest baby bunny we'd ever seen, sitting on the edge of the driveway. We stood around and watched it for a little while, then grew alarmed at (1) the fact that it wasn't running away, and (2) it appeared to have a tick stuck on its ear. Over the course of the next two days, we noticed that the baby bunny was actively shunned by an adult rabbit, and was driven away from nests and any other rabbit shelter by the adult. We surmised that the bunny was diseased, and was exiled from the rest of the herd. Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that "that bunny ain't right". Interesting...
Well, to make matters more interesting, the weekly Yuma newspaper reported an outbreak of bubonic plague among a prairie dog colony out there, and advised people to avoid contact with rodents like rabbits and mice. Oh! Somehow, the adult rabbit knew that baby bunny had THE PLAGUE, and didn't want the rest of the herd infected! Interesting...
Well, to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, I got bitten by a tick while I was out in Yuma. I don't know squat about ticks, except that this one just came right off with a tissue, so it didn't get much of a chance to do whatever burrowing biting gnawing thing that ticks do. It just left a little dot on my leg where I plucked him off - a tickey hickey.
So we drove back, and had a pretty uneventful drive at that. I found out that Margaret's little Civic gets around 38 MPG with the air conditioning at full blast if you keep it below 70 MPH, but beyond that one piece of information, I can't remember much else about the drive home. Oh yeah, we ate at Arby's. Mmmmm...Arby's...
After a week out of town and 2000 miles on the car, we arrived home on Saturday afternoon (7/14), unpacked, and enjoyed the air conditioning and the incredibly affectionate cats.
Sunday morning, I felt kinda sick. Fever, headache, sore throat, chills, random aches-other-than-headache, and some other symptoms that I can't remember. A simple Tylenol wasn't cutting it. So... (yes, you knew this was inevitable) a trip to the emergency room! It was early on a Sunday morning and nothing else was open, so by default we had to go to the good-ol' ER and get my frequent-patient card stamped. I'm now beating Margaret in the emergency room battle of 2001, one to nothing.
So we told the ER people all the facts: I'd been bitten by a tick about three days earlier, I felt fine the night before, and oh yes, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the county where I got the tick bite. Although all of these were perfectly true, they must have sounded ridiculous to the ER staff, and I'd like to think I made their day. Some wacko coming in claiming to have a medieval disease...
So my fever was 101.3 when I checked in, 102.8 about an hour and a half later when a nurse checked me into an examination room, and was probably around 104 by the time they got an IV in me to bring the fever down. I wasn't quite delirious (too bad - I was looking forward to seeing things), but I was pretty shaky and irritable. They took blood - lots of blood - and left bruises on both hands and both arms as they tried to find a cooperative vein. From the tests they ran, I found out that (1) I wasn't pregnant, (2) I didn't have strep throat, and (3) they didn't know what was causing the fever. They said that the bubonic plague test took a week, and they would have to have it sent out to the department of health (no joke).
My prescribed treatment: If it was a virus, then it would run its course (or I would die). Either way, you can't treat it. If it was a bacteria bug, then they would kill it to death with the most head-blastin' antibiotics known to mankind. They prescribed me three weeks' worth of doxycycline - big blue pills that make you pukey, kill your appetite, and make you extremely sensitive to sun exposure. These things are what they use to treat lyme disease, and will easily kill off the bubonic plague. So I have a few days left on the Big Pills, and I'll be glad when it's over.
All in all, I missed three days of work (a rarity for me - I didn't miss any full work days even when I had pneumonia last year), and I missed a Crap From The Past show (an even greater rarity - I'd never missed a show due to illness in almost 15 years of radio). I was SIKK! I lost 8 pounds, and my pants don't fit right anymore. I'm sure I'll bulk up to normal after I'm done with the Big Pills, and I can't wait.
Most importantly, I'm beating Margaret this year - one emergency room visit to zero.
We had one of the wettest springs on record out here, with one of the rainiest Mays. There was some serious flooding on the rivers out here, and some of the bridges around Shakopee (where I work) were closed for about 6 weeks. What a mess!
Then, it got hot. We had the driest 1st-two-weeks-of-July on record, ever. It was 110 with the heat index two days ago, and as I'm sure you've heard, Korey Stringer, one of the Minnesota Vikings, died from heatstroke complications yesterday! My oh my! And boy did we pick the right year to get a new furnace, complete with central A/C. The greatest invention ever, except for maybe the dehumidifier in the basement. That's good too.
I got a new logo for Crap From The Past, and I'll probably be making bumper stickers and T-shirts. Did you know that white T-shirts are cheaper than all the other colors? Why does everyone know that except me?
The CFTP website got a major upgrade, and you music geeks can keep yourselves entertained for hours with this page: www.crapfromthepast.com/favorites
Apparently, the CFTP site is now one of the world's leading authorities on Milli Vanilli. If you go to Google and search on Girl You Know It's True, Baby Don't Forget My Number, or any other Milli Vanilli hits, my site comes up first! I rule!
Finally, I'll wrap this up with more music geekery. There was a legendary live recording from 1974 of the band Steely Dan. The song "Bodhisattva" began with a 2-1/2 minute-long rambling introduction by a thoroughly-inebriated Jerome Aniton, who eventually introduced the band as Mr. Steely Dan.
I suggested to my friend Chuck, "Jerome Aniton ordering lunch in the cafeteria". He came up with this:
"Well, look at all the fine people here....haaa....I think we're in for one....damn fine lunch here today....haaa....you can tell all your friends...hell you can tell 'em over in Watts.....haaa....that they missed out on a....damn good lunch. And all you...little....little pretty ones....haaa...can have lunch too...I don't know...whatever. Because in this here cafeteria right now....Mister...whatever...is gonna fix up a sandwich and chip combo plate that's gonna make you say that....haaa...this cafeteria in Santamonnica....haaa....is def-nitly....on fi-ya...."
Nicely done, Chuck.
That's all from our end. Hope all is well, and we'll talk to you soon!
Ron & Margaret
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - June 2001
"Well, we need the rain." - sarcastic remark made by Minnesotan; we clearly do not need the rain, and June has been about twice as rainy as it should be.
Well, howdy-do, boys and girls. (Written at beginning of June): The past weekend was the busiest I've had in a long time, and I'm still a little sleepy. Saturday: up at 6 (!) to get myself to a record show, where I was a vendor for a change. (These happen every two months, and vendors show up with crates of records and CDs from all over the midwest. They're more common out east, where I'd been going to these since I was in high school.) I sold a few LPs for a buck each, and spent the profits on new acquisitions, the vendor admission fee, and lunch. It all evens out, and I got rid of some of the fat in the record collection. After that, it was back home to pick up Margaret and rush off to a barbeque. (Four species of meat! Woo-hoo!) Margaret made rice pudding for dessert, which was a big hit. (It was indeed yummy, but rice pudding? Who'da thought?) I then left the barbeque early to go play a gig with the band at a coffeehouse in St. Paul. Eventually, I made it home and got to sleep well after midnight. Sunday: I spent a good 4 hours on a stepladder scraping the texturing off our bathroom ceiling. We had a popcorn ceiling, which is like a stucco finish, only it's very cheap to install and is not really the best quality available. It had been flaking off in the bathroom every time we shower, and I just got fed up with it. Now, we have a nice flat bathroom ceiling in need of a painting, and my right arm is sore. What a weekend! (Since then, Margaret has been repainting the walls and adding a new light fixture. Should look pretty nice when it's done...)
Since the last time I wrote, we had a large tree cut down in the backyard. It was hanging over the power lines, and was heading straight for the house. (Granted, trees don't move very fast, but the house moves even slower, and it's not well-equipped to "duck".) We paid some professional guys to cut the thing down, and they showed up with an amazing array of cutting/shredding/scooping equipment. They cut down all the branches and turned them into wood chips right there in the backyard. Woo-hoo! We saved about one-fourth of the wood chips, which they left on the driveway in a pile about the size of our car. No exaggeration - we had many many many wood chips, which Margaret eventually redistributed all over the backyard. And now, we have a stump in the backyard that's about 2-3 feet in diameter, and a lot more sun on the west side of our house. We planted some eensy little trees to make up for the big one we lost, but they're only about a foot tall right now. In due time...
We bought a new couch a few months ago, and had the darndest time trying to get rid of the old one. Even the "free" sign at the curb didn't do it, and it's been sitting in the garage for months. Finally, Margaret ripped it apart, attached some new slats to the hard maple frame, and turned it into a bench that lives on our patio. Recycling indeed!
The weather has been nuts out here. There was some serious flooding along the Minnesota river at the end of winter. Our house is many miles from the river and well above the water level, but I have to cross the Minnesota to get to work. For a while, it was pretty ugly. There is one particular frontage road that lies pretty close to the river, and you can see it very clearly from the highway on my morning commute. First, I was surprised to see water at all on the road (which was closed before the flooding started). Then, over the next two weeks, I watched the water level rise and rise, until most of a yellow right-turn road sign was under water. That's got to be at least 6 feet of water on the road, and for a few days some of the big highways were closed near the river. The water level has since receded, but I don't think the benchmark frontage road is open yet. And I don't know the status of some of the small river towns that got flooded. Presumably, they're cleaning up, but it's not making headlines anymore.
The flooding situation seems to be getting worse as a trend. We've had "hundred-year" floods three times in the last ten years, and my guess is that it's from all the man-made flood controls they've put in. If you go out of your way to contain the river at your town, then you make things worse for all the towns downstream. Or at least that's my naive way of seeing it.
We also had back-to-back days of 94 degrees in mid-May, which is insane, followed by a few days of record lows only a week later. Nutzy!
In other news, "Crap From The Past" has been getting more ambitious lately. To celebrate Cinco De Mayo, I did an all-Spanish show, in which both the music and my talk breaks were entirely in Spanish. I haven't spoken any Spanish since high school 15 years ago, and I was terrified for the whole show. It sounded pretty good, but I won't be doing any foreign-language shows again for some time. The website also got a major upgrade, with the addition of 600 new files, including 100+ audio clips and 300+ pictures! Woo-hoo! (www.crapfromthepast.com) Most of this will appeal to the hardest-of-the-hardcore music geeks, but I have some quaint odds and ends that may interest you. For example, I scanned in the stub from my very first concert - The Thompson Twins with O.M.D. from 1985. Such minutia!
My band, Thinland, broke up. We lost our cello player and never really recovered, so we all agreed that we had a good run, and we'll move on to other projects. The drums now move back into my basement. Oh well...
Our building at work is walking distance from ValleyFair, an amusement park. From our windows in the cafeteria, we can see The Wild Thing, a giant green roller coaster, and we can hear the screams from our parking lot. There's something indescribably wonderful about hearing shrieks of panic during the work day!
Ron & Margaret "Don't look back in Angora" Gerber
Well, howdy-do, boys and girls. (Written at beginning of June): The past weekend was the busiest I've had in a long time, and I'm still a little sleepy. Saturday: up at 6 (!) to get myself to a record show, where I was a vendor for a change. (These happen every two months, and vendors show up with crates of records and CDs from all over the midwest. They're more common out east, where I'd been going to these since I was in high school.) I sold a few LPs for a buck each, and spent the profits on new acquisitions, the vendor admission fee, and lunch. It all evens out, and I got rid of some of the fat in the record collection. After that, it was back home to pick up Margaret and rush off to a barbeque. (Four species of meat! Woo-hoo!) Margaret made rice pudding for dessert, which was a big hit. (It was indeed yummy, but rice pudding? Who'da thought?) I then left the barbeque early to go play a gig with the band at a coffeehouse in St. Paul. Eventually, I made it home and got to sleep well after midnight. Sunday: I spent a good 4 hours on a stepladder scraping the texturing off our bathroom ceiling. We had a popcorn ceiling, which is like a stucco finish, only it's very cheap to install and is not really the best quality available. It had been flaking off in the bathroom every time we shower, and I just got fed up with it. Now, we have a nice flat bathroom ceiling in need of a painting, and my right arm is sore. What a weekend! (Since then, Margaret has been repainting the walls and adding a new light fixture. Should look pretty nice when it's done...)
Since the last time I wrote, we had a large tree cut down in the backyard. It was hanging over the power lines, and was heading straight for the house. (Granted, trees don't move very fast, but the house moves even slower, and it's not well-equipped to "duck".) We paid some professional guys to cut the thing down, and they showed up with an amazing array of cutting/shredding/scooping equipment. They cut down all the branches and turned them into wood chips right there in the backyard. Woo-hoo! We saved about one-fourth of the wood chips, which they left on the driveway in a pile about the size of our car. No exaggeration - we had many many many wood chips, which Margaret eventually redistributed all over the backyard. And now, we have a stump in the backyard that's about 2-3 feet in diameter, and a lot more sun on the west side of our house. We planted some eensy little trees to make up for the big one we lost, but they're only about a foot tall right now. In due time...
We bought a new couch a few months ago, and had the darndest time trying to get rid of the old one. Even the "free" sign at the curb didn't do it, and it's been sitting in the garage for months. Finally, Margaret ripped it apart, attached some new slats to the hard maple frame, and turned it into a bench that lives on our patio. Recycling indeed!
The weather has been nuts out here. There was some serious flooding along the Minnesota river at the end of winter. Our house is many miles from the river and well above the water level, but I have to cross the Minnesota to get to work. For a while, it was pretty ugly. There is one particular frontage road that lies pretty close to the river, and you can see it very clearly from the highway on my morning commute. First, I was surprised to see water at all on the road (which was closed before the flooding started). Then, over the next two weeks, I watched the water level rise and rise, until most of a yellow right-turn road sign was under water. That's got to be at least 6 feet of water on the road, and for a few days some of the big highways were closed near the river. The water level has since receded, but I don't think the benchmark frontage road is open yet. And I don't know the status of some of the small river towns that got flooded. Presumably, they're cleaning up, but it's not making headlines anymore.
The flooding situation seems to be getting worse as a trend. We've had "hundred-year" floods three times in the last ten years, and my guess is that it's from all the man-made flood controls they've put in. If you go out of your way to contain the river at your town, then you make things worse for all the towns downstream. Or at least that's my naive way of seeing it.
We also had back-to-back days of 94 degrees in mid-May, which is insane, followed by a few days of record lows only a week later. Nutzy!
In other news, "Crap From The Past" has been getting more ambitious lately. To celebrate Cinco De Mayo, I did an all-Spanish show, in which both the music and my talk breaks were entirely in Spanish. I haven't spoken any Spanish since high school 15 years ago, and I was terrified for the whole show. It sounded pretty good, but I won't be doing any foreign-language shows again for some time. The website also got a major upgrade, with the addition of 600 new files, including 100+ audio clips and 300+ pictures! Woo-hoo! (www.crapfromthepast.com) Most of this will appeal to the hardest-of-the-hardcore music geeks, but I have some quaint odds and ends that may interest you. For example, I scanned in the stub from my very first concert - The Thompson Twins with O.M.D. from 1985. Such minutia!
My band, Thinland, broke up. We lost our cello player and never really recovered, so we all agreed that we had a good run, and we'll move on to other projects. The drums now move back into my basement. Oh well...
Our building at work is walking distance from ValleyFair, an amusement park. From our windows in the cafeteria, we can see The Wild Thing, a giant green roller coaster, and we can hear the screams from our parking lot. There's something indescribably wonderful about hearing shrieks of panic during the work day!
Ron & Margaret "Don't look back in Angora" Gerber
Monday, April 9, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - April 2001
"Are you adequately prepared to rock?" - Principal Skinner from The Simpsons
"Monkeys are taking over New Delhi." - Bob Edwards, on NPR's "Morning Edition", 3/22. Now THAT's the way to start the morning!
Well, I'm working again, and I'm completely settled in with the new job. Seagate is history (well, the company is still around but I'm gone), and I've been a full-fledged ADC employee for about two months. We do fiber optics stuff for telecom, and our stock is in the toilet right now (which is just fine because I'm buying...) My group is about 17 people, and about 13 of them are from my old optical group from Seagate. It's been a very easy transition for me, despite the fact that I can't walk to work anymore. I guess I could walk, but it's about 13 miles and it would take the whole work day. The ADC cafeteria is excellent; if I were in a restaurant and they served me this food, I would be pleased. I haven't put on any weight, though (bless my skinny ancestors), but I stopped working out. Muscle tone? Who needs muscle tone when you eat a good lunch?
Happy Passover and Easter and All That. Margaret put on our ersatz-Seder again, where she made sushi and in the process, covered nearly all the bases required for a certified regulation Seder. We had a few friends over this time, and consumed enormous quantities of California Rolls, Sake, Sangria, wine, and weird tasty desserts from the Oriental Market down the street. A big success, and because we invited my friend John over (the same guy from the bad pizza/beer/movie night), we had virtually no leftovers. Many thanks to Margaret's Korean roommate from college, who passed on the sushi skills quite nicely. (No raw fish, though. Just seaweed wrappers, rice, cucumbers, carrots, jicama, avocado, a cooked egg, and hot dogs, which work surprisingly well in the California rolls. Wasabi was the Bitter Herb and soy sauce was the "salty tears" for dippping.)
Our big excitement lately was getting a new furnace. Our old one was made by Trane sometime in the early '60s, which puts it at about 38 years old. Each time we had a service guy out to take a look at it, his reaction was always, "My God! I've never seen one of these this old!" I know that furnaces aren't supposed to last for 38 years, and it's a credit to Trane ("It's hard to stop a Trane, but you sure can slow one down") that this one lasted as long as it did. We decided it was time for a new one when it set off the carbon monoxide detector in the basement. At first, we thought it was just the bird that had fallen down the chimney and clogged the flume (which Margaret lovingly described as a basically a piece of charcoal with wings), but even after we cleaned out the ex-bird, we got CO beeps. So The Guy came out last week with a Helper, and the two of them swore up a storm carrying out the old furnace. We got a new Trane, and so far so good. It's remarkably quiet, and it's been unsettling for us because the only time it's been that quiet is when the blower motor died. It's ninety-something percent efficient, compared to the old one (maybe, oh I dunno, how about 10%?), and it's got air conditioning. We'll only need the AC for about two weeks in August when it's so humid that you want to die, but if we ever sell the house it will certainly help.
We saw Chinatown, The Producers, and Manos The Hands Of Fate all in one weekend. All bona-fide classics, and all even better with repeated watchings. Six thumbs up.
We also drove around last week at midnight on a weeknight to see the northern lights. I'd seen them a few times in '91 driving from Rochester MN back up to the Twin Cities, so we hopped on US52 and drove about 50 miles toward Rochester, watching backwards over our shoulders. A dangerous way to drive, but worth it. The northern lights just looked like some red clouds that were illuminated by city haze, but once we realized that we were 50 miles away from city haze, it became clear that that was it. We got to sleep about 1:30, but we saw a cool natural phenomenon. Like it oughta be.
We just went through the KFAI pledge drive, a twice-a-year fun-fest where we solicit financial support from the listeners. (No commercials; this is how we pay the bills.) Crap From The Past broke all kinds of records by raising over $2000 for the station, which is completely unheard of for a show that's on Sunday nights from midnight to 2. Thanks to all the listeners that contributed, and maybe I'll be able to convince the station management that CFTP deserves a better time slot. (I'm not holding my breath.) The website www.crapfromthepast.com has added a Milli Vanilli tribute section, and now it's getting more traffic than anything else on there. Scary, and worth checking out.
I mentioned in my last e-mailing that I would be taking three glorious weeks off between jobs. The time off did me a world of good, and I'd recommend a long break to anyone switching jobs, much in the same way that I recommend relieving some wedding day tenison by eloping and having a reception afterwards. I slept late for two weeks straight, and for the third week, we packed up Margaret's Honda and drove to Yellowstone National Park. It was awesome - Yellowstone in February is great!
We'd had such good luck with road trips before that we just decided to follow the map to Yellowstone. The route was pretty straightforward - I-90 west across South Dakota and Wyoming. We drove all day and pulled into a hotel when we got sleepy. We drove toward the eastmost entrance, and discovered that the eastmost entrance to the park is closed to auto traffic for the winter! (Doh!) The nice folks at the hotel in the tiny Wyoming town informed us of this before we got on the road, and we had to take a whole lot of 2-lane highways across Wyoming to get back to I-90. We turned south at Livingston, Montana, then another 2-lane highway took us into the park.
I have to say that it's absolutely beautiful across Wyoming and Montana, two states which I'd never seen before. It's also part of the "West", with the cowboys and all that, which I didn't realize at all. (I always associate the "West" with Tucson, just because I lived there and hadn't thought much about it.)
And yes, Montana has a speed limit (it's not infinite, as previously believed.) It's 75 MPH by day, 70 at night. We drove significantly faster than the speed limit, though, and found out that your gas mileage tends to be pretty crummy at 90 MPH.
The teensy town at the edge of park is Gardiner, which is mostly some restaurants, junque shoppes, and a hotel or two. Gardiner is pretty much deserted in the winter, and virtually everything was closed in the town except for a gas station. It was creepy. There was a sign in front of one Gardiner hotel advertising, "Elk stay free." And sure enough, there were about a dozen elk lounging on the snow-covered lawn in front of the hotel. Very cool, and it set a very nice tone for us as we drove into the park.
You buy a 7-day pass at the edge of the park, so you can come and go as you see fit without paying a fortune. There were another dozen or so elk inside the park right near the gate, as if to thumb their noses at any potential hunters. (Yes, I know elk don't have thumbs. It's just an expression. After another five miles or so on a twisty, wind-y, two-lane road, we arrived at Mammoth, which is one of the lodges inside the park. There's a hotel, some gift shops and historical buildings, some really nice scenery, and not much else in Mammoth. It's actually a nice gentle way to ease yourself into the park, and there's about 2 miles worth of hiking trails near the hotel. There were a few hot springs along the trail, and we were awe-struck how you can have near-boiling water (it's about 170-180 degrees at the surface) right next to 18 inches of snow. It was plenty cold, and I got good use out of the hood on my ice-fishing jacket.
The Mammoth hotel was really nice, and really old. It was designed in the mid-'20s (I think), when the economy was booming and plans were BIG! During construction through the Depression, it was scaled back to something more reasonable. The rooms were historically accurate to the period, complete with push-button light switches, giant claw-foot bathtubs (no showers!), radiator heating, and no TV or radio. Neat! Outside, there were magpies everywhere. Margaret tells me that magpies are pretty birds that tend to soil their reputations by being scavengers, and they were everywhere. We also saw a big raven in the parking lot eyeing a small yippy dog (a WEINER dog no less!) in one of the parked cars. Dogs is tasty!
We spent a night there, then took a snow-coach down to Old Faithful. The roads are closed to cars, but open for snowmobiles and the park's snow coaches (basically a van on skis!) We're not adventurous enough for the snow-mobiles, so we took the vans-on-skis. It's about a 4-hour ride from Mammoth to Old Faithful, and the van-on-skis makes a few stops for scenery and snacks. It's driven by cool tour guides, who come from all over the world to work in Yellowstone. One of our drivers was from somewhere near Russia (I should have written most of this down when it was fresh in my mind...)
The park had a serious forest fire in the summer of 1988, and you can still see the effects. Lots of burned trees still standing, and lots of new little saplings that are all about 3 feet tall. I was really surprised that nearly everyone working at the park saw the fire as a positive thing, and an almost necessary step in the natural progression of the park. They talked about how some of the tree species need the extreme heat of a fire for their seeds to sprout, and how the animals actually had plenty of food after the fire because the oxidized bark was edible and digestible for them! Who'da thunk? It almost makes me want to watch the Discovery Channel more (but just almost.)
The scenery was astounding, and I'd like to think that I learned a lot. We saw buffalo a-plenty, and I learned that buffalo is a more common (and less correct) term for bison. Buffalo/bison are enormous creatures, and we saw hundreds of them from the van (and up close later on). They're also tasty as I learned from some burger places out east, but oddly enough, no one out there serves buffalo as burgers. I dunno why.
We saw elk a-plenty as well. They're everywhere, and they're pretty big as well. We had a spectacular bald eagle sighting from the van. It just sat there, perched on a tree branch, much to the delight of the Japanese photgrapher in the van with us. As if on cue, it stretched its wings, yawned, and turned to the side.
We also saw some coyotes eating an elk that had fallen into one of the hot springs and died. It was pretty much elk soup by the time we arrived, and it was very cool to watch the coyotes carefully walk out along the carcass, and rip off pieces with their teeth. You could tell that the water was hot by the way the coyotes reacted when they got their feet wet. Good pictures indeed - as if it were staged for the Discovery channel.
Now imagine this - if I described a couple where he was an engineer, she has an art degree, they have no kids and 2 cats, one of which pees in a corner of the basement, she drives a Honda Civic and used to drive a Pinto, they had no proper honeymoon, and he used to do community radio, you'd think I was describing Margaret and me. Nope - this is a description of Dan & Kristin from Portland, Oregon, who we sat next to in the van. We were all pretty shocked at the similarities, and we walked around the park together. Very cool people, and I owe them a letter and a set of pictures.
There's a lodge at Old Faithful, and we stayed a night there for a night. The park at Old Faithful is superb. The hot springs that we saw in Mammoth were nice, but they were peanuts compared to the geysers at the Old Faithful park. Old Faithful itself is excellent, and I was somewhat relieved to learn that you can't exactly set your watch by it - it erupts every 79 minutes, +/- 11 minutes. It's the +/- part that sets my mind at ease somewhat - otherwise nature would be really scary in its precision.
So we strolled around the Old Faithful park with Dan and Kristin on the nicest, sunniest possible day in the middle of winter (I got a bit sunburned on my face). The paths were shoveled, but the park had about 2 feet of snow on the ground, and the air was crisp crisp crisp. We'd walk up to a geyser, it would erupt, we'd applaud, then walk on to the next one. After a while, we realized that Dan had the magic touch for geysers - "Kazaam!" and the thing would erupt on command. He had the Kavorka! And it worked repeatedly as we wandered along the trails. It was only afterward that we saw the expected eruption times; Old Faithful's average eruption separation is about 79 minutes, but the geysers in the rest of the park tended to have a few hours between eruptions, like 4-11 hours! So it really was a total fluke that the eruptions followed us around, but it's nice to believe that someone actually has the Kavorka. And somewhere on Dan's roll of film, we have a picture of a buffalo standing right in front of Old Faithful, taken from about 25 feet away. (We know you're not supposed to be that close to them, but it was standing right in front of us on the path.)
There are some really cool pools in the park. Not erupting geysers really, just warm pools that have some fantastic colors in them from minerals and bacteria. If you were going to install a decorative pool in your backyard, you'd want it to look like one of these. There was a "Do not mark bacterial mats" sign that we interpreted as "Don't pee in the pools."
I did observe one of the coolest optical phenomena I've ever seen, and I'll try and describe it to you fellow optics geeks. It was a very clear, cold day at the park, and we were looking at one of the hot spring pools. The sun was overhead and just behind us, so that the top of our shadows fell about two feet in front of us. There was some steam at the surface of the springs, so that there was a few inches of mist where the top of our shadows fell. If I looked at my own shadow, I appeared to have a bright halo around my head - like a '70s-era basketball afro of light. And each of us noticed the same effect for his/her own shadow - you see a little light halo around your own head, but not around anyone else's. For lack of a better name, I dubbed it my "aura", and I haven't come up with a good explanation of why you'd see this at all. Probably the same math that predicts rainbows, but I'm not sure why you'd see such a sharp reflection only at near-normal incidence (near the head of your own shadow). Thank God it's not an oral exam question, or I'd have to give back my degree...
After three full days in the park, we drove home. Uber-Kudos to Margaret's driving skillz, and she guided us through a Montana snowstorm. She claims to have been in conditions like this all the time growing up on the farm 3 hours east of Denver, and had no trouble passing the semis and magically keeping the car on the road at a healthy speed. (I would never have made it home at all...)
All in all: 6 days of driving, and 2700 miles on the Civic. The best imaginable week.
Margaret would like to interject here for a minute or two for a rebuttal: A flue is a metal chimney, a flume is a log ride. The park guide from "near Russia" was from Croatia, which makes me wonder what his letters to home are like - "Yes, there are buffalo wandering all over the place, all the mountains are spectacular, and everyone that works for THIS government is a dope-smoking Granola!" Yellowstone is ideal in the winter for the reason that the biggest scavengers awake at that time of year are just coyotes, not enormous bears who can strip cars. The Korean roommate wasn't from college, it was from my "sabbatical" when I dropped out and switched schools because I was broke. Her parents were transferred back by the Air Force and threw all of the roommates out, which is why I was only there for a couple of weeks. Welcome to Tucson, your lease is toilet paper. As for the new furnace, it is much too quiet. I keep checking the thermostat, because not hearing the fan running makes me think the house is getting colder and colder. I'm sure that in the summer, I'll still have to run a fan just to psych myself into thinking that it's cool. Gotta go, The Guy who's estimating the shade tree removal is due here soon.
Ron's rebuttal to Margaret's rebuttal: Yes, a bird died in the log ride that's attached to our chimney. I'm sticking to my story...
One more thing, in the name of spring cleaning: The real reason you haven't heard from me in eons is that I was putting off re-typing my alias list, which is over 100 names long. I think it's all in there, but I'm sure I screwed some things up. If you could e-mail me your current info, I'd appreciate it. (And to family members, kindly pass along any other family members I might have missed.) Also, let me know your preferred e-mail address if you have multiple entries; the ADC system only allows one e-mail address per name. Thanks!
So that's what's been up at my end. The last of the snow melted off this weekend, and spring is about to spring. Hope all is springy at your end of the world, and keep in touch.
Ron & Margaret
"Monkeys are taking over New Delhi." - Bob Edwards, on NPR's "Morning Edition", 3/22. Now THAT's the way to start the morning!
Well, I'm working again, and I'm completely settled in with the new job. Seagate is history (well, the company is still around but I'm gone), and I've been a full-fledged ADC employee for about two months. We do fiber optics stuff for telecom, and our stock is in the toilet right now (which is just fine because I'm buying...) My group is about 17 people, and about 13 of them are from my old optical group from Seagate. It's been a very easy transition for me, despite the fact that I can't walk to work anymore. I guess I could walk, but it's about 13 miles and it would take the whole work day. The ADC cafeteria is excellent; if I were in a restaurant and they served me this food, I would be pleased. I haven't put on any weight, though (bless my skinny ancestors), but I stopped working out. Muscle tone? Who needs muscle tone when you eat a good lunch?
Happy Passover and Easter and All That. Margaret put on our ersatz-Seder again, where she made sushi and in the process, covered nearly all the bases required for a certified regulation Seder. We had a few friends over this time, and consumed enormous quantities of California Rolls, Sake, Sangria, wine, and weird tasty desserts from the Oriental Market down the street. A big success, and because we invited my friend John over (the same guy from the bad pizza/beer/movie night), we had virtually no leftovers. Many thanks to Margaret's Korean roommate from college, who passed on the sushi skills quite nicely. (No raw fish, though. Just seaweed wrappers, rice, cucumbers, carrots, jicama, avocado, a cooked egg, and hot dogs, which work surprisingly well in the California rolls. Wasabi was the Bitter Herb and soy sauce was the "salty tears" for dippping.)
Our big excitement lately was getting a new furnace. Our old one was made by Trane sometime in the early '60s, which puts it at about 38 years old. Each time we had a service guy out to take a look at it, his reaction was always, "My God! I've never seen one of these this old!" I know that furnaces aren't supposed to last for 38 years, and it's a credit to Trane ("It's hard to stop a Trane, but you sure can slow one down") that this one lasted as long as it did. We decided it was time for a new one when it set off the carbon monoxide detector in the basement. At first, we thought it was just the bird that had fallen down the chimney and clogged the flume (which Margaret lovingly described as a basically a piece of charcoal with wings), but even after we cleaned out the ex-bird, we got CO beeps. So The Guy came out last week with a Helper, and the two of them swore up a storm carrying out the old furnace. We got a new Trane, and so far so good. It's remarkably quiet, and it's been unsettling for us because the only time it's been that quiet is when the blower motor died. It's ninety-something percent efficient, compared to the old one (maybe, oh I dunno, how about 10%?), and it's got air conditioning. We'll only need the AC for about two weeks in August when it's so humid that you want to die, but if we ever sell the house it will certainly help.
We saw Chinatown, The Producers, and Manos The Hands Of Fate all in one weekend. All bona-fide classics, and all even better with repeated watchings. Six thumbs up.
We also drove around last week at midnight on a weeknight to see the northern lights. I'd seen them a few times in '91 driving from Rochester MN back up to the Twin Cities, so we hopped on US52 and drove about 50 miles toward Rochester, watching backwards over our shoulders. A dangerous way to drive, but worth it. The northern lights just looked like some red clouds that were illuminated by city haze, but once we realized that we were 50 miles away from city haze, it became clear that that was it. We got to sleep about 1:30, but we saw a cool natural phenomenon. Like it oughta be.
We just went through the KFAI pledge drive, a twice-a-year fun-fest where we solicit financial support from the listeners. (No commercials; this is how we pay the bills.) Crap From The Past broke all kinds of records by raising over $2000 for the station, which is completely unheard of for a show that's on Sunday nights from midnight to 2. Thanks to all the listeners that contributed, and maybe I'll be able to convince the station management that CFTP deserves a better time slot. (I'm not holding my breath.) The website www.crapfromthepast.com has added a Milli Vanilli tribute section, and now it's getting more traffic than anything else on there. Scary, and worth checking out.
I mentioned in my last e-mailing that I would be taking three glorious weeks off between jobs. The time off did me a world of good, and I'd recommend a long break to anyone switching jobs, much in the same way that I recommend relieving some wedding day tenison by eloping and having a reception afterwards. I slept late for two weeks straight, and for the third week, we packed up Margaret's Honda and drove to Yellowstone National Park. It was awesome - Yellowstone in February is great!
We'd had such good luck with road trips before that we just decided to follow the map to Yellowstone. The route was pretty straightforward - I-90 west across South Dakota and Wyoming. We drove all day and pulled into a hotel when we got sleepy. We drove toward the eastmost entrance, and discovered that the eastmost entrance to the park is closed to auto traffic for the winter! (Doh!) The nice folks at the hotel in the tiny Wyoming town informed us of this before we got on the road, and we had to take a whole lot of 2-lane highways across Wyoming to get back to I-90. We turned south at Livingston, Montana, then another 2-lane highway took us into the park.
I have to say that it's absolutely beautiful across Wyoming and Montana, two states which I'd never seen before. It's also part of the "West", with the cowboys and all that, which I didn't realize at all. (I always associate the "West" with Tucson, just because I lived there and hadn't thought much about it.)
And yes, Montana has a speed limit (it's not infinite, as previously believed.) It's 75 MPH by day, 70 at night. We drove significantly faster than the speed limit, though, and found out that your gas mileage tends to be pretty crummy at 90 MPH.
The teensy town at the edge of park is Gardiner, which is mostly some restaurants, junque shoppes, and a hotel or two. Gardiner is pretty much deserted in the winter, and virtually everything was closed in the town except for a gas station. It was creepy. There was a sign in front of one Gardiner hotel advertising, "Elk stay free." And sure enough, there were about a dozen elk lounging on the snow-covered lawn in front of the hotel. Very cool, and it set a very nice tone for us as we drove into the park.
You buy a 7-day pass at the edge of the park, so you can come and go as you see fit without paying a fortune. There were another dozen or so elk inside the park right near the gate, as if to thumb their noses at any potential hunters. (Yes, I know elk don't have thumbs. It's just an expression. After another five miles or so on a twisty, wind-y, two-lane road, we arrived at Mammoth, which is one of the lodges inside the park. There's a hotel, some gift shops and historical buildings, some really nice scenery, and not much else in Mammoth. It's actually a nice gentle way to ease yourself into the park, and there's about 2 miles worth of hiking trails near the hotel. There were a few hot springs along the trail, and we were awe-struck how you can have near-boiling water (it's about 170-180 degrees at the surface) right next to 18 inches of snow. It was plenty cold, and I got good use out of the hood on my ice-fishing jacket.
The Mammoth hotel was really nice, and really old. It was designed in the mid-'20s (I think), when the economy was booming and plans were BIG! During construction through the Depression, it was scaled back to something more reasonable. The rooms were historically accurate to the period, complete with push-button light switches, giant claw-foot bathtubs (no showers!), radiator heating, and no TV or radio. Neat! Outside, there were magpies everywhere. Margaret tells me that magpies are pretty birds that tend to soil their reputations by being scavengers, and they were everywhere. We also saw a big raven in the parking lot eyeing a small yippy dog (a WEINER dog no less!) in one of the parked cars. Dogs is tasty!
We spent a night there, then took a snow-coach down to Old Faithful. The roads are closed to cars, but open for snowmobiles and the park's snow coaches (basically a van on skis!) We're not adventurous enough for the snow-mobiles, so we took the vans-on-skis. It's about a 4-hour ride from Mammoth to Old Faithful, and the van-on-skis makes a few stops for scenery and snacks. It's driven by cool tour guides, who come from all over the world to work in Yellowstone. One of our drivers was from somewhere near Russia (I should have written most of this down when it was fresh in my mind...)
The park had a serious forest fire in the summer of 1988, and you can still see the effects. Lots of burned trees still standing, and lots of new little saplings that are all about 3 feet tall. I was really surprised that nearly everyone working at the park saw the fire as a positive thing, and an almost necessary step in the natural progression of the park. They talked about how some of the tree species need the extreme heat of a fire for their seeds to sprout, and how the animals actually had plenty of food after the fire because the oxidized bark was edible and digestible for them! Who'da thunk? It almost makes me want to watch the Discovery Channel more (but just almost.)
The scenery was astounding, and I'd like to think that I learned a lot. We saw buffalo a-plenty, and I learned that buffalo is a more common (and less correct) term for bison. Buffalo/bison are enormous creatures, and we saw hundreds of them from the van (and up close later on). They're also tasty as I learned from some burger places out east, but oddly enough, no one out there serves buffalo as burgers. I dunno why.
We saw elk a-plenty as well. They're everywhere, and they're pretty big as well. We had a spectacular bald eagle sighting from the van. It just sat there, perched on a tree branch, much to the delight of the Japanese photgrapher in the van with us. As if on cue, it stretched its wings, yawned, and turned to the side.
We also saw some coyotes eating an elk that had fallen into one of the hot springs and died. It was pretty much elk soup by the time we arrived, and it was very cool to watch the coyotes carefully walk out along the carcass, and rip off pieces with their teeth. You could tell that the water was hot by the way the coyotes reacted when they got their feet wet. Good pictures indeed - as if it were staged for the Discovery channel.
Now imagine this - if I described a couple where he was an engineer, she has an art degree, they have no kids and 2 cats, one of which pees in a corner of the basement, she drives a Honda Civic and used to drive a Pinto, they had no proper honeymoon, and he used to do community radio, you'd think I was describing Margaret and me. Nope - this is a description of Dan & Kristin from Portland, Oregon, who we sat next to in the van. We were all pretty shocked at the similarities, and we walked around the park together. Very cool people, and I owe them a letter and a set of pictures.
There's a lodge at Old Faithful, and we stayed a night there for a night. The park at Old Faithful is superb. The hot springs that we saw in Mammoth were nice, but they were peanuts compared to the geysers at the Old Faithful park. Old Faithful itself is excellent, and I was somewhat relieved to learn that you can't exactly set your watch by it - it erupts every 79 minutes, +/- 11 minutes. It's the +/- part that sets my mind at ease somewhat - otherwise nature would be really scary in its precision.
So we strolled around the Old Faithful park with Dan and Kristin on the nicest, sunniest possible day in the middle of winter (I got a bit sunburned on my face). The paths were shoveled, but the park had about 2 feet of snow on the ground, and the air was crisp crisp crisp. We'd walk up to a geyser, it would erupt, we'd applaud, then walk on to the next one. After a while, we realized that Dan had the magic touch for geysers - "Kazaam!" and the thing would erupt on command. He had the Kavorka! And it worked repeatedly as we wandered along the trails. It was only afterward that we saw the expected eruption times; Old Faithful's average eruption separation is about 79 minutes, but the geysers in the rest of the park tended to have a few hours between eruptions, like 4-11 hours! So it really was a total fluke that the eruptions followed us around, but it's nice to believe that someone actually has the Kavorka. And somewhere on Dan's roll of film, we have a picture of a buffalo standing right in front of Old Faithful, taken from about 25 feet away. (We know you're not supposed to be that close to them, but it was standing right in front of us on the path.)
There are some really cool pools in the park. Not erupting geysers really, just warm pools that have some fantastic colors in them from minerals and bacteria. If you were going to install a decorative pool in your backyard, you'd want it to look like one of these. There was a "Do not mark bacterial mats" sign that we interpreted as "Don't pee in the pools."
I did observe one of the coolest optical phenomena I've ever seen, and I'll try and describe it to you fellow optics geeks. It was a very clear, cold day at the park, and we were looking at one of the hot spring pools. The sun was overhead and just behind us, so that the top of our shadows fell about two feet in front of us. There was some steam at the surface of the springs, so that there was a few inches of mist where the top of our shadows fell. If I looked at my own shadow, I appeared to have a bright halo around my head - like a '70s-era basketball afro of light. And each of us noticed the same effect for his/her own shadow - you see a little light halo around your own head, but not around anyone else's. For lack of a better name, I dubbed it my "aura", and I haven't come up with a good explanation of why you'd see this at all. Probably the same math that predicts rainbows, but I'm not sure why you'd see such a sharp reflection only at near-normal incidence (near the head of your own shadow). Thank God it's not an oral exam question, or I'd have to give back my degree...
After three full days in the park, we drove home. Uber-Kudos to Margaret's driving skillz, and she guided us through a Montana snowstorm. She claims to have been in conditions like this all the time growing up on the farm 3 hours east of Denver, and had no trouble passing the semis and magically keeping the car on the road at a healthy speed. (I would never have made it home at all...)
All in all: 6 days of driving, and 2700 miles on the Civic. The best imaginable week.
Margaret would like to interject here for a minute or two for a rebuttal: A flue is a metal chimney, a flume is a log ride. The park guide from "near Russia" was from Croatia, which makes me wonder what his letters to home are like - "Yes, there are buffalo wandering all over the place, all the mountains are spectacular, and everyone that works for THIS government is a dope-smoking Granola!" Yellowstone is ideal in the winter for the reason that the biggest scavengers awake at that time of year are just coyotes, not enormous bears who can strip cars. The Korean roommate wasn't from college, it was from my "sabbatical" when I dropped out and switched schools because I was broke. Her parents were transferred back by the Air Force and threw all of the roommates out, which is why I was only there for a couple of weeks. Welcome to Tucson, your lease is toilet paper. As for the new furnace, it is much too quiet. I keep checking the thermostat, because not hearing the fan running makes me think the house is getting colder and colder. I'm sure that in the summer, I'll still have to run a fan just to psych myself into thinking that it's cool. Gotta go, The Guy who's estimating the shade tree removal is due here soon.
Ron's rebuttal to Margaret's rebuttal: Yes, a bird died in the log ride that's attached to our chimney. I'm sticking to my story...
One more thing, in the name of spring cleaning: The real reason you haven't heard from me in eons is that I was putting off re-typing my alias list, which is over 100 names long. I think it's all in there, but I'm sure I screwed some things up. If you could e-mail me your current info, I'd appreciate it. (And to family members, kindly pass along any other family members I might have missed.) Also, let me know your preferred e-mail address if you have multiple entries; the ADC system only allows one e-mail address per name. Thanks!
So that's what's been up at my end. The last of the snow melted off this weekend, and spring is about to spring. Hope all is springy at your end of the world, and keep in touch.
Ron & Margaret
Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Ron's Big Life Update - January 2001
Happy mid-January from Minnesota! We had 34 inches of snow in December, and not much since then. (We also had Super Bowl dreams until the Giants beat us 41-0, but we won't talk about that.)
First off, I'm leaving my job at Seagate. I had a good 3-1/2 years at the company, but it's time to get back to optics. I'll be starting work at ADC Telecommunications at the end of February (fiber optics and such). The site is about 20 minutes from the house, so I won't have to move or anything. The best way to get in touch with me is still ron@crapfromthepast.com, which gets forwarded to the house. (By the way, the crapfromthepast.com site now has a huge section on Milli Vanilli. Someone had to...)
We ditched cable and got a satellite dish, then got a new couch. Margaret and I are well on our way to becoming true potatoes.
So Margaret and I both made quick trips to Florida recently. First, she flew to Tampa to help her sister move into a new house. While she was gone... I was single again! Woo-hoo! So I did the most single-guy thing I could think of - I invited my friend John over, and we got the worst frozen pizza we could find, the worst beer we could find, and watched the worst movies we could find! The details: The frozen pizzas produced some surprises - the Totino's party pizza turned out to be the best of the bunch. The little cubes of artificial pizza meat are a world away from real pizza, but the Totino's was actually quite yummy in an all-artificial way, much like Taco Bell (no one would mistake it for real Mexican food, but it hits the spot nonetheless). Other less successful pizzas included Tony's and Cub Foods' own, which tastes like a rubbery ham-and-cheese sandwich on a bad crust. All in all, we tallied up the numbers for what we actually ate: 1680 calories per person, 83 grams of fat per person. Big woo-hoo! Although I didn't sleep very well that night.
The beer: My friend John walked into Edina Liquors and asked the clerk for the worst beer in the store. The cheapest? No, the WORST. Once the clerks understood that what we wanted was bad beer, not necessarily cheap beer, they got into a serious discussion amongst themselves. Two out of the three clerks agreed: Olympia Beer is the worst. John got a 12-pack for $5. The slogan on the can appears in quotes: "It's the water." As if it were the answer to the question, "My God, what is wrong with this beer?" "It's the water." John and I agree - Olympia is probably the worst beer we've ever had, and that includes my experience with generic white-label beer (made by Perle) a few years back. Bleh! I still have ten cans in the fridge, just in case.
The movie: "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians", featuring an eight-year-old Pia Zadora. After that, we watched most of "Time Of The Apes", a bad Japanese "Planet Of The Apes" knock-off directed by Sandy "light and get away" Frank.
Margaret came back and literally found pizza boxes and beer cans all over the house. I was beaming with pride, having gotten in touch with my XY chromosomes for the first time in a long time.
A few days after Margaret got back into town, I flew down to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate Grandma's 90th birthday. I think I spent more time traveling than I did in Florida, and it was probably the shortest trip anywhere ever. On the first leg of the trip (Minneapolis to Atlanta), I sat next to two high school kids, a brother and sister on their way to a wedding in Florida. Nice kids. I got to see the sunset from the air, which is also terrific. On the next leg (Atlanta to Ft. Lauderdale), I sat next to a 50-year-old alcoholic woman, whose exact words were, "I've been looking for a light beer since 8:30 this morning." She might have been only 30, but she looked 50+. A charmer.
The 36 hours I spent in Florida with Grandma and my mom were very nice. I guess the maternal instinct is to feed your kids until something bad happens - this is a good instinct, and my brother and I freely welcome the feeding part. Well, imagine two generations of maternal instincts raining down on you, and that's how much food I ate in my short visit. Yikes indeed!
I always got a kick out of the little jobs that family members save up for you. One of them was to buy furnace filters and a new smoke detector at the local Home Depot. So Saturday morning, as I made the pilgrimage to the Big Orange, I noticed that Home Depot ran sort of a kids' camp in the parking lot, where they get to hammer and sand some wood scraps together. It was pretty cute, actually, and I can see how Margaret's childhood (which consisted of 90% hammering and 10% plotting the demise of her siblings) was pretty enjoyable.
So on the trip back, from Atlanta to Minneapolis, I wound up sitting next to the same two high school kids! What are the odds? I booked my flight online, and I picked out the seats myself, and I would assume that their parents also picked out the flights and seats at random! Weird! I'll probably run into them again the next time I fly somewhere...
Geeky aside: What if banks set up savings accounts with a complex interest rate, like 0.05i per year? So after a year, 5% of your balance would be turned into imaginary dollars, then negative dollars the year after, then negative imaginary dollars, and finally real dollars after four years. You could hide your assets from The Tax Man by turning them into imaginary dollars! Why has nobody done this before?
My band, Thinland, has been doing pretty well lately. Right before I left for Florida, we played a gig at one of the local Minneapolis bars. We got the whole show on CD, and the CD sounds much better than the actual show (where the audience told us we sounded like mud). I blame the bar's sound guy, but I can't complain too much because the CD doesn't sound too bad. We actually sound like a band, which is pretty cool to me. (We're not just a bunch of guys banging away; we're a cohesive pop/rock band. Neato.) The CD turned out to be 64 minutes long, which is TWICE as long as one of the greatest live recordings of all time, 1962's "James Brown Live At The Apollo". We're TWICE as LONG! A whole factor of 2, is what we are. And we rock as hard as one could expect from a band with a cello.
I have to lug six boxes of books from my office back to my house this afternoon, which sounds like more fun than I can handle. I'm gonna need an Olympia tonight...
So kick back, relax, peruse www.crapfromthepast.com/millivanilli/, and enjoy the rest of winter. Margaret and I will be enjoying the four weeks or so that I have off between jobs, until she gets sick of me, hits me with a frying pan, and sends me back to work at the end of February. Should be fun. I'll send off new contact info once I have a new office. (By the way, let me know if you don't want any more of these periodic Ron updates. I won't be offended in the least, but Margaret may come after you with a frying pan...)
Take care, and may all your Millis be Vanilli,
Ron G
Friday, December 22, 2000
Ron's Big Life Update - December 2000
Hi, all. Every once in a while, the computer network at work dies. When that happens, the only programs that work at all are the ones that run locally on your machine. In my case, the field is narrowed to Notepad and not much else. So...here's my Happy Holidays e-mail, written on Notepad.
I haven't written in a while, and for that I apologize. Margaret and I took a quickie vacation to Florida in early November. (A nice change in weather from Minnesota during that time of year.) We spent three days in Tampa for our niece's christening, and we found the coolest restaurant in all of Florida. "La Teresita" (The Little Terry?) was recommended in our little restaurant book - the same book that recommended Nick Tahou's in Rochester NY, and a fine restaurant or two here in the Twin Cities. The book gives selections that best reflect the local cuisine, and I can attest to that based on the inclusion of Nick's. (For those of you who have been to Nick's, I don't have to say anything; you can probably still taste it.) Anyway, La Teresita was the only restaurant listed in the entire state of Florida, and it turned out to be a little Cuban restaurant, set up sort of like a Wendy's with table service. The book recommended the Cuban Sandwich, which is pretty close to a grilled ham and cheese sandwich on a croissant. Very tasty, but the side dishes were even better. Margaret and I basically ordered one of everything, and we are now hooked on fried plantains, which are a yummy cross between french fries and bananas. (Trust me - soooooper tasty!) We'd never had Cuban food before, and it was fan-tastic! (Nothing at all like Mexican.) The restaurant was a 16-mile drive from where we were staying, and it was so good we drove back for dinner the next night. Many miles for food, and worth it.
After Tampa, we spent a few days visiting Grandma in Fort Lauderdale. We managed to synch up with my brother Kenny (better known as "Gerbs" to all his friends, some of whom don't even know his first name) and his friend Pete, and we all stayed at Grandma's house. Aside from spending time with Grandma, the high point of Fort Lauderdale was challenging Gerbs and Pete to an eating contest at one of the Chinese buffets. (We Gerbers are very food-centric.) Food was et, belts were loosened, and a good time was had by all except the restaurant owners.
And interestingly enough, we spent election day in Fort Lauderdale. (We'd already mailed in our absentee ballots in Minnesota.) We watched a bunch of TV coverage, just like the rest of the country, but we noticed that the local stations ran out of pre-produced segments around 10 PM, and they were just stre-e-e-e-e-e-etching the same sketchy details out to fill the time. Around 1:15 in the morning, somebody announced that Bush won Florida, and I went to sleep. We got up around 5:30 AM to go the airport, and the same TV people were still on announcing election results, looking mighty frazzled. You know the rest, but it was kinda cool to be in Florida to see the start of the mayhem.
December's been really cold out here. After three record-setting warm winters in a row, we're back to reality out here. The wind chill was -41 degrees this morning, and we have plenty of snow out here to kill off all living creatures. Now THAT'S winter! (Which starts tomorrow, actually.)
Margaret and I are looking for a new couch. That's been the big excitement lately. We know exactly what we want, and we're taking our time trying to find it at the stores in town. If we can't find it by spring, we'll order it by mail from one of the furniture places in North Carolina. No big hurry - the old couch still works, even though it doesn't look so good.
"Crap From The Past" has been going nicely. My website was chosen as Site Of The Week from e-crap.com, which is into entertainment stuff. The link that they set up to my site generated a total of 8 hits. 8. Which is a good indication of both the popularity of my site and of e-crap.
Our fifth anniversary is today. Now I'm discovering what it feels like when kids have their birthdays at the end of December - everything gets lumped into Christmas/Hanukkah and that's that.
Oh - U.S. Patent #6,084,846 cleared, of which I am a co-inventor. "Liquid Immersion Lens For Optical Data Storage" may very well be the least useful invention EVER, but at least I'm on it. Huzzah.
It looks Margaret is going to win the Emergency Room game for 2000. I took the lead in March with pneumonia, but Margaret tied it up over the summer with a gall bladder-ectomy, and then a bee sting. Unless I stick a fork in my head - twice - it looks like Margaret will win 2-1. At least next year I'll get a good draft pick...
Update on a good joke from two years ago: Remember how I bought $50 worth of Pinnacle Micro stock when the shares were around 10 cents each? And how we joked that I was now the majority shareholder? And how the day after my purchase, the price went up to 43 cents a share? And how we laughed and laughed? Well two years later, the stock has fallen a bit - now it's 0.8 cents a share and my huge investment is worth exactly 4 dollars. Frankly, I don't think it's fair that the price per share can dip below a penny. That's cheating! I'm still going to hang onto it, and I wonder exactly how low this thing can go...
Hope all is warm and fuzzy in your respective necks of the woods. Have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a pleasant Festivus, and a Happy New Year.
Ron & Margaret
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
