Ron's Big Life Update - November 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay warm!
Ron & Liz Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - June 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that took about one day.

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

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

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

We claim:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ron's Big Life Update - December 2007

Hi, all.

I type all day at work, and it’s hard to find the motivation to go home and type one of these at night, after typing all day at work. But certainly, avoiding losing touch with family and friends outweighs a little more time in front of the keyboard, so… Happy Holidays!

Aug 1 – One day after I sent out the last Big Life Update, the bridge on Interstate I-35W over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis collapsed. Big news, and we had news crews from all over the country descend on the city and stay for days on end. You saw the footage on TV, and that’s pretty much all we got to see as well. With the entire area roped off as a police scene, access by foot was limited to the point where you really couldn’t see anything.

It messed up traffic pretty bad, although I’m luckier than some in their commutes. My house, my job, and the radio station are all on the south side of the bridge, so I didn’t have to take any major detours after the first week or so. Same with Liz. The radio station is really close to the bridge, and the KFAI building was within the Department of Transportation’s original circle of “ground zero” of limited access. It turned out to be fairly painless, and we could come and go as we wanted. They estimate that the new bridge will be done by the end of 2008 – pretty optimistic.

Late August – Our friends Kris and Marie got married, then honeymooned in Canada. They’d been dating for about a year longer than Liz and I had, and we’re really happy for them. Unfortunately, they got married in Rochester, MN during record-setting rains. The day of their wedding, Rochester got about 7 inches of rain, and some of the surrounding small towns got over a foot! It caused some major flooding to the southeast corner of Minnesota, but Kris and Marie’s wedding went off without a hitch. Unless not getting any outdoor photos is a hitch…

Late August – State Fair time! Food on a stick! Liz and I broke our previous record by splitting a total of 15 food items. There was a period around dinnertime when Liz was ready to throw in the towel and go home, but I forced her to hang on to that proverbial towel, in case of… well, anyway. Overall, the food was not as good as last year. The pizza-on-a-stick guy was replaced by a different pizza-on-a-stick guy, who was careless enough to leave out the big cardboard boxes that showed that his pizzas-on-a-stick came pre-made and frozen, and he just heated them up. Not good. I was crushed, since the old pizza-on-a-stick was the highlight of my State Fair visits. Oh well. This year’s highlight was the nut roll, of which we had two, and Sweet Martha’s giant cone of chocolate chips cookies, of which we also had two. Near the end of our stay at the Fair, we wandered through the “Miracle of Birth” exhibition, and saw some recently-born baby pigs that were at the Fair about as long as we were. We finally gave up and went home around 10pm, although Liz claims that she got her second wind and could keep on eating. I doubted it, although I was low on cash at that point and had no way to check. A good time, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s Fair.

Late September – If you can believe it, we actually sold Liz’s condo. It was on the market for just over a year, with multiple price reductions along the way. Dollarwise, we really took a beating, with a substantial net loss on the place. Not a life-threatening amount, but it will take a few years to pay off. We took extra pride in knowing we brought down the numbers for our real estate agent; I guess having property on the market for 54 weeks really hurts your averages!

So we moved all of Liz’s stuff into my house, then went through the fun process of merging the two sets of stuff and keeping the better of the two. Her stuff won, in almost all cases. We got rid of a lot of junk in the process, and I learned that you can get rid of literally anything by putting in at the end of the driveway. People don’t seem to care how old or ratty things are, and usually cart stuff off within 24 hours. We “disposed of” a tiny little couch, a wheely office chair, a computer desk, a rug, a few plastic milk crates, an old jigsaw, and a few lamps. No matter that some of those had gotten rained on while they were out there – someone actually took the dripping wet lamps that only cost Liz $5 when they were new. At least they’re all getting a good home now.

Early October – Our favorite bakery, Patrick’s in Edina, expanded their menu to include burgers and fries. This was a major jolt to our systems. We understood that they wanted to draw in a larger crowd for lunches and dinners, but it seems like they did it by dumbing down their menu. The place used to smell like just-baked bread when you walked in; now it’s, well, burgers and fries. Fortunately, they kept all the baked goods intact, so you can still wander in and get the best butter cookies in the world.

Mid October – Our long-haired orange cat, Noodge, was especially furry. He was shedding everywhere, and had some mats in his fur. I, being the primary vacuumer in the house, was fed up at the orange fuzzitude everywhere, and I suggested to Liz that we get Noodge’s hair cut. I’d heard about the “lion cut”, which basically shaves off all his fur except for his head, his legs, and the poofy tip of his tail. Liz didn’t really like the idea, but she was a good sport and brought Noodge in for a lion cut. It didn’t go very well – Noodge was traumatized, to the point where the grooming people called him the “cowardly lion”. Plus, they bathed him so that he smelled good to people. Normally, this would be a good thing, but because he looked and smelled different, the other two cats didn’t recognize Noodge when he came home and hissed and growled at him for two days. Poor, traumatized Noodge. And on top of all that, he looked utterly ridiculous! So we write this one off as a failed experiment, and I’ll just have to vacuum more often.

Late October – My birthday was decidedly low-key this year. We took over the back room of a really good Chinese restaurant (Great Wall in Edina) and ate with a few friends. Very nice. I got a cake from Sam’s Club that was literally twice as much as what we needed, because I wound up taking the other half home with us. Liz and I ate nothing but birthday cake for an entire week after that. Which is a perfect transition into…

Late October – … Halloween! Or, more precisely, the start of Weight Gain Season! I just love the seasonal Vanilla Tootsie Rolls, courtesy of one of my co-workers. I dressed up as a bowler this year – shirt, ball, glove, shoes, bag. Liz found a skeleton costume, and looked splendid in her bones.

Mid-November – We heard on the radio that Hennepin County was sponsoring a 3-day recycling event in the parking lot of the Mall Of America. Bring in your old TVs, computer monitors, electronics, etc., and drop it all off for free. That’s it – no strings attached. They also announced on the radio that businesses were free to do the same – no strings attached, which I found unusual but most welcome. A great idea that would discourage people and companies from dumping their old monitors at the bottom of a lake somewhere.

So with my company’s permission I loaded up my Corolla to the roof with 6 old CRT monitors, two old servers, CD-R drives, old wiped-clean hard drives, and any other piece of electronic crap that Altera no longer needed. I waited about 90 minutes in my car in line at the recycle dropoff, and drove away happy, knowing that I helped de-junk my office and knowing that the stuff was being disposed of properly. That was Thursday.

On Friday, I loaded up my car with round two for recycling – 6 more monitors and whatever else didn’t fit the first time. I drove out there after work, in really bad rush-hour traffic, mind you, to find that the event was closed. They were completely overwhelmed by the response, and had exceeded their allocated space on day 1, leaving nothing for days 2 and 3. All done, the sign said, so I turned back around and headed back to the office, across town, and also in really bad rush-hour traffic. I unloaded the car back at the office, in a pretty rotten mood, and eventually found my way home. I think it’s great that the county would sponsor such an event, and I’m hoping that they’ll do it again, based on the huge response from the first attempt. Recycling = good.

Late November – Thanksgiving at Liz’s parents’ house again. My favorite holiday of the year, made extra-wonderful by Liz’s parents’ incredible cooking skills. Liz and I contributed desserts this year. She made a candy apple pie, and I made a pan of unbelievable brownies. (Don’t believe that brownies can be unbelievable? I got the recipe from my coworker, Mary, and it’s easily the best brownie recipe I’ve ever encountered. You should definitely try making it – even I can do it, and I have no discernible cooking skills. The recipe’s attached below.)

I think I figured out why everything at Thanksgiving tastes so good – everything has butter in it. (Except the cranberry sauce, which is half sugar, and the homemade ice cream, which is half heavy whipping cream and half half-and-half!) And not just a hint of butter here and there, but a WHOLE LOT of butter! We tallied it all up, and if you include the turkey and gravy, potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing and both desserts, that works out to about 12 sticks of butter. Which was then eaten by six people over the course of two days. Maybe three days. All the leftovers were gone by the time we drove back to the Twin Cities on Sunday, and we were as fat and happy as you can be…

We even got a good picture of Arthur, Liz’s parents’ cat, sitting in a box, mid-yawn. Cats love boxes. Don’t know why.

Early December – We celebrated a friend’s birthday at one of those Japanese hibachi-style restaurants, where they cook everything in a big, flat grill right at your table. Knives flying everywhere, salt and pepper acrobatics, lighting things on fire, flipping shrimp to and fro – all in all, lots of good fun.

And it occurred to me that more restaurants could benefit from the showmanship of these hibachi places. In particular, I thought that a breakfast place would be the perfect outlet for such mad cooking skillz. Imagine your pancakes and French toast made on the grill right before your eyes, with cinnamon, chocolate chips, blueberries, and every other ingredient under the sun all flung together in the most exaggerated and delightful manner. Black olives freshly de-pitted and sliced right in front of you, before being flung into your omelet!

Oh yeah, this thing could be huge. I just need to come up with a snappy name for it, which isn’t as obvious as it seems. (Please think of something clever and send it to me. So I can be rich.)

On a related note, my brother came up with the idea of the donut truck, which is kinda like the hot dog carts that you see on downtown streets. They make the donuts right there in the truck, and you buy ‘em for a buck. And I even came up with a snappy name: “Go-nuts!” See? The catchy name wins you over every time! I just need to come up with one for the hibachi breakfast…

Early December – My tiny law firm moved to downtown. Out of all the occurrences over the past few months, probably none has affected me as much as my office moving from Eden Prairie, a distant southwest suburb, to downtown Minneapolis. We moved officially on December 1, but there was quite a bit of prep in the weeks leading up to Dec 1, including getting rid of the 21 CRT monitors and other unwanted electronic flotsam.

There are only seven employees in our little firm, and we had more space than we needed. By moving out of our palatial office building in Eden Prairie, which had enough office space for about 40-50 people, to our downtown location, we were able to slash our rent expense by a factor of 6. In other words, our old building in the ‘burbs was costing us 6 times more than our new space, which we’re sharing with a few other firms.

Major change #1: I now take an express bus to and from downtown. There’s a park and ride about a mile from the house, which makes life very, very easy for me. After I park my car, I put on my little radio with headphones and zone out for a half hour until I get dumped downtown. There’s a bus stop right in front of my building downtown, but I choose to get off a little earlier and take a ten-minute walk through the downtown skyways to get to my building.

What are the skyways, you ask? Most of the downtown buildings are connected to each other by a series of second-floor skyways that cross over the streets. You can get from one building to another without ever going outside. And this brings up major change #2: I feel like I’m taking part in actual activity, as opposed to the sleepy nothingness of suburbia. Things are actually going on downtown, with real hustle and actual bustle. Especially during lunchtime, when the skyways fill up with other worker people just like me. There are restaurants everywhere in the skyways, which are all designed for weekday lunchtime, and not much else. Most close around 2 or 3pm during the week and don’t open at all on weekends.

It’s funny, I lived here in town for over ten years before I realized how much is going on during the workday downtown. A walk through the skyways in the evening or on weekends is just a bunch of closed-up shops. But during the lunch crowd, you can get literally anything you want. Banking? Found a branch of my credit union in the skyways. In hot water with the spouse? Plenty of florists in the skyways. Buying/selling gold coins? Need your taxes done? Dentist? Shoe repair? Keys made? Hair coloring? Chiropractor? Dry cleaning? It’s all available in the skyways. And you’d never know it from the street level, either. This may very well be the best kept secret of the Twin Cities: the ‘burbs are pretty dull during the workday, but downtown Minneapolis totally rocks!

My office is 17 floors up, facing due east, with a wall of windows that stretch from desk-level to the ceiling. I overlook the Metrodome, which looks a little like a giant marshmallow from up here. I can clearly see the space needle thing at the state fairground, and I can see the building silhouettes of downtown St. Paul, which is about 15 miles away. I can clearly see where the I-35W bridge was, and I’d be able to see the KFAI building if the Metrodome wasn’t in the way. And to make life even sweeter, out of all seven Altera employees, I have far and away the nicest view. I brought my camera to work to take a picture of the view for you, but the forecast for the entire week is overcast, and it doesn’t quite do justice to the view. I’ll have better pictures in the next Big Life Update.

I have four friends who all work downtown, and I’ve already had lunch with two of them. I’m probably going to see them more during the work week than on weekends!

So I am one happy camper. Great view, public transportation to get to/from work, no wear and tear on the car, meetin’ friends for lunch. Oh yeah! Life is very good indeed.

Mid December – Don’t see “I Am Legend”. Thoroughly predictable, start-to-finish, and the lamest deus ex machina ending I’ve seen in years. If you really feel the urge to watch an apocalyptic, humanity-may-end movie, then rent the brilliant “Children Of Men” from a year or two ago. Now THAT’s some magnificent filmmaking!

Hope you all have a happy and healthy holiday season! May you be filled with butter!

Ron & Liz
- -
MARY’S BROWNIE RECIPE

BROWNIES

1 cup cocoa (Mary uses a little less than a full cup)
1 cup butter (softened)
2 cups sugar
3 eggs (Mary beats them a bit before adding)
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt

Mix and bake at 350° for 25-30 minutes. (Mary bakes the full 30 minutes and has left them in for up to 35 minutes)


FROSTING

1 cup sugar
5 Tbls. margarine (Mary uses butter sometimes)
1/3 cup milk
1 cup chocolate chips (Ron uses semi-sweet)

In small sauce pan, combine sugar, butter and milk. Bring to boil, stirring constantly, and boil for one minute. Remove from heat, stir in chocolate chips and keep stirring until frosting is smooth. Pour over warm brownies. (Mary usually stars preparing the frosting right after she takes the brownies out of the oven.)

Enjoy!

Ron's Big Life Update - July 2007

Hi, all.

I’m sure many of you were expecting this a little earlier. After all, it’s been five months since the last Big Life Update. Why the delay? Since the last one had all the details about our giant honeymoon in Hawaii, it would be tempting to say that I needed time to put together a worthy follow-up. Perhaps along the lines of Michael Jackson following up “Thriller”, Quentin Tarantino following up “Pulp Fiction”, or Milli Vanilli following up the “Girl You Know It’s True” album. But that would be just a wee bit inaccurate. For starters, I’m no Jacko, Q, or Vanilli. Although the last Big Life Update was time-consuming to write, I don’t think it qualifies as High Art by any stretch of the imagination. More importantly, I’ve just been content to rest on my laurels. For the last five months, whenever anybody asked what’s new with me, I’d answer that I got married and spent two weeks in Hawaii. Apparently, I can only milk that for five months. It’s back to reality for me…

It’s been a pleasant few months for Liz and me. Since we got the thank-you notes written, it’s really been business as usual for us. All the big things in our life are pretty much the same. Her condo is still on the market (10 months and counting), and all her furniture is still over there. The cats are still being cute and hitting each other in the head. I’m still at my little law firm, and Liz is still at the VA. Cars still working just fine. Nope, nothing big, just a few little things…

March – My cable modem service provider got gobbled up in some kind of corporate merger takeover thing. And so, my terrific RoadRunner service from Time-Warner morphed into the dreaded Comcast service. They raised my rates and restructured the fee structure, so that by signing up for basic cable TV, I actually reduced my bill by $1 every month. So we now have super clear reception on all our local channels, plus TBS (Yay! Atlanta Braves baseball and extra-crappy movies!) and CNN. Competition is good, but unfortunately for me, my suburb doesn’t have any.

February – I’d written before that my cell phone would occasionally get confused, with its main screen suddenly showing a left/right reversal. The reversal would disappear when I open and close the phone, as if nothing was wrong. Well, I finally got some pictures of it, including some with my phone next to Liz’s phone for comparison. Still don’t understand it, but I’m glad I got pictures of it because it hasn’t done it since.
March – I noticed that one of my headlights burnt out, so I had it replaced. Three (3) days later, the other one burnt out, so I had that one replaced as well. Toyota must have some really tight tolerances on their light bulbs!

March – Some of you may know that I’m a member of OSA, the Optical Society of America. We have monthly meetings during the academic year, and there’s always a speaker at the meeting. Last year, one of our speakers talked about a project he was working on, which was an interferometer that was about the size of a beer can. Good talk.

Well, that must have struck a chord with me, because I had a dream about the optics of actual beer cans! It was all right there in the dream in amazing detail, and even included some math. I woke up laughing, and scribbled down as much as I could remember. I’ve written up a tiny portion of my absurd dream, which even includes some relevant math (!), and I tacked it on at the end of this Big Life Update as an Appendix. The proof is left to the reader.

Early April – Saw “Pan’s Labyrinth”, the best kid’s-movie-that’s-not-for-kids I think I’ve ever seen. Can’t say enough good things about it, except that it’s definitely not for kids.

Mid-April – Played plumber and repaired a few of the sinks in the house. The bathroom sink was dripping and the kitchen sink needed a new sprayer, so I got to work.

I learned that one should not buy a cheap Home Depot house brand bathroom faucet, as Margaret had done, because it will eventually drip. You can’t fix it, because it doesn’t contain any user serviceable parts inside. You have to replace it, which is what I did. Not a difficult job by any means, but one that could have been avoided if Margaret had spent more than $29 on the old faucet to begin with.

The sprayer was also pretty straightforward, but involved lying on my back under the kitchen sink for significant amounts of time. The cats thought that was very interesting. At one point, Liz came into the kitchen to find me on my back working under the sink, and Noodge lying next to me on the kitchen floor, also lying on HIS back with his front feet straight up, like HE was working. She said it was the cutest thing ever, but we didn’t get any pictures.

April – Liz’s glasses broke. The plastic frames were four or five years old, and they just broke in half at the nosepiece. She taped them back together at work and was able to finish the workday with them, but they looked mighty nerdy with tape holding them together.

So we went to the mall that night, and hesitantly picked out a pair of frames at Lenscrafters. They weren’t exactly ugly, but she wasn’t thrilled about them. I think what sold her on them was a complete 100% satisfaction-guaranteed refund policy, where she could get all her money back, no questions asked, within 30 days if she didn’t like them.

That night, she tried wearing them but they gave her a headache. Plus, the sides of the frames block some of her peripheral vision, making her feel like she was wearing blinders. The next day, we brought them back. While we were returning them, I figured out that they used her contact lens prescription to make her glasses; you can’t do that. You need slightly different powers, depending on whether your eye correction is a contact lens in contact with your cornea, or is in the form of glasses, which are separated from your cornea by around 14 mm. Now you know. So we got our money back, which was part of their deal.

Then, we went to another vision place in the mall, and it turned out to be a keeper. The place was called “Visionary Optical”, and when we told the guy that Liz’s frames fell apart, he mentioned that he could probably fit the existing lenses to a new frame. In fact, he had a pair of frames right… here! And he popped Liz’s old lenses into a dark-red version of her old frames. For the new frames, he charged us a mere $50, which is WAY less than anything else we looked at. So we spent practically nothing to keep Liz’s good lenses, and Liz is walking around with glasses that look exactly like her old ones, which are very cute. And we’re spreading the word about “Visionary Optical” – there’s one in Southdale, one in Uptown and one in Plymouth. They are truly unlike any vision place I’ve ever seen, and I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Late April – As I was getting into the elevator at my office building, a guy in the elevator asked me if anyone had ever told me that I look just like Joe Satriani? Joe Satriani is the rockin’-est guitarist ever (and it’s hard to believe that the “Surfing With The Alien” album is 20 years old), and he, too, shaved his head a few years back. So I told the elevator guy that that was the coolest thing anybody had said to me all day. And if I could play half as well as Satch, then my life would be very good indeed!

Early May – Got the ducts cleaned in my house. It was the first time I had that done since I moved in 10 years ago, and it had probably been 15 years or so since it had been done. I hired a little mom and pop outfit, and cleaning ducts is all they do. The whole company is just the two of them, which is pretty cool.

They backed their van up in our driveway near the side door, then attached one end of a gigantic flexible tube to the intake portion of the ductwork right next to our furnace. The other end of the tube was hooked up to a huge compressor in the van, and its job was to suck everything out of the ductwork. For each duct, the guy fed a high-pressure air hose down, and blew all the junk toward the furnace and the huge vacuum tube attached to the ducts.

It went fairly smoothly, and took about an hour. They showed me a small portion of the crud that they cleaned out, and there was plenty. They could tell that I had pets, which is no surprise. They could also tell that nobody had been smoking in the house, and it was nice to know the previous owners hadn’t smoked either.

Early May – Bought Liz a bike for her birthday, albeit two months early. She and I now have the same model bike, and she can retire the $99 Target bike that she’s been using for the last ten years. We christened it with a 26-mile ride all over town, which ended with a stop for ice cream. I don’t know what it is about bike rides, but they always involve ice cream.

May – Played paintball with a bunch of friends here in town. Learned that I’m a really bad shot. (I couldn’t hit the side of a barn if someone picked me up and threw me into the side of the barn.) Liz, on the other hand, was a wild woman on the course, and kept shooting people in the face. (Unintentionally, she says, but I’m not convinced.) We all wore masks, and the face shots just left big paint blotches on the screen – no severe injuries. Liz did manage to hit me in the left hand, and actually shot my wedding ring. Not sure what that means.

And also learned that I don’t like getting shot at. I guess that’s not surprising, but it adds just a little more to the mountain of respect that I have for police officers and soldiers. Not cool getting shot at. Glad that doesn’t happen much in my line of work…

Late May – Had a really brief trip out east to see family in New York and Washington, DC. We flew into and out of Newark, NJ, and drove the rental car all over. New York and DC are much farther apart than I remembered, and I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.

Right after we flew into Newark, we drove into Manhattan. New York has apparently replaced all the coin-operated parking meters with a centralized system that takes credit cards, which was surprising, but was pretty easy to use. We decided to be all artsy this visit and went to the Museum of Modern Art. Liz hadn’t been there since they remodeled the building and I don’t think I’d even been there, so it was a fine choice. Plus, Liz just happened to have a credit card from some particular bank that allowed us to get in free! Woo-hoo! Free art! I enjoyed the MOMA; I got to feel much more cultured than I do at home. Liz took my picture standing next to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” filling my cubist quota for the whole year. And I got Liz’s picture with Elvis, making my “El-Vis with Elvis” picture worthy of inclusion in the museum itself. Maybe if I call it “Two Elvi”…

Did you know the MOMA has an actual exhibit for the Helvetica font? It’s 50+ years old and still going strong. Arial, in contrast, was commissioned by Microsoft to be a knock-off of Helvetica, so that Microsoft wouldn’t have to pay to license Helvetica. Ugly, ugly Arial…

In Manhattan, the only things we ate were from vendors on the street. Pieces of fruit, including the best peach Liz ever tasted, pretzels, a hot dog, a meat-kebab or two, and an ice cream sundae. I think I might have had a slice of pizza and an éclair, too, but I don’t think those were from street vendors.

While in Manhattan, we wanted to do something you can only do in New York – go to a Broadway show. I didn’t want to see anything based on the music of Abba. Or Billy Joel. Or Monty Python. Or Winger. (I don’t think that one exists, actually.) Or anything based on a movie, like Legally Blonde, or even worse, on a Disney movie, like the Lion King. Which ruled out most of the shows playing at the time. I chose to see “Rent”, because it began life as a play before being turned into a movie. Not sure that was my smartest choice ever. “Rent” had an excellent production value, uniformly great singers and a few good songs, but lacked any substantive narrative thread. Enjoyable, but I don’t think we’d see it again or recommend it to anyone.

Times Square is pretty disappointing, actually. I don’t know what it was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but nowadays it’s clean but commercial. Chain restaurants and so forth. Worth seeing once, but not really worth returning to.

To head out of Manhattan to mom’s house, I drove up Broadway so Liz could see something north of the Met. We drove past Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th Street, which was made famous by “Seinfeld”. Didn’t get to eat there, though, because it was after midnight and they were closed. The drive home was marred by a sobriety check on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County, which dropped traffic down to one lane and added a full hour to our drive. And yes, it turns out that I was indeed sober.

Got to see family in Rockland County, which was nice. My brother has a condo in Suffern, which is at the westernmost corner of Rockland County and looks nothing at all like its portrayal in “Sex In The City”. (No, it’s not Sufferin’.)

Then drove down to DC to see my aunt & uncle, my cousin, and Grandma (the same Grandma with the house in Florida that got damaged by Hurricane Wilma.) What a great city to visit! My cousin lives literally one block from a Metro stop, so once we parked the car in front of her house, we didn’t drive again until we left town.

We spent one day just seeing museums. We spent almost four hours in the Holocaust Museum, and I made it a point to read every single caption while we were there. Then off to the Museum of Natural History, because them dinosaur bones never get old. Got a great picture of Liz with the Hope Diamond. It’s good to hope…

Next day, we spent the whole day seeing monuments. Initially, we wanted to get a tour of the Capitol Building, so we followed the instructions to go to the office of one of our representatives (hello, staff of Keith Ellison!) to get a pass. But there were way too many people in line to actually get the tour, so we hung on to our passes, and we’ll use them next time we’re in town.

We walked from the Capitol to the White House, about two miles even though it seems really short on the map, then to the Washington Monument. This is my illustration of the Washington Monument:It’s very tall.

We didn’t have tickets to go inside, so initially, when we walked up to the base of the monument, we sat down on the benches and took a few pictures. After a minute or two, a guard came around and asked if everyone there had tickets. When we said no, he told us “Shh! Don’t say anything and go with those people.” And in short order, we were on the tour!

The Washington Monument is very tall. Very extremely tall. I’ve been in taller buildings, but this one is the tallest in the DC area and you can see for miles in all directions. The observation room is 500 ft up, and the tippy top of the peak is 555 ft and 5.5 inches. Nice! This is probably the reason that the US never embraced the metric system, because 169.294 meters doesn’t have the same ring.

We took pictures from the top, facing the east, north, west and south. It’s very cool, and I heartily recommend the Washington Monument to anyone who visits DC.

Then walked to the Lincoln Memorial. A park ranger gives a short talk at the Memorial a few times a day, and we caught the last one of the day. The crowd listening to him was very small, and I tried to think of unusual questions to ask him. Does the sculpture go all the way around to the back? His hair does indeed go all the way around to the back, but the rest of the sculpture is pretty much featureless on the back side.

We did a bunch more walking and saw more monuments, but you can read about those in books. (That's Ron with his arms spread at the Jefferson Memorial.)

We stayed a few days with my cousin, Heidi, in her house in Arlington. She moved in a few years ago and I hadn’t seen the place until now. Great old house, plenty of charm, cool location, and easily-identifiable by its super-bright-red door. We came back home, thinking, “Why can’t our house be that cool?”

In DC, we also saw my aunt Amy and uncle Arthur. Arthur has worked for years for the insurance industry in DC, and has quite a respectable reputation there. When Bob Dole ran for president, I think uncle Arthur was his health advisor. Extremely knowledgeable about health care and the health insurance industry, probably more so than anyone else I’ve encountered. So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw a TV ad for Michael Moore’s film about the health insurance industry, “Sicko”, with a quickie clip of uncle Arthur walking out of a building. I believe Liz and I said to each other, “That’s uncle Arthur!” It certainly looked like him, and it would make sense that he’d be somewhere in the movie. But the TV ad? We kept watching until they showed the ad again. Yup – unmistakable. We haven’t seen the movie yet, but I understand that Arthur is not a big fan of Michael Moore…

We also saw Grandma’s apartment in DC. She’d been there for a year and a half, but I hadn’t seen her or her new place since I cleaned out the old one in Florida. Nice little apartment in an assisted-living complex. Two meals a day, doctor on premises, bankers and hair stylists that come by regularly – a really nice place. And Grandma seems to really like it. She’s surrounded by people to interact with, which is a welcome change from the last few years she was down in Florida. I hope I end up in a place like that when the time comes.

Early June – DJed a wedding for my friend Jill’s sister. Very nice party. They rented out the Wabasha Street Caves, which was originally an underground nightclub in the ‘30s. It was built inside a series of caves, and it was very cool. Kinda clammy, too, even though they have dehumidifiers cranked up non-stop. The food was from Cosetta’s, a terrific Italian restaurant here in town.

Musically, the wedding started off like all my other parties. But once the older folks left, the young folks, including the bride and groom, wanted some recent dance music. And I started to sweat just a little bit; I don’t have a very high opinion of recent dance music, even though I have all of it. I did a 45-minute set of stuff I used to play in my mid-‘90s club days, and it totally killed! Who’da thought that “Rump Shaker” and “Jump Around” would make a comeback? And someone actually requested “Ice Ice Baby”. After I burned through everything I could remember from the mid-‘90s, I crossed my fingers and hauled out the recent stuff. Turns out that I shouldn’t have worried; drunk 20-somethings will dance to pretty much anything they’ve heard on the radio, so I gave them a buncha hits and a good time was had by all. Really good party, actually.

Mid-June – Found out that Liz got into grad school! YAY! She’ll be starting in May, 2008 at St. Mary’s here in Minneapolis, and she’ll be getting a master’s in Nurse Anesthesia. When she’ll be finished in about two years, she’ll be a Nurse Anesthetist. When they have to knock you out, she’ll be the one administering the anesthesia, telling you to breathe deeply and count backwards from 100 by sevens. Note that an Anesthesiologist does essentially the same job but has an MD. She doesn’t need to go to medical school to be a Nurse Anesthetist, which is a relief.

Mid-June – Liz got an aquarium for her betta fish. It’s a rectangular 11-gallon tank, and we put it in our TV room underneath the TV. The TV is on the top of the stand, and the tank is within the stand, so it’s not as electrically dangerous as the picture you have in your head right now.

The tank has a filter and a light on a timer, and it looks really nice. She planted some plants on the bottom of the tank and a put a little thermometer on the side, but the fish seemed intent on bustin’ the place up and knocked loose the thermometer and a few plants. So the thermometer and a few plants just float around on the top of the tank, and that’s that. The cats show surprisingly little interest in the fish, which I guess is good.

Initially, Liz bought a few gallons of water that was specially prepared by the fish store, with proper pH and all that. The next time she went in, she talked to the guy about water, and he asked her what part of town she lives in. She answered, Richfield, our little first-ring suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. The guy then told her that Richfield tap water is just perfect for the kind of fresh water tank she was putting together. No extra filtering, no pH adjustment, nothing. Just out of the tap and it’s perfect. The guy told Liz that that’s why virtually all the fish stores in town are located in Richfield, which we had noticed before but hadn’t fully understood. Until now.

Late June – A friend of mine gave us tickets to see a production of “Barbarella” as done by a local tongue-in-cheek dance troupe, “Ballet Of The Dolls”. That’s the very same “Barbarella” as the Jane Fonda movie from 1968, a science fiction classic that came out the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Except that the movie “Barbarella” is laughably awful.

And wouldn’t you know, the ballet production of it was terrific! WAY more enjoyable than “Rent”…

Late June – I’m on the program committee of my radio station, KFAI, and we’ve been working on some changes to the schedule. The last time anyone tried changing the schedule was, like, 13 years ago, and there are some station members that still grumble about it, so we knew we would have to makes these changes carefully.

We solicited proposals for about 13 slots, and received about 60 submissions. So over the course of June, the other program committee members and I all listened to all 60 submissions. For me, it took up nearly every weekend in June. The new schedule is great, but I can’t bring myself to listen to any more KFAI shows yet…

Late June – We saw the movie “Waitress”, then sneaked into an adjacent theater to see “Knocked Up”. Two excellent movies, both of which I heartily recommend. The last time we did this, we saw “Sideways”, then sneaked into “The Incredibles”, which may very well stand as the greatest double feature in movie history.

Actually, both “Waitress” and “Knocked Up” are remarkably similar. Both show how getting pregnant unexpectedly can really screw up your existing life. Both feature casts that are made up almost entirely of TV people rather than movie people. “Knocked Up” has a bunch of people from “The Office” and nearly the entire cast of “Freaks And Geeks”; “Waitress” has that girl from “Felicity”, that woman from “Curb Your Enthusiam” and that guy from “The Andy Griffith Show”(!) And, surprisingly, both come to the same moral conclusion, which I won’t give away because you should really see these films.

Late June – Liz and I took our annual camping trip. We met on this camping trip three years ago, so this was our fourth trip together. This year, we went to a campsite south of Rochester, MN, which was MUCH closer than the Wisconsin trip we’d done in years past. The weather cooperated spectacularly, and we had a great weekend.

The campsite was pretty nice, and they had a list of rules to make sure that it stayed nice. A printed list of rules. 18 rules, to be precise, several of which included fines if they were broken. So that became the running joke for the weekend – a $25 fine for whatever little thing we were talking about.

On the drive down, we were behind the same car for about 100 miles, and this car had the license plate “MOLISSA”. Molissa? What kind of name is Molissa? Actually, it’s fun to say: Mo-Lissa. Try it! It just flows off the tongue, especially if you stretch out the MO to a few seconds. Moooooooooo-lissa.

The day before we got there, there was some heavy rain upstream from us, and the river was too high for canoeing. It wasn’t just us – they also wouldn’t let a particular group’s 26th annual canoe trip on the river. So we drove into town and all rented bikes. Liz and I got a side-by-side tandem bike, which was two independent bikes that were latched together to ensure that we steered in the same direction. It was a fun ride, but the bike weighed easily over 100 pounds, and any uphill pedaling was brutality for us. We rode down a paved trail into the next town for pie. Mmm pie. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who do that; the business cards of the “Aroma Pie Shop” give their address as “on the bike trail, Whalan, Minnesota”. Then we rode back. The next day, we were able to go tubing down the river, which is more my speed than actual canoeing anyway, then showered and drove home. There is a spectacular barbeque place in Rochester, MN called John Hardee’s, and Liz and I stopped there twice to eat, once on the way there and once on the way home. Mmm meat.

Early July – In a moment of weakness at Sam’s Club, I bought a 3-pack of some sugary Kellogg’s cereals. One bag each of Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix. The box was boasting that Trix had an exciting new shape: “round”. Since when does “round” qualify as a “new shape”? I would think that “round” would have been around since the invention of cereal itself, but apparently, “round” is the hip new shape that all the young kids dig nowadays. Those wacky kids with their “round”…

Mid-July – Arranged a low-key surprise party for Liz’s birthday. After she was done with work, I told her to get dressed so we could go out. She figured out that we were going out to dinner, and she even figured out where (oooh! El Meson!), but boy was she surprised to find people she knows in the restaurant! Hey! What are you guys doing here? So we had a table for eight, rather than just us two, and a good time was had by all.

Late July – Saw “The Simpsons Movie”. Along with the rest of America. For opening night (July 27th), which was a Friday, I did 90 minutes of Simpsons-related stuff on “Crap From The Past”.

Hope your summer is going well!

Ron & Liz Gerber
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Appendix – Ron’s Crazy Dream: The Optics Of Actual Beer Cans

Actual beer cans make rather terrible optical elements, as best as I can tell.

For instance, let’s consider a beer can used as a laser cavity.

We can apply the mathematics of laser resonators to top and bottom surfaces of the beer can. We’ll assume that the top of the can is flat (R1 = infinity), the bottom of the can is convex with a radius of about 30 mm (R2 = 30 mm), and that the on-axis separation between the top and bottom is about 100 mm (L = 100 mm). We can calculate the g parameters (= 1 – L/R) of each surface (g1 = 1, g2 = -7/3), note that their product does not fall between 0 and 1, and conclude that the inside of a beer can would be an unstable resonator.

We can do similar analysis of a beer can used as a waveguide. It’s a pretty terrible waveguide.

We’ll consider the waveguide to be cylindrical with a diameter of 3.25 inches, with a refractive index of about 1.33 (beer is mostly water, Bud Light especially so) if full and 1 if empty, with aluminum walls with a refractive index of 2 – 7i. There’s a bunch of math involved, which says basically that because the diameter (3.25 inches) is so much larger than the wavelength (550 nm for green light), there would be an awful lot of high-order transverse modes. Not really a good thing.

We can analyze a beer can used as a pinhole camera. It’s not a very good pinhole camera.

Pinhole cameras have a film plane a particular distance back from a pinhole, and the theory is that every ray leaving the object and reaching the film plane passes through the same (x,y,z) location of the hole. Exposure times can be really long, because there’s not a lot of light getting through a pinhole. For a pinhole camera to work well, the hole should be small and round, two things that the beer can tabs are not. A rule of thumb for the size of the pinhole diameter is 1.9 times sqrt (hole-to-film distance length times wavelength). For a green wavelength of 550 nm and a top-to-bottom distance of 120 mm (assuming the bottom is flat, even thought it’s really not), the pinhole diameter should be about 0.5 mm. Based on my casual measurements on a Sierra Mist can that I found in the fridge at work, the can tab is roughly elliptical with major and minor axes of about 24 mm and 16 mm. I don’t remember if beer cans have the extra-wide drinking tabs that sodey pop cans have, but I’m fairly certain that they’re larger than 0.5 mm. Bad news for the pinhole camera!

If you were to put a lens on the top surface of the can, with a 5-inch focal length and a 2-inch diameter, and attach a detector to the bottom of the can, you’d have an odd detection system, which would have an effective numerical aperture of 0.1 along one direction and about 0.07 along the other. Plus, there would be a constant phase shift across the detector, caused because the drinking tab is located off-center (or else it would be hard to drink from!)

We can analyze a beer can used as an integrating sphere, if we attach a detector to the bottom of the can and allow light to enter the top of the can through the drinking tab. Basically, a terrible integrating sphere because the inside of the can is smooth, and you’d want a roughened surface on the inside of the integrating sphere for scattering light.

And so forth! I think that for virtually any optics application you can think of, a beer can does it badly. Mind you, this all came to me in a dream! And I don’t even like beer!