cleaning up the neighborhood. one twelve-pack at a time.

Last Saturday, it seemed like the right thing to do.  We needed to get the big car in for service (the big car being the 14 mpg Tahoe which Miz Susan now refers to as "my car"; as in hers).  It seemed like a nice Saturday morning to drive the big car over to the service station and then hoof it home.  What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?  Acting locally and all that good stuff.  Not much but it was instructive.

We have a new service station, Grand Wheeler at the corner of Grand and Wheeler.  As opposed to Grand Wheeler II down the street at the corner of Grand and Hamline.  And as definitely opposed to Novick's Super Service (R.I.P.), the garage of which still sits, now unoccupied, at the corner of Snelling and Saratoga.  Harvey Novick locked up the doors on his garage for the last time this past summer.  It was an emotional time for Harv and his employee Tony (not that Tony would ever let on) and the dozens of people who stopped by to pay their respects at the farewell party back in  June.  I had Harvey on the verge of tears as I told him how much he'd meant to me and all the extended family and what a true gentleman he was.

There was no question that we felt like we'd been tossed into a sort of automotive void.  Neither Miz Susan nor I had ever learned the first thing about cars other than where to stick the key in to start the car and where to put the business end of the hose on a gas pump to ensure that the car would go somewhere once we've started it.  I guess neither one of has much of a mechanical turn of mind.  But Harvey had recommended Grand Wheeler as a substitute for his own shop and we'd been there once or twice late in the summer.  So, off to Grand Wheeler last Saturday morning before Miz Susan had dragged her a.., well, you know what I mean...out of bed.  I do have to give her credit for remembering that we needed to get the car in, something that had slipped off of my radar completely.

The drive down to the shop was uneventful and comfortable.  I had no cause for concern.  I was driving a car which had started, had gas in the tank and had a working heater. I should have been paying closer attention to the advantages of a working heater on a morning when the outdoor temperature was 8°.  Above zero but still nippy.

I ddn't really start paying attention to those 8 degrees until I started the walk home.  Into a light breeze from somewhere well north of the county line.  Brrrrrrr.  I was dressed plenty warm enough until I started playing good citizen and picking up empty beer bottles and cans.  I imagined that these had been left by various Macalester and St. Thomas partiers with maybe a Ramsey Jr. High 7th grader chipping in.  The empty beer bottles and cans which I was picking up (especially the two bottles) had had the evening and the early morning hours to get nicely chilled, probably down to about 8°.  That chill quickly made it through the fleece linings of my cheap Menard's gloves and turned my hands into frozen claws perfectly formed to clutch beer bottles by the necks.  I started crushing the cans and sticking those into my pockets and by the time I'd gotten home my little collection had grown to 9 dead soldiers.  There were the 2 beer bottles which claimed to have previously contained two different Belgian ales, 2 Natural Ice tallboy cans, 2 Hamm's cans and 3 assorted pop cans.  The Natural Ice and Hamm's cans I found lying near each other.  What an odd pair those two drinkers/litterers must have been.

I laid my booty out on the front porch though Miz Susan must not have been impressed.  She later scooped them up and tossed them into a bag of domestically produced empties for eventual recycling pick up.  She not only doesn't have a mechanical turn of mind, she doesn't have much respect for the fruits of good citizenship.

The two of us ran around for a bit that afternoon.  Mindless and aimless middle class consumerism, most likely.  And apparently totally forgettable since I can't remember a single thing we did or bought or place we stopped in.  I've become such a tool.

I do remember my haul of empties on my walk back down Grand Avenue to get the car and pay for the two new tires.  Which, incidentally, I'm now trying to pass off as Miz Susan's major Christmas present for the year.  Pathetic, I know, but it beats the lemon zester I've threatened her with.  Anyway, I found another Natural Ice tallboy can (I'd seen it earlier but couldn't juggle one more empty along with the nine I'd already been carrying on the first leg of my little walk.  No complementing Hamm's can, though; maybe those two drinkers just weren't meant to be a thing.), a half empty Odell's IPA bottle and, finally and for a little touch of class, a Miller Light can.  I risked an open bottle citation by dumping them onto the floor of the back seat and brought them home.  Pretty good work for a Saturday.  New tires, a couple of walks and a twelver's worth of empty cans and bottles headed for the recyclers rather than cluttering up the landscape.

So what was instructive about all this?  The people who left those cans and bottles laying on the sidewalks and in peoples' gardens weren't any more responsible than I'd been 45 years ago when I was starting in on my drinking career.  I'd like to think that I'm a smidge more responsible now but I'm having a hard time understanding why it's so hard for other people to do a little better.  At work, I have to grit my teeth regularly as I pull cans and bottles and paper and plastic bags out of trash cans where that stuff should never have been dumped in the first place.  It's going on everywhere.  What the hell?

a new discovery

I'm consistently amazed by how much there is that I don't know.  Not only don't know but don't have even a glimmer of the width and breadth and depth of things I don't know even the least little thing about.  Like, for example, Ine Hoem.

One of my favorite-ever recordings is an early-60's collaboration between vocalist Nancy Wilson and alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's band, titled (originally enough) Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley.  Cannonball (nee Julian) and his brother Nat left Tampa and headed north to front one of the best of the hard bop bands of the late-50's and early 60's and even beyond that.  I want to say that I remember current Adderley singles coming out of the Mac Grill's juke box in the basement of the old Student Union when I was manning the sandwich board down there and that was in the early-70's.  But I date myself.

Cannonball's most visible gig was probably as a member of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue sextet and he'll live on forever thanks to that session.  But he cut a slew of records under his own name that are still plenty deserving of repeated listenings, not the least of which is the Nancy Wilson date.  Nancy Wilson has also had a long career in music from all the way back to the early-50's.  She tended to stay more in the camp of mainstream pop but when she ventured into jazz territory, she tore it up.

Which takes me back to the NW/CA recording.  There are 12 cuts on the record and the last five are by the band alone without Ms Wilson.  It's solid music, particularly the last cut, Unit 7 from the pen of bassist Sam Jones (I did not know that until I started writing this), which went on to become one of the Adderleys' standards.

But the first seven selections lift this into the stratosphere.  They smolder, they shout, they belong right up there with the great vocal and instrumental partnerships in jazz.  There's only one snoozer in the seven and the other six are brilliant.  I'll  leave it to you to figure out which is the yawn but I'll say that even in the sanitized confines of South Pacific, it's fluff.

I'm enough of a geek (and willing to admit it) that I'll retreat to YouTube as a shortcut to favorite music, especially late at night when Miz Susan has fallen into troubled sleep, no doubt haunted by dreams of 30 10-year old scholars who led her to the brink of exhaustion in the first place.  YouTube doesn't have it all but it does have a helluvalot and it leads almost seamlessly down lots of unknown paths.  Like the one which led to Ine Hoem (pron: I have no idea).  I can't understand a word of her Norwegian (I was born closer to Owatonna than to Oslo) but her English lyrics on Nancy Wilson songs are enough to bridge any language gaps.  I'm considering taking up Norwegian for a better read on her.

I stumbled across Ine Hoem while checking out Nancy Wilson videos, including a bunch from NW/CA.  Not only did the paths lead off to lesser known Wilson stuff but one led to a series of Nancy Wilson tributes by Norwegian vocalist Hoem and a band of like-minded jazzers.  Which included a pianist who could have been an avatar of a high school aged Philip Seymour Hoffman and a smartly played tenor sax in the hands of Hanna Paulsberg (whom I need to learn more about).  But the star of this show was Ine Hoem who did a pretty fair job of approaching the musical and emotional heights established by Ms Wilson 50+ years ago.  She smoldered and she shouted and she knocked me off my feet.  I think she deserves credit(?) for a ragged night of sleep when I couldn't get her version and the lyrics of  Never Will I Marry out of my little pea brain.  I'm obsessed in a way that I haven't been since I went off on my hunts for Dale Barlow and Tubby Hayes records.  Don't ask.  Just check out Ine Hoem on YouTube.  I think it will be time well-spent.  I'll be back there for sure.

There are only two members of the recording cast of 1961 still alive: Nancy Wilson and drummer Louis Hayes.  Hayes has recorded until at least recently though I don't know if Wilson is still active on the music scene.  I owe her a continued allegiance but one of the great things about music is that there are always new sounds to absorb.  I'll still go back to Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley but I'll also be spending time tracking down more of Ine Hoem.  Anyone have a Norwegian-English dictionary I can borrow?

ted cruz, statesman? puh-leeze.

I'm gonna come right out and say it.  Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a puke.  I'm not usually this disrespectful toward Republican luminaries (OK, OK.  Maybe I am.) but this little worm deserves some special singling out for upping the ante in in lying, GOP smarm.  He makes John Boehner look like a fucking diplomat.

Interestingly enough, he's also a walking, talking PSA for passing federal anti-bullying legislation.  Which, of course, Ted's wing of the Republican party vehemently opposes since, to their feeble little minds, there's nothing more clean-cut, good old American fun than picking on the vulnerable.  But I can't help but wonder if Ted would have made the same sketchy choices if he hadn't been scarred so by cruel teenage hazing.

Ted looks for all the world like a high school sophomore debate team nerd who never grew out of it.  He is full to overflowing of that age's arrogance and unbreakable confidence that he knows more than anyone in the room, the one he's currently in or any other.

I can pretty easily imagine how it went for pimply-faced little Teddy.  Picture it with me as he got repeatedly athletic-taped to locker room benches or was hip checked into the hallway lockers to send his decks of 3x5 index cards flying halfway back to his homeroom or had his lunch tray tipped over into his lap.  After his cookie had been stolen, of course.

Most of those kids grow out of their early-teen social awkwardness and ostracization.  They go off to good colleges where they excel in math or science or economics to points that they're accepted into top tier grad school programs which ensure their entries into jobs that grads of those programs get.  Somehow though, Ted missed that memo.  Instead of taking the hints of getting repeatedly taped to locker room benches or having his file cards scattered all over the 2nd floor hallways of his high school, he dug in his heels and decided that, by God, he was going to show those mean seniors a thing or two.

He never grew out of all that shit which made him so goddamned unpopular back in high school.  Not him.  He now gives every appearance of having groomed and cultivated and elevated that unsavory skill set to the point where nobody does it better.  As I wrote, he makes Boehner look angelic by comparison and, even if the Senate's minority leader hadn't prematurely entered his dotage, Mitch McConnell wouldn't stand a chance against the junior senator from Texas.  I even read somewhere that the Republicans are rolling Paul Ryan out of semi-seclusion to try to calm the waters which Ted has whipped into a lather of political whitecaps.  Now there's a comforting prospect.

Ted has had some luck on his side, too.  He's parlayed geography (Texas.  Rick Perry's still the guv down there, right?) and a timeline (which finds the country more fragmented than at any time since Fort Sumter came under fire) into a disgusting celebrity.  He's jumped all over a very strange time and place and ridden it to the head of the column made up of people who actually put value on his essentially valueless shtick.  And I have a feeling that Ted sees himself on a mission from God.

Which was all well and good for Jake and Elwood Blues to be spouting in an SNL spinoff back in the '70s.  But Ted Cruz has nowhere near as smart a supporting cast as Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway.  Maybe I'll wake up some Sunday morning and not have to see this little cockroach's smirking face leering out at me from the TV nor hear his pathetic, empty soundbites.  Pretty please??

 

summer about over? or is the jury still out?

My poorly-chosen profession has led me to say that summer's over on Memorial Day.  I used to say that it was over on the 4th of July but the always increasing pace of activity in a college bookstore doesn't seem to give me even that much of a break anymore.  Or, maybe it's my always increasing stupidity that makes the pace seem so much more frantic.  I thought for awhile that it was an international conspiracy against me but, when I bring that theory up in casual conversation, people's eyes glaze over so quickly that I've kind of let that one slide.

There's strong evidence that we've moved into the fall season.  We started our fall semester at my beloved North Hennepin Community College.  Tons of the books we spent the past three months hauling into the store and piling up on the shelves have now found their way back out the front door in the hands of eager young scholars, most of those presumably having passed by our cash registers.  We could argue about the wisdom of starting any fall semester before Labor Day but most everybody's doing it so there doesn't seem to be any going back on the concept.

And Miz Susan's summer break seems to be over.  At any rate, she's gone back to getting her brains beat out at her beloved Linwood/Monroe Arts Plus Upper Campus.  Again, we could argue over why the Upper Campus is actually down the hill from the Lower Campus but the geniuses who work at 360 Colborne (which is even farther down the hill than the Upper Campus) have got that one set in stone.

The State Fair definitely seems to be over.  That's usually a pretty good sign that summer is, too.  Snelling Avenue traffic levels have returned to their usual merely stupid instead of four to six lanes' worth of parking lot.  Plus, the obnoxiously inane behavior of local TV station weather reporters has subsided now that these fools are again chained up in their studios where they belong.

Miz Susan and I managed to sneak in a trip to the Fair on the Sunday before Labor Day.  We even ran into a handful of people we knew which turns out not to have been all that big a surprise.  We were among 165,000-plus saps who turned out for Day 11 of the Great Minnesota Get-Together and Cheese Curds Massacre.  Statistically, it would have been nearly impossible not to have known a few other people out there.  For the record, I didn't get to eat nearly as much food that's bad for me as I'd hoped I would.  I guess that's what next year is for.

And then (a few days after I started this piece), low temps overnight were down into the upper 40s.  And into the lower 40s up Grand Forks and Roseau way.  And, of course, near freezing for International Falls.  Show offs.

The sign of the end of summer which I've liked the most (other than surviving 8,000 community college students looking for my head on a pole because of textbook prices) was seeing Orion for the first time since late last winter.  He was off in the southeast at 5:15 this morning, just starting his march up and across the sky.  Come midwinter, he'll tower over the night sky but, for now, he's mine alone in the wee small hours.

The sign of winter's approach I like the least is the idiot on the bike I saw today.  He was practicing for his stupid winter bicycling behavior by riding with his right hand on the handle bars, texting madly with his left hand and cutting a trail of delicate sine waves eastward up Marshall.  He made the right-hand turn onto Fairview, straying no more than 10-12" from the curb as he wobbled around the corner.  I'll admit that I advised him that he was a stupid fuck as I went past him toward Selby.  He'll do just fine after the streets ice over and darkness falls at 3:45.  If it's not snowing, in which case dusk will come at about 2.

And now in mid-October (I started writing this weeks ago), temperatures are back down into the low-50s in the morning but we've had a string of 80+ and 70+ temps over the past couple of weeks.  Miz Susan has imsisted that I keep cutting the lawn on a weekly basis when all I really want to do is lay around and channel surf hoping to find a postseason baseball game to ward off the great barren winter of football/hockey/basketball.  So far, so good.

I know that the ice and snow and my snow emergency email blasts are waiting in the wings.  I'd be fooling myself to think otherwise.  But there's still a ray of hope.  In our neighborhood, summer's not really over until the Dairy Queen on Snelling closes down shortly before Thanksgiving to make way for the Christmas tree lot.  And from that point, it's only four months til DQ opens up again in time to catch the drunks staggering out of O'Gara's on St. Paddy's Day.

I'm predicting a short winter.

further local findings confirm recent research conclusions

Earlier this year, a purportedly scholarly journal (how in hell would I know?) lit up a little buzz in the cat-people community after it published research findings of a recent study.  The researchers' work showed that domestic and stray/feral cats are responsible for killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 billion birds in the U.S. each year.  And something like 15 billion small mammals over the same stretch.  I don't think that this is quite what the not-so ancient Egyptians had in mind when they opened up the doors of their pyramids to let Fluffy in out of the desert cold all those years ago.

The study (which I, of course, haven't read) speaks to methodologies and numbers that I probably wouldn't even begin to understand.  But, I do wonder if those researchers somehow managed to forget to include our backyard in their sampling (as well as other residential properties within, say, a 150 foot radius). And if they did forget, then maybe they came up with some numbers which are way too low.  Our cats are over the top when it comes to this sort of a feline pastime.

I think that our cats, particularly Gray (or is it Grey?), who is slim and long and lithe and athletic, account for a few birds.  We feed the birds (sporadically) and I'll admit that we might be luring a few of them to untimely deaths.  We'll catch our girls eying the birds with interest every so often and Susan still gets stirred up when she remembers Gray and the goldfinch. 

The real carnage, though, seems to be on the small mammal populations in the neighborhood.  These two cats are hell on rodents.  They've dragged home chipmunks, a squirrel (they must have double-teamed that one) and moles in abundance. I think that it's Gray who rounds up most of the moles and leaves them strewn around the yard.  There was a particularly touching vignette out there a couple of weeks ago: one dead adult mole was stretched out under the tree while two juveniles lay at rest about 15 feet away, back by the garage.  I imagine the adult making a stand while the little ones made a break for it.  All for naught.

But, what really gets dragged home in numbers is rabbits. These two cats of ours are actual holy hell on rabbits.

Not so much Gray, maybe.  But Olive (so-named due to the similarity of her body shape to that of a black olive?), in this age of specialization, has specialized on rabbits.  Young rabbits, especially. Baby rabbits, even.  I described Gray earlier but Olive looks nothing like her sister.  In fact, they're so much unalike that I think we got sold a bill of goods when we were told we were adopting siblings from the same litter.

Gray probably tips the scale at  four or five pounds if she's just eaten.  On the other hand, Olive is large and round and, if she doesn't keep an eye on her figure, she's likely headed for 18-pound territory as a sedentary grownup.  If she makes it to 18 without being stepped on because she refuses to get out from underfoot. Where Gray is quick and agile, Olive is slow and hulking.  Where Gray can leap cat-scale buildings in single bounds, Olive is well aware of her vertical jump limitations and gives long consideration before trying even two and a half feet to an open window sill.

But this girl is a bona fide hellion when it comes to finding and dispatching baby rabbits.  She showed some early promise in this last year but she's blossomed this summer.  I think her count is approaching 10 and that only covers the ones I've found and buried along the borders or the backyard.  Stephen King's got nothin' on us.  Her tally likely soars when she manages to elude capture to stay out all night but will probably never be known.  I think she eats up some of the evidence out of sheer boredom.  I say boredom cuz it ain't hunger.  One look at her dispels any thought that she's missed any meals over the past few months.

Her favorite hunting ground is the backyard two doors west down Laurel.  There's a tool shed in that back yard which is set up on some dimension lumber footings and the subbasement  has been appropriated by local rabbits as a convenient bunny hutch and hookup motel.  But whoever moved in there first didn't do any background checks or they'd have learned about the undesirable neighbor two doors east up Laurel.  I've caught Olive leisurely stretched out near the main entrance to her local bunny smorgasbord, just waiting to snap up some of the passing traffic. The homeowner up the street recently confirmed, by actual sighting, my picture of Olive muscling her way past whatever security is posted at the door and coming back out after choosing her latest pal for a playdate.

Olive usually drags the poor saps back to our place to show them off or to try to sneak them into the house.  I've been good about prying the casualties out of her clutches before she can get in but I was bound to miss one sooner or later.  That sooner or later came the other night when Miz Susan went out onto the back deck after dusk to do whatever it is she does out on the back deck after dusk (don't tell her mother, as if her mother doesn't already suspect).  She claims she went out to turn off the water,  OK, fine.

While she was "turning off the water", Olive made her move.  She slipped unseen onto the house with a mouthful of still-warm baby bunny and dashed all the way up to the third floor to show it off to me.  I was doing whatever it is up do up on the third floor (usually folding t-shirts) when Olive and friend made their appearance.  I gently chided her for this breach of house etiquette in a calm and measured tone using words something along the lines of, "What in the good-god-peewallin-fuck made you think that it was a good idea to bring that goddamn thing up here for?".  That stopped her in her tracks and she dropped the still warm, though cooling, baby bunny on the floor and lay down to await further developments.

She may have been willing to await further developments but I had other problems.  Namely Gray, who had been sprawled out on the bed disrupting the t-shirt folding process to the best of her ability short of getting thrown off onto the floor.  Gray was intrigued.  This was something new and, by God, if there were going to be further developments, then she was going to be a part of them.  Nice try.

I scooped up both cats and shooed them down the steps and then hustled down to the kitchen for a plastic bag and a paper towel.  Stopping only to commend Susan, still out on the back deck, for having successfully gotten Olive into the house at this late hour but had she really wanted to let Olive bring a friend in for a sleepover with no prior permission, I headed back upstairs with plastic bag and paper towel in hand.  The thought crossed my mind that maybe the baby bunny hadn't really been all dead but that maybe it had been just mostly dead or playing dead and that it had crawled off into a nice cozy corner to recuperate.

But no,  there it still was in a little still warm though cooling baby bunny heap on the floor to be scooped up with the paper towel and dumped into the plastic bag and get left at the foot of the steps of the back deck to be unceremoniously dumped in the trash with the old kitty litter the next day.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.  It took Miz Susan the better part of a day to stop with her "yucks" and "i-i-ishes" and "grosses".

Cat videos are all the rage on YouTube these days.  Katie, one of Liz's and Alison's friends from way back, rode a cat video film festival to help launch her presence on the local visual arts scene.  We've come a long way from Morris's plugs for 9 Lives.  I wasn't able to get video footage of this recent little drama but I doubt that, even if I had, it would have been as well received as Grumpy Cat or images of cats falling off of the backs of couches while chasing laser pointer beams on the wall.  We love our cats dearly.  They've brought tons of pleasure into our previously barren and meaningless lives.  And Miz Susan and I like to tell each other that they love us, too.  They've just got some strange ideas of how to show it sometimes.

starting to feel like we own the place

We're two days out from my latest round trip to Regions Hospital.  This last visit came this past Wednesday when Miz Susan and I put in full days of work, arriving at 7 AM and getting thrown out at about 3 in the afternoon.  I'm starting to wonder how many more punches on our card in the ramp we need to deserve our own rock star parking spot.  I guess that we really don't want to know.

The adventure started about 5 weeks ago.  I received calls from the Heart Center to tell me that the remote monitor which watches over me while I sleep had picked up distress calls from my pacemaker which indicated abnormal rhythms.  What else is new?  That seems to be about all I have.

I learned during a quick trip down there that I was experiencing atrial flutter and that I was in need of an atreal flutter ablation.  Who was I to argue?  It turns out that my ticker was churning out rapid and weak compressions in its upper chamber and that that this was something to be avoided.  And that the crack staff at the Heart Center had just the procedure for me.  An atreal flutter ablation.

There were a few preliminary steps which I needed to take before the real fun could begin.  One was to dispense with taking my baby aspirin in the morning and instead start taking little red martial-arts-throwing- star-shaped tablets of something called Xarelto.  They loaded me up with nearly a month's worth of free samples and sent me home with orders to come back on July 10th and to get a pre-op physical scheduled.  One of the attending physicians neatly ducked my question about the cost of a refill of Xarelto when the free ones ran out.  Smart guy.  The refill set me back $175 when it came time to do that.  And that was discounted on the Walgreen's prescription plan for the overmedicated and under-insured.  You may have seen Xarelto's ads on national TV.

I hate getting physicals.  Pre-op, annual, army induction (as if I'd know): you name it, I hate it.  I take terrible care of myself.  I don't test my blood sugars regularly.  OK, I don't test my blood sugars at all.  I can't lose the weight that my doctor tells me to lose, not to save my life.  Literally.  I eat and drink all manner of things which provide instant gratification but which are irreparably bad me.  I'm wracked with guilt before I go into a physical and I'm wracked with guilt during a physical as I lie to Dr. Mahmoud about how I'll try to do better.  These are not good experiences for me.

Dr. Mahmoud, my family practitioner, is an adorable Pakistani who undoubtedly sees through my lies every time I trot them out.  She probably rolls her eyes and takes a deep breath before coming into the examining room to see me and she probably leans back against the door, rolls her eyes and breathes a deep sigh of relief after she's left the examining room.  I don't wish her any harm; I'm just a bad patient.

I got off lucky this time.  My blood pressure decided to come down out of the stratosphere and I've unexpectedly and unaccountably lost some weight.  I called this minor weight loss to her attention and said that I was disappointed that she hadn't congratulated me on it.  She responded by saying, "David, I think you're doing very well."  While looking forward to that deep sigh of relief she was just waiting to release.

I'd scheduled the pre-op physical just a day before the ablation procedure so I didn't have a whole lot of time to rest on my laurels.  Really, what would have been the point in getting that scheduled any earlier?  My only regret is that I had to suffer through two straight mornings of not having eaten anything since dinners the nights before.

At any rate, Wednesday morning came way too early, especially for Miz Susan who is not used to being up at 5:30 in the AM.  We managed to get out of the house only two minutes behind schedule and were actually walking into the hospital at 5 minutes before 7.  I absolutely love I-94 eastbound for getting us down to Regions hospital in a hurry.

We checked me in and I was whisked away to my prep room, stat (yeah, I've seen ER).  Where I was visited by half the staff of the hospital for various lectures, pokings, monitorings, forms-signings and donning of hospital attire.  We won't go into that any further.  A bright spot of that stop on the tour of the hospital was the appearance of Alison's and Liz's friend and erstwhile coworker and roommate Andrea.  She cheerfully informed us that she was working the recovery end of the operating room and that she might be my nurse if I survived my time on the table.  I've heard since that she was impressed by my imaginative use of various profanities but she must have been thinking of somebody else.

I remember Miz Susan being dragged away from me and then going for a long and winding ride on my gurney to the operating room.  I remember that it was cold in there and that they offered to turn up the heat if I wanted them to.  I don't think they were serious.  I remember that all the nurses and techs were making jokes, mostly at my expense.  And I remember somebody telling me that they were going to start giving me some medicine to help me relax.  Fade to black.

When I came to, my right arm was aching and throbbing.  This had nothing to do with the procedure (which consisted of threading a line up a vein from the groin to the heart, determining the location of the nerve which was causing the flutter, and then zapping it dead with a laser or an electrical charge or some appropriately harsh words), my right arm always aches and throbs when I've been sleeping. An old softball injury, perhaps.

The damn arm hurt like hell and I started squirming to get it into a more comfortable position.  This must have been one of the things that I had been lectured not to do because several voices at once told me to hold the f--- still.  When I complained that my arm hurt, they cranked up the relaxation medicine and put me under again.

Sooner or later, I was transferred from the operating table back to my gurney and from there to the recovery room.  Where we found out that Andrea was going to be my nurse and that her coworker who covered for her during lunch was an old friend whom I hadn't seen for 8-10 years.  Alison's former supervisor came and introduced herself to Susan and told her how much Alison was missed.  We ran into quite a few people who spoke fondly of Alison.  We felt like we owned the place.

All good things, including this one, do have to end and we got discharged with a minimum of formalities.  We were home for naps by 3:30.  We still had to pay 8 bucks to get out of the parking ramp.  I'm torn between staying healthy and getting that frequent visitor rock star parking spot.

I pictured this procedure as pretty garden variety medicine by today's standards though it remains a complete mystery to Susan and me.  I asked the nurses in the OR about this and, in between jokes at my expense,  they said they were doing five ablations on that Wednesday alone and that our surgeon performs several hundred a year.  This was a time when, even if we didn't understand the magic that was being performed, we needed to put our faith in the expertise of the experts and go all in.  It worked out well that we did.  I'm happy to be here to tell the tale.

father's day...check.

I'm happy to have survived another Father's Day relatively unscathed.  Not only were Miz Susan and I joined on the back deck by four of our children (the fifth flies in tonite) but we also hosted Tomas's mother Pia, who'd jetted in recently from Argentina.  That made for interesting conversations with a constant hum of translation in the background.  Liz and Kate were sort of able to follow along with Liz looking for hints of French in Pia's Spanish and Kate listening for what little Italian she hasn't already forgotten since December.  But Miz Susan and I could only keep looking helplessly to Tomas and Alison for help as to what Pia was saying and vice-versa for her.  We did OK even with a nasty rain squall chasing us inside until the dessert course.

I was generally left alone to do my usual grilling and table clearing and dish washer loading.  But I was called on to hold myself up to public self-ridicule for the entertainment of my daughters.  Who does it better?  They hadn't heard the story of another of my recent brushes with my own stupidity (or worse).  For added effect, I blew the punch line.  The word's out now, I might as well let the whole world in on it.  The story goes like this.

A month or so back when the PowerBall jackpot was approaching the levels of some smaller Minnesota counties' annual budgets, I hit a $4 winner on a ticket.  When this happens, I don't do the smart thing and look for investment opportunities in up-and-coming penny stocks.  Not me.  I take the winning ticket back to SuperAmerica and roll it over into more tickets.  To compound that dumbness, I usually buy a couple more besides.

So, there was this $4 winner and I asked Miz Susan if I had time to walk up to SA to secure our fortune in the next drawing.  Sure, no problem.  So I headed up the street for SA.  But, between our house and SA, lies Cheapo Records and Discs.  Never one to pass up a chance to throw good money after bad, I stopped in and browsed Cheapo. To my credit (about the only thing in this story to my credit) I didn't buy anything.

I was ready to brave the traffic on Snelling when I realized that I didn't bring the ticket with me.  Pretty sure that they wouldn't take my word for it at SA,  I turned around and headed for home.  Sigh.  Susan's seen this stuff from me before so she jumped on the chance to suggest that this would be the perfect time for me to put some gas in her car.  Given the moral low ground that I was occupying, how could I argue?  Out the front door and into the Tahoe for the 2-block drive to Super America.  It gets better.

I gassed the Tahoe up with the usual 10  gallons (I just know that gas is going to go down to $1.99 again and soon) and went into the store to do my PowerBall business.  I reminded the cashier that it was her who had sold me the winner a couple of days ago.  She seemed impressed.  I took my tickets, walked out the door, breeezed right past my car and walked home.

Where Miz Susan and I proceeded to have dinner.  I can't remember what it was but I can guarantee you that it wasn't anything that's been linked to better brain function.  We cleaned up and started to get ready for the trek up to bed.  One of my new pre-bedtime rituals has become a last check to make sure that both cars are locked.  This security consciousness is a fairly new routine for me and comes in the wake of our Toyota getting prowled a few weeks earlier.  I can't for the life of me figue out what else got stolen other than the 47¢ in loose change.  Hey, I wasn't the only sap to get hit that night.

But imagine my surprise when I got out onto the front porch and saw no sign whatsoever of the big black Tahoe which is usually hunkered down in front of our house.  I'll bet it took me a good 10 seconds to reconstruct what had happened.  Or hadn't happened.  With a shriek to Susan down in the basement that I had to go out for awhile, I was down the steps and half running (can't really manage anything much quicker) with the set of car keys in my hand.  What comes next is what I forgot in my story as we were all gathered around the Father's Day dinner table, thus blowing the punchline.  Or at least one of the many punchlines in this sorry story.

When I got to the corner of Laurel and Snelling, I started anxiously looking toward SA to see if the St. Paul cops had surrounded the Tahoe with bomb-sniffing dogs or were hooking it up to a tow truck.  Neither.  Big sigh of relief.  I got to the car, breathing hard, and hit the remote to unlock it.  I might have unlocked another Toyota or two within a block's radius but the Tahoe's locks were unmoved.  Wrong set of keys.  Do I now really have to go home to try to explain this to Susan?

Yes.  Yes, I did.  I trudged back home, swapped keys, warned Susan that I was suffering an episode of early Alzheimer's onset and headed back for my car.  Which, thankfully, had not yet attracted the attention of the local authorities or Homeland Security.  This time, the locks responded to the remote and I was able to drag myself up into the driver's seat and bug out.  Without so much as a thank you to the Super Ameica staff for keeping such a close eye on my car for the last two hours.

I did have some explaining to do to Miz Susan when I finally got home.  She seemed sympathetic and concerned for me but I just know that, inwardly, she was packing a bag for a quick get-away to stay with her mother in Lamberton.  In the Tahoe.

Needless to say, there weren't any winnners in that batch of PowerBall tickets.  Not for me anyway.

long day's journey into whatever

I woke up with a start this morning at about 3:20. I remembered right away that I'd forgotten to set the alarm on my phone.  No big deal, either way.  I can't remember the last time I slept through a night without waking up and seeing the red numbers on the clock radio reading somewhere between midnight and way too early.  Once in a awhile, I'll actually be asleep when the alarm goes off at 5:10 but that happens like a night or two a month.

I was still a little bit rattled by all this at 3:20 this morning.  Rattled because, even though I hadn't set the alarm last night for good reason, I remembered right away when I woke up that I'd forgotten to set the alarm and was thinking that I needed to be up for work in another couple of hours, what with today being Thursday and all.

The good reason that I hadn't set the alarm last night was, of course, that last night was Friday.  And today is Saturday and I didn't need to be awake at 3:20 or 5:10 or any time much before 9 o'clock this morning.

Maybe I was compensating for last week when I was convinced that we were a day further along on the calendar than we actually were.  Neither state of mind is particularly productive though I guess that being just one day off last week was better than being two days off this morning.  Thinking that I needed to go back to work on Thursday and Friday after having already worked them has to have been a bad sign, though of what I don't know.  I really should have known better because, if I'd thought about it for even a second, I'd have realized that I sure as hell wasn't gonna get paid twice for those days even if I did work them again.

Or maybe I'm entering some early stage of dementia which is messing with my internal clock.  I worry all the time about an early onset of dementia even if I still do OK on the Friday crosswords.  I haven't yet headed off to work one morning to come out of some driving-induced coma two hours later in Fergus Falls surrounded by Egg MacMuffin wrappers, having missed all three exits for Brooklyn Park.  I suppose that's a good sign.  And I haven't yet headed off to work one morning only to get to work and realize that it's Saturday or Sunday.

There may be hope for me yet.  

here we go again. but maybe better this time

Miz Susan and I were well on our way to charting new territory in the world of New Year's Eve pathetic last night.  Eyelids were fluttering at about 9:15 and I thought sure we'd be welcoming 2013 the next morning, alert and well rested.  With no  Downton Abbey episodes left to watch (which hadn't already been watched during the previous week's D.A. marathons) and not realizing that we were missing out on The Apartment on TCM, it was starting to look like an early evening.  However, Miz Susan rallied heroically for the last few scenes of Lemmon and MacLaine and then a grudging hour of the original Ocean's Eleven.  At the stroke of 12:01 AM, 1/1/13, a verdict of "lame" was pronounced on Sinatra et al and it was lights out.  Our honor as party animals was somewhat preserved though I doubt that anyone's fooled.  I'll have to remember The Apartment for next year.  Maybe we can do better.

I'd like to do better on a lot of things in the coming year but I know one thing for sure.  I'd like to be a little more charitable to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the rest of their Congressional Republican cronies.  Even Eric Kantor and Michele Bachmann.  Ouuchh!  Jeez, that hurt.  Thank heavens that I don't have to lump Paul Ryan and Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock and Chip Cravack into that charity basket.

Yeah, I'll try to be charitable despite having to see nightly video of Boehner striding purposefully through the halls of the Capitol.  And having to listen to crap from McConnell such as, "Why are we stuck now doing all this backing away from the fiscal cliff thing when we should have been doing it months ago?"  You moron, you're having to do it now because months ago (and right up until about 10 PM Eastern Time on November 6th) you and your dimwit Republican cronies were hunkered down playing keep away from the American electorate and plotting your delusional revenge after you'd swept the usurper from office.  You believed that shit right up until early in the evening of Election Day and, from all appearances, you still don't look to have anything in the way of a better plan.

I'm not saying that it hasn't been effective in keeping that damn Obamma and his ACORN-bought-and-paid-for do-gooders from implementing the policies that he was elected to implement.  The GOP and the Tea Party got away with the rope-a-dope from 2009 through 2010, came out swinging and scored big in mid-term November (which probably had more to do with the normal flow of American politics than the validity of their message).  Then they lied and they nudged and winked and they insinuated that Barack Obama was a bum and a fake that he was going to go away in 2012.  They'd tapped the deep pockets of the ultra-conservative corporate big money machine to fuel their gains in 2010 and they used those gains as collateral to tap those deep pockets again in 2012.  With significantly less success.  But they don't seem to have come up with any better ideas for 2014.  The scary thing is that they might get away with it, midterm elections being what they are..

I'll admit to feeling a little sorry for the Tea Partiers and GOPers.  Having put themselves deep into hock to the ultra-con loan sharks, I can imagine that they're scared to the point of wetting their pants worrying that the loan sharks are going to be sending out the muscle to collect on those debts.  I'd be scared too if I'd misspent the big boys' half a bill so blatantly.  I suppose that these talentless Congressional shills are worried that they're either going to get visited by the muscle or that their corporate masters are going to actually make good on the longtime blowhard promises to up and leave the country for climes more receptive to big money and its excesses.  Where exactly that is, I'm not sure; China or Roossia maybe.  But the gravy boat might be close to empty for the toadies and lickspittles and they might actually have to move back to their districts or embrace the totally foreign concept of governing.  Bleak prospects for a bunch of otherwise unemployable slackers.

I've gone back and reread all of this and it occurs to me that I haven't been much more charitable to Boehner McConnell, Inc. than I have been in the past.  Ok, I'll try to do better.  Thing is, I'm pretty sure that those two have no intentions whatsoever of doing any better themselves.  Is this a great country or what?

Happy New Year to all.  On to 2014!!