If a friend should ever call you up and ask, “Want to launch a rocket?”, the answer should be “Yes!” Our friend, Marie, got her husband, Kris, a giant inflatable Titan Blast Rocket for his birthday in September. It’s powered by water and air pressure – you pump it up until the little gauge reads in the target range, and squeeze a little ball to launch.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing. We got 9 or 10 decent launches in, with all of us taking turns squeezing the launch ball and running after it when it eventually returned to earth. Quite the perfect fall activity.
It’s been a good six months since the last Big Life Update in April, so some of the specifics have gotten a little hazy since then.
May 16th: 38° F in the morning. May 19th: 97° F in the afternoon. Yikes!
June 5 – The beloved radio trade publication, Radio & Records (R&R), published its last issue. Just another reminder that the Radio industry and the Records industry are far from healthy, and couldn’t sustain having two competing trade journals. No good news here…
June featured three consecutive road trips to the corners of the state.
June 6 – Drove up to Ada, MN for a wedding. One of Liz’s cousins got married. Normally I don’t comment on the work of other professionals, but the DJ from Fargo that they used was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. We were there no more than five minutes when I said to Liz, “I bet you $35 that he plays ‘Old Time Rock And Roll’.” If Liz had actually taken that bet (she didn’t), it would have been the easiest $35 I ever made. Aside from the endless stream of musical clichés he played, the worst aspect of the whole performance was that he seemed to think that he was part of the band, and gleefully added inappropriate percussion instruments to many of the songs. Tambourine, cowbell, you name it, all where they didn’t quite belong. Dare I say, TOO MUCH cowbell?
June 13 – Our yearly camping trip with friends was condensed down to a day trip to Lanesboro, MN. The rest of the group camped overnight, but Liz’s work/school schedule didn’t allow that much time off. We drove down with the bikes on the back of the car, ate, rode en masse to the pie shop in the next town, ate pie, rode back en masse, ate some more, and drove home. On the way home, we stopped at John Hardy’s in Rochester MN for barbeque. A terrific day, complete with pie and John Hardy’s. Life is very good indeed.
June 20 – Drove up to Duluth to visit one of Liz’s classmates. Coincidentally, it just happened to be the weekend of Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, so we got to see the tail end of the race. We hung around the finish line for a while around the 7-hour mark, and applauded for some truly exhausted runners. Then we partook in the parties afterward, which included a concert from a really good disco/funk cover band. How do all these 20-somethings know all the words to songs that are older than they are?
We essentially used up all our summer travel in June, and stayed put for the rest of the summer.
July – Got fed up with Qwest, the provider for my land line phone. Too much static on the line, poor customer service, time for a change. So I dropped Qwest, dropped my basic cable TV from Comcast, picked up local phone service from Comcast, and had Comcast deliberately slow my internet connection down to the lowest (cheapest) level. I’m now saving a boatload of money every month, which is very nice indeed.
Because I dumped cable TV, I had to figure out how to best receive the over-the-air HD TV signals. Our TV is ancient, but works just fine for the room, so I got one of the converter boxes and bought an HD antenna. The signal was pretty weak, so I returned the antenna and bought a stronger antenna. Still too weak, so I returned that one and bought a monstrously huge powered antenna. Still too weak! At this point, I decided to experiment, so I attached the converter box to the coaxial cable that ran outside, so I could dink around with setting up an antenna outside. I was quite surprised to find that the bare coax cable, outside, with no proper antenna at all, gave me a better signal than anything I could set up inside the house. In hindsight, it’s obvious – the aluminum siding on my house is a giant cage, and there’s nothing I can do to get decent reception unless I go outside the cage. I wound up attaching an old FM dipole antenna to the outside of the house around one of the upstairs window frames, so it’s barely visible, and that has been working great. I returned the third and final expensive antenna with no questions asked and, ultimately, no money spent.
I’m glad I chose to buy the antennas at Ultimate Electronics, a small chain that’s completely dwarfed by Best Buy here in town. The staff at Ultimate was genuinely helpful (most unlike the Best Buy staff I’ve encountered over the years), and their return policy was very generous. After buying, then returning, three different antennas over the course of a weekend, I sent a letter to Ultimate Electronics headquarters, praising the staff of the Edina store. I didn’t end up buying anything from them for this project, but I will most assuredly start there first for my next project.
Mid-July – A bunch of my commercial radio friends were in town for The Conclave, a yearly conference here in Minneapolis. This year, I invited all of them down to KFAI to sit in on my show, and it was glorious chaos! Eight radio pros all sitting in with me, and one of them (Art Vuolo) professionally videotaping the whole thing! Art has been videotaping radio personalities for a good 30 years, and he has some amazing footage of literally every radio DJ you’ve ever heard of. He even had the home phone numbers of Casey Kasem and Ryan Seacrest with him, and those are just two random people that came up in the conversations! I’m honored that he chose to work his magic on “Crap From The Past”, and I now have an entry in the same library as many of my radio heroes! Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.
Early August – Threw a joint birthday party at the house for Liz and for our friend Marie. Combined, they turned 60 this summer, so this was a biggie.
Mid August – Bought a new mattress. Did not buy it from an actual store here in town, called Mattress Liquidators. That’s quite an unfortunate name for the store, since I would think that liquidation would be one of the reasons for getting a new mattress in the first place.
Mid-August – Played hooky from work and went with friends to Valleyfair, an amusement park in the southwest suburbs. Heather’s suggestion of stopping first for donuts was a really good idea, even though you’d think that being shaken and turned upside down would not be optimal for donuts. The day we picked turned out to be cold and rainy, which meant that we essentially had free reign of the park. We got soaked, but not having to wait in lines for anything more than made up for it. I will say that getting pelted by heavy rain on a 70 mile-per-hour roller coaster stings a bit, but what are you gonna do?
Liz and I can wholeheartedly endorse Valleyfair’s newest roller coaster, the Renegade. Unlike most roller coasters, the Renegade is made up almost entirely of short, tight turns. From the opening drop, the ride is really unexpected and is quite a different experience than the typical roller coaster ups and down basically along a single direction. The park expects this one to be a huge hit, and the serpentine waiting area that they set up for this ride seems to be far larger than for any other rides in the park.
We did not go on any of the water rides at the park, since we were already soaked to the bone from the rain. I think we tallied up 21 rides for the day.
Immediately after Valleyfair, we drove to the Costco in Eden Prairie. We plan on joining in November when our Sam’s Club membership expires, and this was our first time in one of the stores. It’s the same general idea as Sam’s, but the merchandise seems to be a tiny bit better quality, overall, and the employees seem to be happier to be there. And as a bonus, hard rain hitting the corrugated metal roof of the building may be the loudest sound you’ll ever hear.
August – Four (count ‘em, four!) sets of friends all closed on new houses here in town. Wow!
Late August – Liz began a clinical rotation in Neillsville, Wisconsin, which is about 2.5 hours away by car. During the week, she stays in a call room inside the hospital itself, which makes for a very easy commute to start her workday. The call rooms are a lot like dorm rooms, and Liz even has a little plastic crate to carry her toiletries to and from the bathroom down the hall. She’s been driving home about two out of every three weekends, so she gets to spend some time with me and the cats.
During her first week out there, her elderly fish died. He was a little blue betta that had far exceeded his expected lifetime, and unfortunately he expired on my watch. I’ve had better luck keeping the cats alive, for which Liz is extremely grateful.
She has a few more weeks in Neillsville, then transfers to much bigger Marshfield, Wisconsin, where she’ll be until the end of 2009. That’s a three hour drive each way. At least we’ll get to see each other on most weekends.
Early September – Went to the State Fair with Kris and Marie, and our friend Jill. The full food tally for us five, as compiled by Kris: 2 Foot Long Hot Dogs, 2 Deep Fried Snickers Bars, 2 Dole Whips, 1 Breakfast Pretzel (bacon and eggs baked in), Peaches and Something, 1 Cheese Curds, 1 Pronto Pup, 2 Cokes, 3 Strawberries and Cream, 4 Corn on the Cobs, 2 Cream Puffs, 1 Popcorn, 1 Root Beer, 1 Bucket of Sweet Martha’s Cookies, 3 Giant Pretzels, 1 Pork Sandwich, 1 Turkey Sandwich, and 2 More Pork Sandwiches.
Obviously, we ate a lot. To show you the ferocity of our consumption power, Kris took pictures of the Sweet Martha’s chocolate chip cookie bucket, before and after we got to it. The pictures were taken six minutes and 57 seconds apart.On the way home from the Fair, Jill stopped at Culver’s for a cheeseburger, fries and a malt – now THAT’s a trooper!
September 9 – While the rest of the world rejoiced in the remastering and rerelease of the Beatles’ back catalog, I took a different approach on “Crap From The Past” by celebrating the genius of the Stars On 45. That’s right, the guys who hit #1 in 1981 with their imitation-of-the-Beatles medley.
Those of you that didn’t live through it can’t fully appreciate the impact that the Stars On 45 had back in their day. I had all the 45s and the albums, and I knew all the words to everything they ever recorded. Even the tribute records: “We love you Stars On 45/Oh yes we do!” Other kids might have been lured in by the Hooked On Classics guys (the bad boys of the medley world), but for me it was the squeaky-clean Stars On 45, all the way. To this day, they’ve done more for my appreciation of medleys of hit songs set to a thud/clap disco beat than any other group I know.
Just a few weeks ago, I was talking with a guy at the office, and he’d never heard the Stars On 45-album-with-some-songs-from-Revolver. Never heard Stars On 45-album-with-some-songs-from-Revolver?? So I sent him home with a copy of the album, with instructions to listen to ignore the dated production (distracting vocals-that-sound-like-the-Beatles in one channel and thud-clap instrumentation in the other channel), and just try to hear the music as simple medleys of pop songs, strung together with more wit and sophistication than had been ever done before. If he bites, I’ll introduce him to the mono mixes – the joyful strains of what I heard in my childhood on AM radio coming through the speaker in the middle of the dashboard of our 1979 Chevy Caprice.
Of course, the Stars On 45-mania eventually faded, and nowadays you just have to roll your eyes when you hear an oldster talk about how the Stars On 45 were all the rage back then, man. The hits have been played to the point of numbness on oldies radio, and the subsequent solo careers have tarnished the reputation of the band a bit (the guy-who-sounds-like-Ringo solo records, anyone?). But the music will live on forever.September – Business at work picked up briefly. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when a potential client called. I almost never get cold calls, and it just worked out that I had lots of technical expertise in the field that he needed, so he brought us on board for huge project that consumed almost every waking minute in September.
For the introductory meeting, he wanted me out in California the next day. So I took a local bus home from work right after lunch, threw one day’s worth of clothes in a knapsack, drove to the airport, ran up to the American Airlines counter and asked them, “How quick can you get me to Burbank?” One would think that I had a screenplay burning a hole in my pocket, and if I didn’t get it to the director in time, the whole deal with the studio might fall through…
I spent one full, exhausting, day with the client, breakfast-to-sushi, and headed home the next day. I did have my celebrity sighting at the Burbank airport on the way home. On the security line, there was a very attractive woman a few people ahead of me that looked a lot like actress Wendie Malick (the only worthwhile thing about “Just Shoot Me”). She was wearing a casual pink/purple sweater, jeans, and sunglasses. Not pretentious sunglasses, but normal-looking sunglasses that you’d use to keep the sun out of your eyes. It was pretty bright out there, after all. She was with another adult and a young teenage girl, and I overheard her talking a bit – she had this wonderful, deep voice, just like Wendie Malick. So since we were waiting in a line for security, where you had to show your ticket and driver’s license, I sneaked a peek at her license. Hey! It really was Wendie Malick! And that’s her real name, too!Now I just assume that there’s an unwritten code of conduct out there that says that you’re not supposed to make a fuss when you see someone you recognize. “HEY! YOU’RE WENDIE MALICK!”, screamed at the top of one’s lungs, would probably be frowned upon. So I didn’t say anything. There’s no need to make someone uncomfortable, just because her job makes her easily recognizable. In case you were wondering, if you were to see her in the airport, she doesn’t come across as a Big Star or anything like that. She just looks, acts, and dresses like a normal person. An attractive one, to be sure, but one with normal social skills who laughs and jokes with her companions and with the airport security people.
Obviously, celebrity sightings are pretty rare in Minneapolis.
So the work itself for this project was good. For the first time that I can remember, I worked 12-hour days and weekends, and it was all billable. It calmed down in early October, we got everything filed before a particular critical date, and now I’m back to normal. But all I really remember about September is that I worked my tail off.
Early October – The Twins and Vikings momentarily made sports fans out of everyone in the entire city. The Vikings’ new quarterback, Brett Favre (you’ve heard of him?), beat the Green Bay Packers in their first face-off against his old team. Favre is now the only NFL player ever to beat every team in the entire league, which is pretty cool. And, after being out of first place from May onward, the Twins went on a rampage at the end of the season and snatched the division title from Detroit. Then, they got clobbered by the Yankees, which was expected.
I was in New York (more on this in a second) for the last two playoff games, where I silently rooted for the Twins. It’s a miracle that the Twins made it as far as they did. And it’s easy to see why they didn’t stand a chance against the Yankees, whose batboys probably earn more than the entire Twins franchise. After the Yankees finished off the Twins, the newspaper headlines in New York were all happy, reading something along the lines of “Yankees now off to destroy the Angels”. When I got back to Minnesota, the headlines here were all sad, sort of like “Twins last morsel of hope crushed by insolent Yankees”. Very amusing to me to see both perspectives on the same day.
Got a Kia Rio as a rental car for the New York visit. I asked the guy for the tiniest tin can they have. Ford Focus? Do you have anything smaller? Then the guy pointed at a little gray car waaaaaaaaaay at the end of the parking lot, which appeared to have never been touched by human hands. That’s a Kia Rio, you say? I’ll take it! For a tiny little tin can with no electric door locks and roll-up windows, it did just fine. It felt sturdier and handled better than all of the small American cars I’ve driven. I don’t think I’d actually own one, but I’d certainly rent one again.
While in New York, I got to see my friend Tracy, whom I know from my days in Rochester, and whom I hadn’t seen in about 12 years. Her parents were selling their house in Thiells, NY (at the north end of Rockland County), and she was paying them a last visit in NY before they move out to Seattle to be close to Tracy. Tracy got married around the same time that Liz and I got married, and she and her husband have a 15-month-old girl. What a coincidence that she and I were both going to be in NY at the same time!
We stopped by during an open house at Tracy’s parents’ house, and got to hang out with Tracy, her husband, her little girl, her parents, and some of her parents’ friends. It was a pretty delightful afternoon – they were all warm, funny people, and we laughed ourselves silly.
Tracy’s little girl, Olivia, insisted that I hold a particular piece of rolled-up cardboard. Don’t know why she chose me, but she had her mind made up. We experimented a bit by putting the cardboard down at different places on the floor in the living room next to different people, and each time she’d pick it up and carry it over to me. Once, while I was holding it, she walked by me, looked at the cardboard, looked up at me, and nodded her approval. Very nice!
At one point, they had to go change Olivia’s diaper. They apologized, and remarked that it was the third time today they had to call for a cleanup on aisle number two. This provoked a comment: “Third time today? It’s a retiree’s dream!” Later in the afternoon, for the fourth time, Olivia was dubbed the “miracle baby”.
Obviously, the whole visit was baby-centric, and there were many, many baby stories. At one point, Tracy and her mom were describing an encounter with a young mother and her rather unattractive baby. Tracy said that upon seeing this baby, she was completely speechless. Her mom felt like she had to say something, and made the save with the comment, “He’s such a BIG BOY!” Again, we laughed ourselves silly.
So why was I in New York? Because my brother, Kenny, got married. Sorry ladies, he’s now spoken for, and all of us Gerbers are now taken.
I learned that literally everyone outside of family calls him “Gerber”. Not “Ken”, “Kenny”, “Kenny G”, “Special K”, or anything that involves a first name. Just “Gerber”. Most of the bride’s extended family didn’t even know his first name. The wedding vows completely avoided his actual first name: “Do you, Gerber, take Maria…” So for the entire weekend, he was “Gerber” and I was “Gerber’s brother”. Liz’s was “Gerber’s sister in law”.
One of my responsibilities as Best Man was to give a toast at the reception. I whittled it down to be incredibly short, and I probably got it down to under 30 seconds. I told a story of how when Ken was 6, and I was 12, our aunt and uncle took us to a Chinese restaurant. I dared him to eat a spoonful of hot mustard, he replied ‘OH YEAH?’, took a big spoonful, then started crying. Afterward, he said he couldn’t taste anything for the rest of the meal, or the Carvel ice cream we had for dessert. I told Maria that the moral of the story was that she could get him to do anything she wanted, as long as she dared him.
Too bad I had to cut so much out of the toast, since the BETCHA CAN’T DO SOMETHING RIDICULOUS / OH YEAH? had, over the years, lead to Kenny eating a shot glass full of ground pepper, a hot dog that had been sent to him in the mail, a seven-pound can of chocolate pudding (over the course of one full day), and a taco that had been sitting in the roof liner of his ’83 Chevy Celebrity in the hot Oklahoma sun for three days. That last one gave him “a little case of the botch”. The Botch is truly one of my favorite stories, but it didn’t fit in the toast.
Wedding day went smoothly except for one significant glitch. At the very start of the day at the hotel, the photographer was getting shots of the groom, the best man, and the three groomsmen. We five guys did some posed shots in the hotel lobby and on the hotel grounds. The photographer thought it would be cool to get a mid-air action shot, and had us jump off a small stone ledge onto a grassy patch about two feet below. Normally, this would have been fine, but upon landing, one of the groomsmen, Randy, bonked his nose against the back of Ken’s head, and broke his nose. Yes, Randy broke his nose during the first batch of pictures for the wedding day.
We got paper towels and ice pretty quickly from the hotel staff, so we were able to control the bleeding and swelling. At that point, we were a little unsure what to do, so we piled us five guys in the Hummer limo (as was planned) and drove to the church. The limo dropped us five guys off at the church, then went back to retrieve the ladies (also as was planned).
We were at the church maybe a half hour, with Randy reclined in the passenger’s seat of someone’s car with ice on his nose, and the other four of us trying to stay calm. Guests and family started showing up at the church, well before the limo returned with the bride and ladies in the wedding party. As fate would have it, the husband of one of the bride’s cousins was an ear/nose/throat surgeon. That’s right, Rob was an ENT specialist and was at the church with the rest of us.
We brought him over to Randy, and he said he could reset Randy’s nose if he had something shaped like a butter knife. Well, the four of us had just been wandering around the church, including their kitchenette! Hey, we knew where there was a butter knife! I ran to the kitchenette, wrapped a flatware knife in a paper towel so I wouldn’t call too much attention to it, and delivered it to Rob, who said the blunt end would work just fine. He then told Randy there would be a quick moment of pain, and that it would subside quickly. I then walked away, not really wanting to see Rob reset Randy’s nose right there in the passenger’s seat of the car. It took just a few seconds, apparently, and was captured on video on Pete’s cell phone. Good as new! Or at least it looked that way from the outside. We loaded Randy up with ibuprofen, and he made it through the rest of the day just fine. Rob said that Randy should get it looked at in a few days, and probably wouldn’t need anything else done to get it to heal properly. They say that if you break your nose, the quicker you get it set, the easier it is to heal. This was set within an hour or two, which is pretty ideal. I can’t imagine any better coincidence for Randy than having an ear/nose/throat surgeon as one of the guests.
And then, after all this was done, the ladies showed up at the church, and the wedding ceremony went on as scheduled. Now THAT’s an unusual chain of events for a wedding...
At the reception, the food was good, and the band was tight. The food was cocktail-style, with a bunch of themed tables set up around the perimeter of the room. Much more interesting than the usual course-after-course wedding reception meal.
I got a chance to catch up with my cousins, Heidi and Beth, who I hadn’t seen since Grandma’s 98th birthday party earlier in the year. And with Aunt Amy and Uncle Arthur, who were the ones who had taken Kenny and me to that particular Chinese restaurant from the toast. Grandma made it to the wedding, too, and we’ll be gathering in DC for her 99th birthday party in January! Ken and Maria are taking a few days to visit some wineries out on Long Island, then the thank-you notes, and then back to normal.
Yeah, once you’ve been to a wedding where one of the groomsmen breaks his nose and has it reset before the ceremony, without any delays to the proceedings, the day-to-day tasks at work can seem a little mundane. That’s what I’m going through now.
I have a wedding in town to DJ on Halloween, and I’m bringing a butter knife just in case.
Stay warm!
Ron & Liz Gerber
