Ron's Big Life Update - March 2012

Hi, all!  I usually wait to write these things until some big event happens or something inspires me emotionally.  Neither of these two things has happened on this go-round.  It's been a few little things, most of them good, but nothing really great.  So...

August 4 - Found, but did not buy, a comically large 200-watt compact fluorescent light bulb in Menard's.

Late August - Liz coined the word "over-extrenuated".

August 28 - Made a sandwich.  Finished the peanut butter, the jelly, AND the bread.  Aced it!

August 31 - Went to MN State Fair with out friends Squid and Lemur.  Survived, despite eating all of the following:

Chocolate chunk scone
Black currant iced tea
Cappuccino
Cinnamon currant scone
Big Fat Bacon
Ice cream sandwich samples
Fried apple pie w/cinnamon ice cream
Microwave beef pot roast sample
Cider Freezies
Chai on a stick
Mocha frappe
Hamburgers
Kettle corn sample
Elk burger
Summit beer
Cheese curds
Roasted corn
Corn ice cream
Pretzel dog
Soft pretzels
Spring Grove Sodas
Dole Whip
Deep-fried Reeses
Bourbon chicken
Sweet Martha's cookies
Milk/Chocolate Milk
Weird rib sandwich
Ocean Spray samples
Shave ice

The fried apple pie was my favorite out of the whole bunch.  Highly recommended for next year's State Fair.

Late August - Stroke of genius: In five years, my 1996 Corolla will be eligible for Minnesota Collectors Plates!  It's still all-original everything, down to the factory-installed AM/FM/Cassette player!  Soon, my ho-hum black car will officially be a Sweet Ride!

September 27 - Liz and I went to our first Twins game at the new Target Field.  It was the next-to-last game in the season, and if they lost it would have been the Twins' 100th loss of the season.  They won, and won the last game of the season as well, thereby avoiding 100 losses for the year.  At this game we saw: a grand slam home run, a near inside-the-park home run, and an extremely large bug flying around the lights that was eaten in flight by a bird.  Plus, we got free hats.  Overall, it was a pretty good night.

October 9 - Liz and I wanted to drive around and check out the fall colors, so we drove southeast, into Wisconsin, just for giggles.  We'd driven for maybe an hour when we saw a tiny little sign on the side of the two-lane highway.  It said, "Apple picking", or something to that effect, and had a big arrow pointing left.  I like apples, so naturally, I followed the arrow.  We stumbled across a lovely little orchard, run by a family and open to the public.  The gave us a bucket and some big sticks with hooks on the end.  The hooks looked a lot like the cage that goes over the incandescent bulb on your hang-able work light.  And off we went.  Best apples ever!

They also had grapes, but we were there so late in the season that there wasn't much left to pick.  We found only about ten or so, here and there, but they were terrific.  The orchard also grew pears, but those were completely done for the season.  We learned our lesson - go in early September.

So we continued our aimless drive through Wisconsin with a bag of apples in the trunk.  Then down to Rochester for barbecue, then back home.  Best day ever.  Next year, we go in September to pick pears and grapes.

Early October - I was saddened to read that WKPQ/Hornell, NY (Power 105.3) had flipped music formats from Hot AC (sort of a kinder, gentler top 40) to Country.  When I was going to school in Rochester, NY from 1986 to 1990, they were my favorite station.  For a while, I lived in a ninth-story apartment facing due south, and they came in clear as a bell from up there.

Back then, it seemed like they would play anything released on a 45.  It was, and still is, the only commercial station I ever heard play Far Corporation's 1986 remake of "Stairway To Heaven" (put together by Frank Farian, producer of Boney M and Milli Vanilli).

Their morning show was the "Cavalcade Of Whimsy", a phrase I still use regularly.  One of their morning local news stories (and this was a serious story, not a bit) was that at a local construction site, an unmanned, parked steamroller had somehow gotten loose and rolled down a busy hill.  Miraculously, no one was hurt.

In all my radio experience in Rochester, nothing even comes close to being as memorable as the runaway steamroller I heard about from a tiny station 70 miles to the south.  I'll miss them.

Early October - Noticed that one of the columns in front of the house was leaning.  Severely.  So we called Todd, our go-to contractor, and one week later, we had brand new concrete steps in front of the house and new columns.  Every homeowner needs a Todd!  It wasn't nearly as expensive as I'd thought, the house looks a lot better, and I can sleep a little easier knowing that the old 1964-era concrete steps won't continue sinking into the front lawn.

October 22 - Celebrated my birthday with a poker game with the guys, while Liz went to a Scary Movie Night with the girls.  I finished the evening up by exactly ten cents, which is probably the closest I've ever gotten to breaking exactly even.  Plus, Liz made me a bunch of homemade black and white cookies, the best treat in all of New York City.


November 13 - Got to participate in a cool event at the Minnesota Historical Center.  They had an exhibit called "Hot Wax: A Musical History Of 1968", and I was one of a handful of live DJs that played music from the era in one of the exhibit rooms.

It was the first time that I'd ever attempted doing a live gig running music off the laptop, rather than the CD players, and it worked really well.  DJing this way is clearly the future, so this was a watershed event for my little DJ career.  I was at the forefront of using CDs back when I started in 1986, and 25 years later, I'm starting to catch up with the rest of the world by running the music off the laptop.

November 13 - Local grocery store, Rainbow Foods, gave away scratch-and-win cards with purchase.  We won 25 cents off one eight-count pack of Rayovac Hearing Aid Batteries, Size 10, 13, or 23!  This truly must be our lucky day.

November 21 - Freak occurrence at another grocery store, Byerly's.   Bought eleven items, and all of them turned out to be on sale.  No scratch-and-win cards here, unfortunately, because we surely would have won big.

Mid-December - Had a portion of our bathtub regrouted.  December was not very exciting.

December 25th - Received the best gift ever - a "Desktop Drum Set"!  It's in a little cardboard box, a bit larger than a notebook computer.  The box proudly proclaims, "Smokin' hot drum set delivers incredible sound", "Assembles without tools in about 2 minutes" and "Jam like a Superstar!"  A picture on the box shows the hands of some guy wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt, holding two tiny sticks, maybe four inches long.  It's fantastic.

January 2 - Saw one of the most informal concerts I've ever seen - The Driftbenders at the Dakota Jazz Club.

I don't think the Driftbenders were even an actual group; they were just Joey Molland (the guitarist from Badfinger) and Phil Solem (half of The Rembrandts), two local pop music legends up on stage playing guitar with no backing band.  They took turns playing each other's songs for their entire set.

Liz and I sat front and center, practically on stage with the guys.  We got some incredible pictures with Liz's cell phone - a big plus to being so close.

Both guys have the same make and model guitar, which apparently wasn't planned.  I managed to nab the set list, which I got signed by the first opening act (Jeff Miller), the second opening act (Ryan and Pony of local fave the Melismatics), and Joey and Phil.  Got a guitar pick, too.  A mighty fun night.

Mid-January - Came up with a new band name: Tuna Meltdown.  I've done better.

Mid-January - The 1968 DJ event from November showed me the future of DJ work, so for Christmas, I got a new laptop that I dedicated to just music stuff.  It has a 500 GB internal hard drive, which can hold a good portion of the permanent "Crap From The Past" library in an uncompressed format ("flac" files, if you're playing at home.)

Picture pilfered from the internet

Through a little bit of trial and error, I settled on a small amount of add-on hardware to go with the laptop.  Most important is an external sound card that plugs into the USB port.  There are a few on the market, but I settled on a Traktor Audio 2, which has two sets of outputs - one for the actual output (for the dance floor, or the signal that actually goes out over the air) and the other for previewing and cueing the upcoming track.  The Traktor sounds orders of magnitude better than the crummy little headphone jack that comes with the laptop, and I highly recommend it to those that want to dabble in such things.

Again pilfered from the internet

I also got a little portable controller, which I use to actually trigger the music (start/stop), and crossfade between tracks.  Numark makes a nice little unit called the DJ2GO, and it's very well matched to the Traktor sound card.  I also highly recommend the DJ2GO - this unit actually makes the DJ work fun!  As for software, I'm running a version of VirtualDJ, which comes with the DJ2GO unit.  There are free versions of VirtualDJ out there, and it seems to be the standard software that most live DJs use.  The nice part is that all of these add-ons are tiny, and easily fit in the carrying case for the laptop.

Also pilfered from the internet

I also found some great, inexpensive DJ headphones from a company I'd never heard of, Monoprice.  Dirt cheap, and comparable in sound and ruggedness to headphones that cost two or three times as much.  I'm trying to convince my radio station to buy ten or twenty pairs, but that's an uphill battle.

If you're going to dabble in the DJ stuff, some advice: (1) Get the best-sounding music files you can.  Mp3s suck rocks, but if you have to use them, get them at 320 kbps.  Better to use flac, if you can.  (2) Be meticulous about getting the tag information correct on your files.  (3) Invest in the extra hardware for sound output and controlling.  It's worth it, and it'll make people take you far more seriously than if you try to run everything off your Ipod.

Yes, also pilfered from the internet

Mid-January - Liz went bananas.  Literally.  She bought a monstrous Vitamix 5200 blender with the intent of making fruit and veggie smoothies for the whole block, no, the whole universe.

I was heading out to do some shopping, and asked Liz if she needed anything.  She jotted down a few items for me to pick up on the way home - small pineapple, bananas, four granny smiths, four fujis or galas (whichever is cheaper), red grapes (half bag?), green grapes (half bag), and strawberries.  I should point out that this was about three days before we left town to visit family.  Liz is ambitious.


Mid-January - Met the extended family in Washington, DC for Grandma's 101st Birthday!  It was basically the same as the 100th Birthday - same restaurant and all that.  Grandma is doing just fine. 101!

Late January - To celebrate our anniversary (five years already?), Liz made another New York City staple: rainbow cookies.  I used to call them "stripey" cookies or something to that effect, but hey're actually called rainbow cookies.  You make basically a big layer cake, then slice it into the little strips.  It was fantastic, maybe even better than the black and whites.

February 11 - Got new glasses.  We wandered into Visionary Optical in the Southdale Mall and told the twenty-year-old girl behind the counter that I wanted something stylish that would look good on my face.  She said, "Try these."  And I said, "I'll take them."  And that was that.  Liz got a pair of prescription sunglasses, too, based on the same instructions.  It was probably the easiest sale they've made all year.  (There's a picture of me below with the new specs.)

Early February - Every year, radio station KVSC in St. Cloud, MN (about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities) runs a Trivia Contest.  For a fifty-hour period from Friday evening to Sunday evening, they ask questions on the air, and teams phone in their answers and get points for correct answers.  The team with the most points at the end of the weekend wins.  I wouldn't say that it's well-known around here, but it's definitely considered a tradition, especially among us radio folks.

So this year, being the 33rd year of the contest, the theme was Long Play Records.  Since I tend to have a reputation of knowing a thing or two about records, I got recruited from a St. Cloud radio friend of mine.  Do I want to be on the team?  I sure do!  Liz had the weekend off, so we were both in.

We were part of this year's team called "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women".  They took their name from the title of a book that I haven't read.  I was given instructions to show up at a particular house in St. Cloud, the basement of which was converted into the "war room" for the team.  I was amazed to find about 20 people, all with laptops, all wired into some custom software specifically written by the team members for the trivia contest.  There were about 50 people worldwide on the team, all linked in by the internet to this software.  It was very sophisticated, and very impressive.

KVSC asked about nine questions an hour, spaced apart by a few minutes, with relatively short windows to call in the answers.  The team operated in shifts, so that we could cover all fifty hours.

Unfortunately, my actual knowledge of music stuff wasn't really necessary.  The questions were asked in such a way that to find the answer, you had to use the internet.  A sample question: "Big-screen characters X and Y go into a record store and are talking to the clerk about guitar lessons.  Over X's left shoulder are seen two albums displayed on the wall.  What are those two albums?"  So to answer, step one was  identifying the movie or TV show in question.  Step two was finding the actual video online, which usually involved someone's Netflix streaming account.  Then step three was relatively easy, once the scene played out on a team member's screen.

Out of the 450+ questions, I was able to answer only three of them off the top of my head.  Those three questions involved playing a clip of the B-side of a hit, and they wanted to know the title and artist of the A-side.  I easily identified the B-sides of "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks, "Rainy Days And Mondays" by the Carpenters, and "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" by the Fifth Dimension.  While I identified those songs in about two seconds, the sad thing is that eighteen seconds later, the Shazam app on people's iPhones did the same thing.  They really didn't need me at all.

But still, of the sixty-seven teams competing this year, we won.  Beat everybody else.  Yup, we are the champions no time for losers cause we are the champions.  I, personally, didn't really contribute much, but I was happy to be there for part of the weekend and proud to be part of the team.  And it extends my streak of never having been beaten at music trivia.  Really, you do not want to compete against me in music trivia.  You will lose.

February 14 - For Valentine's Day, I got Liz an "I Heart Ron" T-shirt, which is based on the character Ron Swanson from NBC's Parks And Recreation.  Liz plans on wearing it every day this summer.  Perhaps.

February - Liz and I found a great bowling alley in south Minneapolis called Skylanes.  The building is currently up for sale, and it needs some pretty severe repairs to the roof (many, many buckets hanging from the ceiling tile grid), but it's completely charming inside.  Ten alleys, and that's it.

We went twice in February.  The first night, I rolled a one-seventy-something, which would have been way above my average back when I bowled weekly.  Then for giggles, we bowled a game lefty - I got a 113.

The second night, we bowled five games - three righty and two lefty.  The second right-handed game, Liz beat me 149 to 147, including two consecutive beer frames (that's four strikes in a row between the two of us), and three consecutive frames where I left the same three pins (3, 6, 10) and picked them up for a spare.

The first left-handed game, I rolled a 112 (almost the same as the last time we went), and Liz kicked butt with a 76.  If you've ever tried to bowl with the wrong hand, you'll know that a 76 is excellent.  (I had a lot of practice bowling with the wrong hand back in college, stemming from the time I mistakenly gave blood with my right arm on the day of my bowling league, and had to try my luck lefty.)

February - The radio show, Crap From The Past, turned twenty years old, which is quite a hefty milestone for such a silly radio show.  So we got a little press, with mentions in some of the local alternative weeklies.  Nothing life-changing, but just enough mentions for the show to feel loved and wanted.  It was nice.

To celebrate on-air, I came up with the most ambitious special I could think of.  I went back to the American Top 40 shows for the decade leading up to the start of CFTP (that's 1982-1992), and manually extracted the commercials for those shows.  To put that in perspective, that's over 500 shows and 2000 hours of audio!  It took about two months to get all the commercials in one place on the hard drive.  I then picked the most memorable of them, grouped them into little sets, and did an All-Commercial CFTP as the 20th Birthday show.  I had talk breaks, just like always, but now I was introducing and discussing old ads instead of old songs.  It sounded pretty spectacular on-air.  I managed to squeeze in 131 ads during the ninety minute show.  Even better is that now I have a library of about 1000 old radio commercials on the hard drive, which I'll be using in small doses in the weekly shows from now on.

You can download/stream the 20th Birthday show here.

Joel Stitzel, Ron Gerber and
Andy Sturdevant on stage,
courtesy of a picture I found
posted on the web

We also had a live event to mark the 20th Birthday.  There's a monthly live variety show here in town called Salon Saloon, hosted by Andy Sturdevant.  He agreed to devote a whole show to radio stuff and even titled the February show "The Radio Show".  I was a featured guest, along with some other respected radio colleagues here in town.  It went really well.  I played show and tell, and explained a little of the philosophy behind why the show sounds the way it does.  (It's not just random - there are real reasons for why CFTP is structured the way it is.)  I think Salon Saloon sold out, too, which is always a good thing.

So after the burst of excitement about the CFTP birthday, it's back to normal for me.  All this discussion about radio stuff is a nice warm-up for KFAI's pledge drive, which starts later this month.

March - Found out that Minneapolis just had the fourth warmest winter on record.  Climate change is, apparently, good for Minnesota.  Not so much for the rest of the planet.

March - Liz and I went to five weddings last year, so maybe it's appropriate that seemingly everyone we know will be having babies this year.  We know of four couples that are due before year's end, and we expect a few more.  The next few months should be very interesting indeed.

Mandatory cat picture - This is Poohead, sleeping on the landing, with sunlight streaming through the blinds.  It's good to be Poohead.

Mandatory food pictures - Liz has been cooking up a storm, as you'll see.  She's modest and says that she's just following recipes, but you need cooking talent to make food look this good.  All of the recipes are from the culinary geniuses at America's Test Kitchen.

August 19, 2011 - Summer vegetable pasta

September 1, 2011 - Fiesta chicken with rice

September 7, 2011 - Don't remember what this is, but it looks really good, doesn't it?

September 20, 2011 - Pork loin with roasted sweet potatoes and cilantro chutney

September 30, 2011 - Don't recall this one, either

October 12, 2011 - Chicken teriyaki

November 2, 2011 - Thai chicken soup

December 12, 2011 - Chili con carne

December 16, 2011 - Pork tacos with mango salsa

December 23, 2011 - Chicken and couscous with fennel and orange

January 3, 2012 - Tacos

January 5, 2012 - Pot roast

January 18, 2012 - Chicken vesuvio

February 5, 2012 - Lemon cake (for Super Bowl party; I think this was gluten-free)

February 8, 2012 - Chicken bon femme

February 21, 2012 - Shepherd's pie

February 29, 2012 - Chicken tikka masala

March 6, 2012 - Pan-roasted chicken with cheesy herb mashed potatoes

Is it any wonder than I'm the heaviest that I've ever been?  And probably the happiest, too!

Hope your spring is springy!
Ron & Liz

Ron's Big Life Update - July 2011

This next item may take many of you by surprise, so bear with me. Over the last year and a half, I’ve been in touch with my biological father, Ed. He and his wife, Marie, live in Florida near Tampa, and Liz and I flew down there in March to visit them. It was a warm, relaxed visit, and really nice to reconnect after something like 25 years.

I’m sure you didn’t see that coming, so I’ll explain.

My mom and dad divorced sometime around 1978, when I was 10. I don’t really remember much from that time, mostly because I was 10 and hadn’t developed a sense of context for anything except music. Someone recently asked me why they got divorced. I didn’t have a good answer. It’s not like there was any abuse, or one particular event to point to. No, they just didn’t get along, and all parties concerned seem to agree that they were much better off apart than together. Ed moved out, and my brother and I continued living with mom. Mom remarried when I was 12, and I saw Ed for visitations every other weekend, or however things like that work.

By the time I was 12, my relationship had soured with my dad. I can’t remember what happened or why, but I attribute a lot of it to my being a moody adolescent. I’m sure there are 12-year-olds out there that are wise beyond their years, but I was certainly not one of them.

When Bar Mitzvah season came around for my 13th birthday, I had pretty much severed ties with Ed. That was the year I started at junior high, and that was when I made the friends that would carry me through high school and afterwards. As timing would have it, none of my friends ever met my father. A few years later, the relationship between my brother, Kenny and my dad dissolved as well. I don’t know why.

And we all moved on. Ed remarried while I was in high school, continued to live in Rockland County and work in New York, and eventually moved down to Florida when he retired in the mid-’90s. His wife, Marie, had grown children so Ed’s new life included children and grandchildren without Ken and me. I went to college, then grad school, and didn’t have any contact with him until the local paper in New York had my picture in the “Engagements” section in 1995. He saw my picture in the paper and sent me a congratulatory card, which in hindsight was a really nice thing to do. At the time, I still had traces of my adolescent hot-headedness and didn’t respond. I still regret that.

In the years since then, I’ve mellowed substantially. I’ve been through a divorce and remarriage of my own. And from all those experiences, some very good and some not so good, I’d like to think I’ve learned a bit about civility, tolerance, and forgiveness. I’m most certainly not the same person I was when I was 27. Or 18. Or 12, for that matter.

So skip ahead to 2009. Out of curiosity, my brother’s wife, Maria, decided to poke around on the internet and see if she could find an address for my father down in Florida. It wasn’t all that difficult, and she found one. Maria wrote him a letter asking if he’d be interested in getting in contact with Ken. He was. They exchanged letters and eventually phone calls. And then Ken and Maria brought me up to speed at the beginning of 2010.

I sent my first letter to my dad in February 2010, and it must have been as awkward for him to receive as it was for me to write. I started by telling him I regretted how hostile and immature I must have been back then, and that I can’t undo my actions, but only apologize for them and try to move on. And then brought him up to speed on what I’ve been doing since college – a lot of material to squash into one letter. I knew that a single letter couldn’t completely patch up 25 years of silence, but I thought it was a start.

And he wrote back. And I wrote back. It was nice.

And then I called. They weren’t home, so I wound up leaving a message on their machine. They called back when we weren’t home, so we got a message on our machine. It sounded like Ed was just as excited and nervous as I was, which is pretty understandable. Eventually, we got each other on the phone. That, too, was nice.

We traded calls pretty regularly after that. When I told him that I’d be heading out to Las Vegas for the bachelor party last November, we got to talking about poker. I told him that I’d been playing casually since high school. Mostly 7-card stud, 5-card stud, 5-card draw and a lot of variations on those games. Usually with a lot of wild cards. He told me that he used to play pretty regularly as well, with the same low-stakes atmosphere of my games. I told him that I was a little apprehensive about playing for the first time in Las Vegas, since there was real money involved. He then shared a terrific story that he said he hadn’t told in years. About 35 years ago, on a business trip to Las Vegas, he got to spend a few hours in one of the casinos. He was checking out the poker tables and spotted a table full of old ladies. It looked like they didn’t know what they were doing. He overheard conversations between the ladies and the dealer, like “What do I have? You mean I won? Oh, my word!” So Ed sat down at the old ladies’ table, thinking he could do pretty well against some old ladies that didn’t even know what they were holding. Nope – the old ladies cleaned him out. Apparently, they had a pretty good racket going there, and would do this to those New York-type guys all the time. Ed was so annoyed that he didn’t sleep a wink that night. So his advice to me was not to sit down at any table full of old ladies playing poker.

In March, Liz and I flew down to Tampa to pay them a visit in person. We didn’t want to overwhelm them, so we rented a car and a hotel room, and told them that they didn’t have to play host. Think of it as if we were going to be in town for the weekend, and thought we’d drop by to say “hi”. That worked nicely. We all went out to lunch one day, then Liz and I dropped by in the evening the next day for a few hours.

We talked about the old days and about people I would have known from back then, we looked at some photos I hadn’t seen in 25 years, and tried to fill Liz in on some of the details from back then. It was striking how a handful of my personality traits are directly traceable to Ed. For instance, you may know how I used to follow American Top 40 on Sunday mornings and write down the chart positions in a three-ring binder. I still have the three-ring binder. Well, Ed showed me a book, which included handwritten lyrics of the hits of the day, written in a paperback-book-sized calendar/planner from 1951. Apparently, my compulsion to categorize and catalog music comes directly from him! He also had great math skills, and during his work career, he was responsible for writing many of the specifications for the early computer programs that ran the Nasdaq Stock Market. All in all, a very rewarding trip for all of us. I’m sure we’ll visit again when it’s cold in Minnesota.

I waited to write about all this until I’d had a chance to really absorb it. A few weeks ago, my brother, Ken and his wife, Maria, got to meet up with them in New York. Ed came across to us as simply a nice old guy who’s really happy to reconnect with his kids after 25 years. We were happy to see him and find out how he’s been, and he was just as interested in us. It’s been a really rewarding experience for us, and we feel very fortunate to be able to share some aspects of our lives with someone who’s been wondering about us for a quarter of a century.

Compared to all that, the rest of our lives lately feels a little small. I’ll do my best to fill in some of the details of late.

January - My grandmother turned 100, so we flew to DC and spent a few days with the family. They threw a nice party at a local Chinese restaurant out there, with lots of old friends coming into town for the occasion. We got balloons for Grandma, but we couldn't find any with "100" on them. We settled for two "50" balloons.

We stayed with my cousin, Heidi. She'd accumulated quite a few bottles of wine in the last few years, from sources mostly unremembered, so we had an impromptu wine tasting party. Old wine can be pretty foul, and they ranged from merely undrinkable to downright mutogenic. Fun, but most unfortunate from a beverage point of view.

Early February - Liz settled into a normal work routine. She has positions at three hospitals in town, and all are considered "part-time/casual". She gets to pick her own hours, and she doesn't have to work nights, weekends, holidays or whenever she wants to schedule a vacation. I thought it was a little odd that she could work at different hospitals, but apparently that's a common thing to do for the medical field. Can't do that with the law stuff or in engineering, that's for sure.

February – I’d heard some where that the best gift you can give is something completely selfless. So this year, for Valentine’s Day, I decided to give Liz a gift of which I could not possibly receive any joy. I offered to sit through a showing of the movie “Beaches”.

For those of you who don’t know, “Beaches” came out in 1988, starred Bette Midler, and included Ms. Midler’s blood-curdling rendition of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings”. Factually, that’s all I knew of the movie until recently, and that’s all I really needed to know to use “Beaches” as the go-to punchline for any chick-flick-related jokes. Liz had seen the movie when she was a kid, and always defended the movie against my never-ending stream of snide remarks. So in deference to Liz, I offered to sit through the movie (even if I had to force my eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style) and approach it with an open mind. Quite the selfless gift, eh?

So we watched it. I gave it a fair shot. I thought it was BAD.

Not just chick-flick bad, but objectively BAD as a piece of cinema. Thoroughly one-dimensional, stereotypical characters. Blatantly obvious plot resolution. Acting so wooden it left splinters in my eyes. And pretentious, pretentious Bette hamming it up in every single frame of the movie. And finally, as if the audience had not yet been bludgeoned into submission, the complete destruction of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings”, which had been originally recorded very sweetly a few years earlier by Lou Rawls.

If your Valentine’s Day gift to your wife makes you want to die, that should count for something, right? Liz said she would have rather had chocolate.

May – You probably didn’t know that I appeared in a book about American Top 40. It came out in early 2010, but I just recently got a copy for myself. I’m on page 104 of “American Top 40 with Casey Kasem (The 1980s)” by Pete Battistini. Now you know.

Mid-May - Liz and I got to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Holy moly! It's as close to seeing James Brown as we will ever get! You've no doubt heard about the tightness of the band and her amazing stage presence. All true, and then some. She and some band members all stuck around to sign every last autograph for us, which was very, very gracious.

I got to talk to one of her backup singers for a little while after the show. Everything on stage was really tight, so I asked her how many rehearsals they had before they went on the road. Two. Two???? Yup, just two. They have hour-long sound checks, and if they want to try something new, they work it out during the sound checks. There are visual cues onstage as well, so while they're playing, they're keeping an eye on the one person in the band who gives cues to the rest of the band. (I noticed the same thing for George Clinton's P-Funk zoo onstage many years ago.)

Late May - Liz's brother got a kitten, named Leonard Montgomery. He got big really quickly after this. They also got a second kitten, named Lorenzo Banks, who I haven't met yet.

June 7 - It hit 103 degrees F in Minneapolis. That's the hottest day in the city in 23 years. It felt like some sort of cruel joke. In Tucson, sure, it's expected to get that hot every day during the summer, but in Tucson, it doesn't spend a week below zero every winter...

Early June – We got a new dishwasher. The old one was a ‘70s-era Kitchen Aid, with a heavy metal-lined door. Very old, and of late very ineffective at getting the crud off our dishes. So we checked Consumer Reports, bought one of their relatively inexpensive Best Buys, and take delight in our again-shiny glasses and utensils. I guess there’s not much of a story here, except that it’s good to have a new dishwasher.

Mid-June – There’s an ice cream place in St. Paul called Izzy’s, which is like no other ice cream place on earth. Yes, there are other places that make and sell yummy ice cream from scratch, but none do it quite like Izzy’s.

When Liz and I stopped by Izzy’s a few months ago, I noticed that they had replaced the sign that they use to let us know what flavors are available. The old sign was a big magnet, like a giant whiteboard, and each flavor had its own magnetic circle, which they stuck on the whiteboard if the particular flavor was in the case.

The new sign is a technological marvel, even if it maintained the look of the old sign. What you see is a projector, like the LED-based projectors commonly used in conference rooms, shining a big, rectangular image on the wall. The image includes a bunch of circles, each circle representing a flavor in the case. So cosmetically, it’s immediately recognizable as a replacement for the old magnetic sign.

It was a slow day at Izzy’s, so I asked about the sign. The guy explained. Each flavor has its own name tag, like “Chubby Bunny”, which is slid into a little holder in the glass case so that customers can identify what the flavor is. No surprise there; most places do this. What Izzy’s did is to put an RFID tag on each name tag, and put an RFID tag reader in the case itself, so that the case knows what flavors are being served at that very instant. The RFID tag reader then automatically talks to Izzy’s website, and lets the website show what’s being served at that very instant. It’s posted on the website, plus on Facebook and Twitter, and updated every three minutes. And finally, the projector in the store automatically talks to the website, finds out what’s being served at that very instant, generates the image of the circles with flavors in them, and shines that on the wall right above the ice cream cases. It’s true genius. The guy at the store said that the owners had contracted with a programmer to design and build the whole thing. I was absolutely floored.

While we were eating our ice cream, I wondered aloud to Liz about where they actually make the ice cream. The guy overheard us and said that since it was a slow day, would we like to see where they make it? FYI: if anyone ever asks you if you want to see where they make homemade ice cream, the answer should be YES. We were like 10-year-old kids… He walked us out the door to an adjacent part of the building and walked us around in their surprisingly modest-sized kitchen. Lots of counter space and racks, with two giant ice cream tumbler machine thingys. They looked like oversized front-loader washing machines. And that was it. No assembly-line conveyor belts or anything. Just a spotlessly clean kitchen area. Oh yeah! We asked how many people work on the recipes. About 2 or 3 – just the owners, who are clearly ice cream culinary geniuses.

So that’s the background as to why I think Izzy’s is the greatest ice cream store in the whole universe. Now back to mid-June: their 9th People’s Flavor Awards!

From their entry form: “Every other year we take submissions from our customers for ice cream flavors. We choose four finalists in six categories: Kids, Chocolate, Mix-Ins, Fruit, So Local, and Specialties. We make the flavors. Customers vote at the contest. Ballots are counted and winners are announced in each category, including a Best In Show. The Best In Show receives a $100.00 gift certificate to Izzy’s, his or her name on our wall plaque and their ice cream featured in our dipping cabinet for the rest of the year. Each finalist will receive 2 free tickets to the tasting event, a contest T-shirt, and one pint of their flavor.”

So on this particular Sunday, from 1 to 4:30, they had their ice cream tasting event. You pay an admission fee, and you get to try all 24 flavors and vote for your favorites. I had 29 scoops of ice cream, and that was literally all I had to eat that entire day. Our friend, Ellen, had a marathon’s worth of ice cream, or 26.2 scoops. Possibly the best day in all of recorded history.

And since you’re wondering, the Best In Show for 2011 was a flavor called “Mango Django”, submitted by Gaku Sato: Mango ice cream with honey, balsamic vinegar, poppy seeds, dash of cayenne pepper and dash of ground pink peppercorns. God Bless Izzy’s.

July 4 - We spent the weekend at Liz's parents' cabin on Pelican Lake, about three hours northwest of Minneapolis. Perfect weather all weekend, right up until the fireworks display. A big, dangerous thunderstorm was coming our way from the northwest, and we were at the east end of the lake watching it all roll in. For about a half hour, we sat on the dock and watched an immense display of cloud-to-cloud lightning. I mean, REALLY immense. It filled up most of the sky and looked like Hollywood special effects.

They pushed up the start time of the fireworks display on the lake by about 15 minutes, and shortened the whole display to about 10 minutes. From our dock, we could see the fireworks just fine, and although those would normally be considered great seats, the entire display was completely overshadowed by the immense lightning display. Liz tried to get some pictures, but it didn't photograph well. She did get one shot showing a giant lightning bolt, with a tiny little firework going off in the corner. Imagine that picture, with very active lightning activity, for a half hour during what should have been pitch blackness, and that was our fireworks display. Very, very memorable, but not for the usual reasons.

After the fireworks display ended, we saw a few boats speeding across the lake to get back home ASAP. And then the actual storm hit. For a good ten minutes beforehand, the air was completely still. No breeze, no nothing. They tell me that's bad. We think we saw some funnel clouds way off in the distance. Then, a very perceptible front moved in. You could actually see it moving across the water in the wave patterns on the surface. Liz's brother said that it should be hitting us in "5, 4, 3, ..." I was inside by 3. And hit us it did! The winds picked up immediately, the temperature dropped by about 20 degrees, and a wall of rain moved over us. In those first few seconds, before the rain hit us, we saw whitecaps on the lake behind the front. And it lasted a good half hour or so. Cleaned out the air and drenched everything in its path, but didn't cause any damage in our area. We got lucky, I think.

Mid-July – The old, old, old basic black half-sphere Weber grill that I got for $5 at a garage sale 14 years ago finally died. Over the years, the insulating lining inside the dome had flaked off, causing a slow chain reaction of destruction that unfolded over many years: No insulation, so the dome got very hot every time I grilled. Dome got hot, so handle eventually got brittle. Brittle handle eventually disintegrated, leaving a single piece of hot sheet metal as the grippable part. Hot metal couldn’t be touched by hand, so got used to using tongs to move and remove dome during use. Tongs are clumsy, and I am even moreso, and I eventually dropped hot metal dome onto concrete patio. Dropped hot metal dome warped, so that it didn’t fit on the rest of the grill. Admitted defeat. Wheeled the grill out to the curb with a FREE sign. Drove to neighborhood hardware store. Asked for recommendation for small charcoal grill. Knowledgeable staff pointed toward their best-selling grill – the old black basic half-sphere Weber grill that I just wheeled out to the curb. Bought grill. Put on patio. Returned to normalcy.

The only difference that I can see between the old and new grills is that the new one has whitewhall wheels on it. Otherwise, I appear to have bought the Technics 1200 of grills. May it, too, live forever.

Ongoing - Liz has become the master of all food preparation. To demonstrate, more food pictures.

January 31, Chicken Teriyaki

February 13, Skillet Chicken Parmesan

March 8, Vegetable Beef Soup

March 20, Potato Leek Soup

March 29, Manicotti with Meat Sauce

March 31, Penne Alla Vodka

April 4, Light Chicken & Dumplings

April 4, Light Strawberry Shortcake

April 6, Beef Brisket with Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes

April 6, Blueberry Streusel Muffin

April 7, Pork Tostada with Mexican Rice and Refried Beans

April 9, Chocolate Blackout Cake

April 14, Scrambled Eggs with Feta and Thyme

April 18, Tandoori Chicken with Raita and Cilantro Sauce

April 18, another picture of Tandoori Chicken

May 9, Beef, Pepper, and Snow Pea Stir-Fry

May 11, Braised Short Ribs

May 22, Scrambled Eggs with Basil and Feta

May 24, Spicy Penne with Sausage and Broccoli

June 8, Steak and Garlic Green Beans

June 14, Pan Seared Chicken Breast with Roasted Asparagus

June 17, Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Take a bow, Liz. I am the luckiest guy in the world.

Mid-July – Our state government has been shut down for the last two weeks in a stalemate over the budget. Basically, our Governor wants tax increases on the wealthy to plug a hole in the budget but is willing to make cuts that match the tax increases, while our legislature wants only cuts and adamantly refuses tax increases. I’m sure that most, if not all, 50 states had some kind of budget pressure this year, but only Minnesota shut down the entire state government because they couldn’t reach a compromise. The cliché says that a people will always get the leadership they deserve; this must be our own fault.

I don’t say that to be snarky. No, I firmly believe that we Minnesotans have permanently lost the ability to compromise. It’s how politics is supposed to work, but it no longer works in Minnesota.

It seemed like an obvious thing when I was a kid. A specific example from my childhood: I liked vanilla ice cream. I wasn’t a fan of chocolate ice cream, and I would have been perfectly happy if chocolate ice cream were banished from the earth. But I accepted that others in my household liked chocolate. So while my first choice would have been if mom bought a carton of vanilla ice cream, I accepted that mom bought the vanilla/chocolate/strawberry combination. I got my vanilla, others got their chocolate, and the third party candidate of strawberry sat in the freezer until ice crystals enveloped it and we threw it out. That was called compromise. Everybody got a little of what they wanted, at the expense of a having a stale carton of strawberry ice cream left in the freezer for months on end.

It’s called compromise. A little something for you, a little something for me, and we all move on.

Somehow, politics has devolved to a winner-take-all bloodfest, where no effort is made to compromise with the opposing viewpoint. We won the election, so you don’t exist anymore. And to make matters worse, the trend is away from the political center, with both left and right political stances becoming more and more extreme.

I don’t really see any way out of this. We made the mistake of electing people precisely because they promised not to compromise, and that’s exactly what they’re doing in office. It’s at the expense of the entire state, with over 20,000 state government employees currently out of work, a lowering of Minnesota’s credit rating (lowered by Fitch Ratings on July 7 from AAA to AA+), and countless hardships and inconveniences to people who need help the most.

And to make matters worse, it looks like inflexibility is being touted as a virtue all across the political spectrum on the national level, which is not helpful to anyone. There is no hope for nuanced discussions of any issues; any shades of gray are overridden in the black and white of the voting booth, where we’re expected to vote out of fear that the opposing party will destroy the country.

I’m not optimistic. I watch as one European country after another requires some kind of financial bailout (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, perhaps Italy…), and I’m certain that their financial mess will spread to the US in the next few years. Fixing their situations has been straightforward on paper: less money paid out, more money taken in. Very, very painful in practice, but extremely simple in principle.

It’s also apparent to me that our own political leaders could not possibly enact the kinds of austerity measures that the bailed out countries have undertaken. Both the left and the right have built their whole platforms around demonizing the opposing side, and have turned it into less money paid out VERSUS more money taken in. It’s hard to see how either one can back down, even though it looks like common sense to me.

So be prepared for political ugliness on a scale we Americans haven’t seen in our lifetimes. Our elected officials here in Minnesota have given you a glimpse of what’s to come.

On that note, count your blessings, give generously to those that are less fortunate than you, and enjoy the rest of summer. The political apocalypse may be imminent, but not while there’s fun stuff to do outside.

Stay cool!
Ron & Liz