I like to believe that I'm holding my own against the nasty winter that's got us by the collective throat. I'm probably fooling myself but I really think that, at worst, it's a split decision in what's shaping up to be a heavyweight death match. I do know that Old Man Winter and I were slugging it out toe to toe last weekend.
Winter was probably proud of the sucker punch he landed last Saturday. I'd been hacking away at the escape tunnel from the alley up to the back deck. We haven't had a clear shot at our garbage can since before Christmas what with the all the snow that's piled up back there. Miz Susan has kept a little patch of the deck cleared off for star-gazing and shaking out the kitchen rugs and whatever else she does out there when I'm not looking. But as far as being able to haul the trash out through the back yard, well...that just ain't been happening. We've been driving the garbage up the block and down the alley to get rid of it. I'm almost positive that the neighbors are starting to gossip about us taking on airs what with our treating our garbage like it was royalty.
Anyway, I'd made a half-assed start at working northbound from the alley over the past few weeks. I'd managed to hack out a trench maybe 20 feet long but the house still looked like it was miles away. I made some nice progress on Saturday and had cut the remaining distance in half. Satisfied with that little bit of work (being a firm believer in never finishing today what I can put off until tomorrow), I slung my two shovels over my shoulder and headed down the alley and back to the front of the house. I was going to play around in the street a little bit and try to shovel some of the slop up onto the boulevard. As I was shifting my hold on the shovels, the nice red plastic grain scoop that I'd bought at Seven Corners Hardware manged to work it's way loose, spin out of my control and somehow land a jab to my upper lip. I was spitting out blood in no time. I managed to subdue the shovels and went to work on the street. It was perfectly fitting that my lifeblood was dripping down into the slush that I was shoveling.
As this was going on, Jasper--the incredibly handsome and intelligent American Standard poodle across the street--made one of his occasional breaks for freedom from inside his house. Maybe he's really not all that intelligent or maybe he was having a bad day because he bought into my act of playing indifferent and he let me lasso him and take him home. Where I let Jasper's owner guilt me into heading off down the block where another of our neighbors was out chipping ice all by herself. Something about maybe we should all pitch in to help her since her husband was serving overseas. Not a bad idea though I seemed to be the only one who was offering any volunteer help that day. Maybe others had beat me to it because her sidewalk looked a hell of a lot clearer than mine.
My lip didn't get swollen up nearly as much as I'd hoped so I got robbed of any possibility of sympathy attention. On the other hand, I was well enough the next day to get out into the backyard and to finish the path to the deck. We can now take out our garbage without looking all snooty and we've got an extra escape route from the house in case of fire or bill collectors knocking at the front door.
Who knows? I may even try to run a path over to the compost barrel or the bird feeder. We've been feeling guilty about throwing our compost-eligible garbage away (even factoring in chauffeur service). And feeling guiltier about not keeping the bird feeder full. Never too late to start feeding the sparrows and occasional cardinals and chickadees.
Maybe they'll spread the word to some of the other birds and we'll be rewarded with a few more goldfinches and even a hummingbird or two in a few months. Spring is going to come again and, between me and winter, I'm going to make sure that I'm the last one standing. I don't care how many rounds this goes.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
off-target
Miz Susan and I make a thing out of Sunday mornings. Drink some coffee, eat a little breakfast, choke down our handfuls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, check out the Sunday paper. And sometimes the Thursday, Friday and Saturday papers if the pace of the week has gotten a little too frenzied for us.
There's not much joy for me in the Sunday paper between late-October and early-March. I've fallen away from following football and hockey and never was much for basketball in the first place so the sports section doesn't hold much allure. Think about it, a quick check of high school boys' swimming results (to remind me of just how bad I was, even 40 years ago) and three sentences on Joe Crede's free agent deal with the Rockies don't chew up more than three or four minutes. The Sunday obits page has gotten gigantic but that doesn't take long either. Once I've confirmed that I'm not featured among the recently departed, there isn't much left but to scan the news sections to confirm what terrible shape the world, country, state and neighborhood are in with an occasional rowser from Michelle Bachmann. After that, it gets down to arm-wrestling with Susan over the advertising sections.
We use the grocery ads to plan out our dinner menus for the week. I'm partial to the Cub ads but Susan, even if she won't always admit it but usually does, hates the place. She'll come up with almost any excuse as to why I shouldn't go there. Like, "Oh, it's OK hon. I was gonna stop at the coop, Trader Joe's, Kowalski's, Widmer's and Baker's Square after school tomorrow anyway." Right. She even thinks that Target qualifies as a full-fledged grocery store and yesterday somehow sweet-talked me into going there instead of Cub. I think that it was the turkey breast that Target was advertising at 79¢ a pound (half of Cub's price) that she used as Exhibit A. Made sense to me.
Our trip to Target last weekend was a disaster. I had this horrid grim feeling almost the whole time I was there. It was as if I knew that a bunch of the other shoppers were serial killers and that they were all feeling the itch again. Nobody actually threatened to kill either of us but I repeatedly got cut off and run into and forced to do long detours to bypass aisles that looked more like cart storage areas than retail spaces, all of this so many times that I started to get the creepy paranoid feeling. To top it off, somebody made off with our cart full of 45 minutes worth of middle-American consumerism and Miz Susan's favorite winter gloves which had probably originally been bought at Target. We were so thrown off by that disaster that we couldn't reconstruct what we needed (yeah, our list was in the stolen cart, too) and ended up forgetting half the stuff we'd come to buy.
Shrugging off that recent defeat, I headed for Target with my list in hand and my mouth watering at the thought of 79¢ a pound turkey breast in the crockpot. I'd also been given an auxiliary to-do list, most of which centered around service issues for the Chevy Tahoe at Holiday. Which was mostly a ploy to get the car washed. Who in their right mind washes a car when it's 8ยบ outside? But, what the hell, there are certain standards we need to make a pretence at maintaining and I love being inside the car when it's getting washed. I was deprived of so many things as a child.
Target pretty much overwhelms me whenever I go with a long list of must-haves. I've been reduced to tears of frustration and shame while looking fruitlessly for square cotton pads for makeup removal. This time I got most of what I needed without having to double back over the entire store more than four or five times. It was the two-pack of re-usable lunch totes that nearly did me in this trip. I asked like five different redshirts where they were and I actually got what turned out to be helpful advice but it took me about four passes through the bargain section back by the seasonals before I found the damn things. And when I got them home, I got chewed out for not buying them in patterns rather than in basic black and purple. Sigh.
Oh yeah, the turkey breast. They hadn't gotten their shipment in, something about their distributor being out. Distributor, schmischtributor. They own the distributor, for God's sake. I was told that the shipment was on a truck due for arrival later that night. Check back tomorrow. Which I did today from work. Still no turkey breast at 79¢ a pound. Sigh again. Walgreen's didn't have the special Anniversary Edition of Uno back in stock either, another of the hopeless grails that I've been assigned by this sadistic woman I live with.
You can probably guess where this is headed. After Miz Susan told me in no uncertain terms not to, I stopped tonight at Cub out in Brooklyn Park for their turkey breast. It was more expensive than Target's alleged turkey breast but at least it was in stock. And I wasn't about to miss out on hot turkey sandwiches out of the crockpot on Wednesday night.
There's not much joy for me in the Sunday paper between late-October and early-March. I've fallen away from following football and hockey and never was much for basketball in the first place so the sports section doesn't hold much allure. Think about it, a quick check of high school boys' swimming results (to remind me of just how bad I was, even 40 years ago) and three sentences on Joe Crede's free agent deal with the Rockies don't chew up more than three or four minutes. The Sunday obits page has gotten gigantic but that doesn't take long either. Once I've confirmed that I'm not featured among the recently departed, there isn't much left but to scan the news sections to confirm what terrible shape the world, country, state and neighborhood are in with an occasional rowser from Michelle Bachmann. After that, it gets down to arm-wrestling with Susan over the advertising sections.
We use the grocery ads to plan out our dinner menus for the week. I'm partial to the Cub ads but Susan, even if she won't always admit it but usually does, hates the place. She'll come up with almost any excuse as to why I shouldn't go there. Like, "Oh, it's OK hon. I was gonna stop at the coop, Trader Joe's, Kowalski's, Widmer's and Baker's Square after school tomorrow anyway." Right. She even thinks that Target qualifies as a full-fledged grocery store and yesterday somehow sweet-talked me into going there instead of Cub. I think that it was the turkey breast that Target was advertising at 79¢ a pound (half of Cub's price) that she used as Exhibit A. Made sense to me.
Our trip to Target last weekend was a disaster. I had this horrid grim feeling almost the whole time I was there. It was as if I knew that a bunch of the other shoppers were serial killers and that they were all feeling the itch again. Nobody actually threatened to kill either of us but I repeatedly got cut off and run into and forced to do long detours to bypass aisles that looked more like cart storage areas than retail spaces, all of this so many times that I started to get the creepy paranoid feeling. To top it off, somebody made off with our cart full of 45 minutes worth of middle-American consumerism and Miz Susan's favorite winter gloves which had probably originally been bought at Target. We were so thrown off by that disaster that we couldn't reconstruct what we needed (yeah, our list was in the stolen cart, too) and ended up forgetting half the stuff we'd come to buy.
Shrugging off that recent defeat, I headed for Target with my list in hand and my mouth watering at the thought of 79¢ a pound turkey breast in the crockpot. I'd also been given an auxiliary to-do list, most of which centered around service issues for the Chevy Tahoe at Holiday. Which was mostly a ploy to get the car washed. Who in their right mind washes a car when it's 8ยบ outside? But, what the hell, there are certain standards we need to make a pretence at maintaining and I love being inside the car when it's getting washed. I was deprived of so many things as a child.
Target pretty much overwhelms me whenever I go with a long list of must-haves. I've been reduced to tears of frustration and shame while looking fruitlessly for square cotton pads for makeup removal. This time I got most of what I needed without having to double back over the entire store more than four or five times. It was the two-pack of re-usable lunch totes that nearly did me in this trip. I asked like five different redshirts where they were and I actually got what turned out to be helpful advice but it took me about four passes through the bargain section back by the seasonals before I found the damn things. And when I got them home, I got chewed out for not buying them in patterns rather than in basic black and purple. Sigh.
Oh yeah, the turkey breast. They hadn't gotten their shipment in, something about their distributor being out. Distributor, schmischtributor. They own the distributor, for God's sake. I was told that the shipment was on a truck due for arrival later that night. Check back tomorrow. Which I did today from work. Still no turkey breast at 79¢ a pound. Sigh again. Walgreen's didn't have the special Anniversary Edition of Uno back in stock either, another of the hopeless grails that I've been assigned by this sadistic woman I live with.
You can probably guess where this is headed. After Miz Susan told me in no uncertain terms not to, I stopped tonight at Cub out in Brooklyn Park for their turkey breast. It was more expensive than Target's alleged turkey breast but at least it was in stock. And I wasn't about to miss out on hot turkey sandwiches out of the crockpot on Wednesday night.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
season's greetings!!!
Another sure sign of the change of seasons besides the Linwood Monroe charity auction is the arrival of Christmas and other holiday greetings cards. We had a great collection this year and I enjoyed almost all of them. We're fortunate to live in a house that's hosted a number of homeowners over a relatively short timespan so we get not only the cards addressed to us but those intended for people several notches down the title opinion from us. Part of me wants to return the cards from people we don't know and tell them that their erstwhile friends have become even more erst. But Miz Susan won't let me and maybe that's for the best.
One of the departed who still gets cards here (as well as investment advice) is apparently alive and well to the point of having run for a Ramsey County office this past election season. A few of his lawn signs popped up in the front yards of some of the neighbors so he must have been an OK guy. I didn't vote for him. We tend to stick to straight party line voting and this guy didn't show up on my sample ballot. Our candidate actually won which seems like a rarity some years. That was enough to bind the wounds of not getting to live in the local version of the George-Washington-slept-here house.
A couple of years ago, we opened a card addressed to some long-gone tenant and discovered a Christmas letter which caught Miz Susan's fancy. It was a Christmas ABC letter and the damn thing ate at her for a couple of years before she finally gave up on trying to shame me into concocting one. She cranked one out during the uneventful hours of her jury duty stint. She did a considerably better than average job, better than I ever could have. She's a sucker for kids' illustrated ABC books so maybe there was some creative longing that finally found an outlet. Except for filling in the letter "F" which she'd forgotten (and what was that about?), I could only come up with a few minor tweaks and edits to make it production ready. We sent it out tucked in some 30 year old holiday cards that I'd probably bought home from the Hamline Bookstore in about 1988. No one's complained yet and we haven't had the postal inspectors at our door telling us to quit wasting the mail carriers' time with junk like that so I'm going to call it a success. If any of you missed out on this thing just let us know and we'll get one headed your way.
I don't usually feel sorry for our mail carrier. He sometimes gets the mail delivered to us before dark and he liked our cat Miles but other than that we're not all that crazy about him. We had a great carrier when we moved in but he didn't last the year before the geniuses downtown pulled him off his long-time route and turned our block over to a cast of characters which can only be described as a mixed bag. The nearest to regular guy hates to take advantage of the opportunity available to him for wholesome outdoor exercise and will tromp across our front and through Miz Susan's gardens shamelessly. About the only good thing to come from all the snow this winter is that it's piled so high next to our walk that he can't trailblaze his own shortcut and is forced to take the long way around to the next door neigbors.
About the most bizarre card we got this year was the one that showed up (after Santa's big day) from Linda and Laird Hanson of Hamline royalty fame. This card always sends Miz Susan into a seethe for a couple of hours and even I'm perplexed as to how I've stayed on that mailing list. I hate to think it, but maybe Linda doesn't realize that I still get the card or even remember who I am (or was). This year's version was particularly smarmy with L and L surrounded by a group of purported Hamline students who might have come straight from the Multicultural Modeling Agency. Mainly, I wonder why it was late in arriving. Probably the stress of the all-by-her-lonesome keeping Hamline propped up in the face of all the nay-sayers prevented her from getting to her cards as soon as she'd have liked. Hey, it's nice to still be counted among the inner circle. And it fills the void of not getting a card from the President out at North hennepin.
One of the departed who still gets cards here (as well as investment advice) is apparently alive and well to the point of having run for a Ramsey County office this past election season. A few of his lawn signs popped up in the front yards of some of the neighbors so he must have been an OK guy. I didn't vote for him. We tend to stick to straight party line voting and this guy didn't show up on my sample ballot. Our candidate actually won which seems like a rarity some years. That was enough to bind the wounds of not getting to live in the local version of the George-Washington-slept-here house.
A couple of years ago, we opened a card addressed to some long-gone tenant and discovered a Christmas letter which caught Miz Susan's fancy. It was a Christmas ABC letter and the damn thing ate at her for a couple of years before she finally gave up on trying to shame me into concocting one. She cranked one out during the uneventful hours of her jury duty stint. She did a considerably better than average job, better than I ever could have. She's a sucker for kids' illustrated ABC books so maybe there was some creative longing that finally found an outlet. Except for filling in the letter "F" which she'd forgotten (and what was that about?), I could only come up with a few minor tweaks and edits to make it production ready. We sent it out tucked in some 30 year old holiday cards that I'd probably bought home from the Hamline Bookstore in about 1988. No one's complained yet and we haven't had the postal inspectors at our door telling us to quit wasting the mail carriers' time with junk like that so I'm going to call it a success. If any of you missed out on this thing just let us know and we'll get one headed your way.
I don't usually feel sorry for our mail carrier. He sometimes gets the mail delivered to us before dark and he liked our cat Miles but other than that we're not all that crazy about him. We had a great carrier when we moved in but he didn't last the year before the geniuses downtown pulled him off his long-time route and turned our block over to a cast of characters which can only be described as a mixed bag. The nearest to regular guy hates to take advantage of the opportunity available to him for wholesome outdoor exercise and will tromp across our front and through Miz Susan's gardens shamelessly. About the only good thing to come from all the snow this winter is that it's piled so high next to our walk that he can't trailblaze his own shortcut and is forced to take the long way around to the next door neigbors.
About the most bizarre card we got this year was the one that showed up (after Santa's big day) from Linda and Laird Hanson of Hamline royalty fame. This card always sends Miz Susan into a seethe for a couple of hours and even I'm perplexed as to how I've stayed on that mailing list. I hate to think it, but maybe Linda doesn't realize that I still get the card or even remember who I am (or was). This year's version was particularly smarmy with L and L surrounded by a group of purported Hamline students who might have come straight from the Multicultural Modeling Agency. Mainly, I wonder why it was late in arriving. Probably the stress of the all-by-her-lonesome keeping Hamline propped up in the face of all the nay-sayers prevented her from getting to her cards as soon as she'd have liked. Hey, it's nice to still be counted among the inner circle. And it fills the void of not getting a card from the President out at North hennepin.
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