going all in vs. the icy blast

photo by Susan Marina Dammann Young

I had Monday off on account of the ridiculous weather; a first for me, I think, in my present job..  It came totally unexpected from anything I thought I knew about the theory and practice of managing human resources on a public community college campus.  That theory and all its practices being predicated on the belief that human resources are to be paid as little as possible and that there will rarely be any slack extended to employees.  That's how it goes for the schmucks like me anyway, the people on the front lines who are actually doing the work of the institution and bringing home a paycheck based on an hourly wage.  What the hell, it's the American way; employers everywhere, private and public and nonprofit sectors alike, are doing the same thing.  So be it.

It was brutally cold yesterday morning (and was predicted to be even colder this morning though I didn't get another day off). I got the word late Sunday night that North Hennepin would be closed and I could stay home.  Miz Susan had already been excused from three days of work at her St. Paul Schools gig due to the cold and it would have been nice if we'd have been able to have a day off together.  Nope.  Even though St. Paul Schools were closed to students on both Monday and Tuesday, teachers were required to report.  I've heard that St. Paul was one of only a few districts which required its teachers to show up, presumably to attend an endless string of meetings calculated to help raise St. Paul school kids' standardized test scores.  It's nice to know that there are other employers out there which enjoy grinding their staffs down as much as mine does.  Get this.  For the first three days of the cold closings, only essential staff were required to report.  These included the principals and the APs and such and some of the maintenance staff to make sure the pipes didn't freeze.  Not included were the teachers, presumably because administration considers teachers to be less than essential to the work of the district.  Come days 4 and 5 though, the teachers suddenly found themselves on the rolls of essential staff, presumably because administration realized it was shelling out payroll dollars without the satisfaction of having its staff under its direct control.  I'm waiting to hear about the memo that tells the teachers that they're off that essential staff list and back to being the schmucks we all know they are.

Susan didn't have to go in until 9, a nice concession.  I wished her well as she pulled away from the curb, commiserated with one of the neighbors whose car wouldn't start and headed back inside for a rare day home alone.  I made the most of it.

I vacuumed most of the carpets.  I cleaned the cats' box.  I straightened up the kitchen.  I took the last remnants of Christmas decor (the hodgepodge of holiday-themed coffee mugs) to the basement.  In short, I did the bare minimum which I thought might be required for Susan not to go off on me when she got home for being the lazy, worthless slacker she now regrets marrying.

But doing that bare minimum allowed me a free conscience to zip down University Avenue for stops at the Goodwill and Menard's.  The Goodwill made for a disappointing haul: a tall fluted milk glass, a mug with appliqued songbirds (both nods to Susan) and a fire engine bright red long sleeved t-shirt for me.  Pay no mind to the fact that it probably started its life as a pajama top in the Penney's catalog; now it's a long sleeved t-shirt which I will be wearing as soon as I can get it washed and dried.  As I like to say, it'll be in the rotation.

Oh, but Menard's was another story altogether.  I did some major shopping at Menard's and I came out of that place with a cart full of snow shovels and other assorted necessities of January middle class life.  It was $75 (plus tax) worth of snow removal equipment including a snazzy telescoping snowbrush and scraper with a swiveling brush so that you can sweep the snow off the hood of your car in two directions at right angles to each other.  Not you and your car so much as Miz Susan and her Tahoe.  No longer will she have to clamber up onto that big Chevrolet hood to clear the windshield.  The new snowbrush and scraper is going to solve all her problems.  As a bonus, I bought a new set of jumper cables for the trunk of the Camry.  Winter has sucked so far but I might have it on the run.

I was so excited by the new arsenal that I made Miz Susan take a picture of me.  My pose is modeled on the snap which Lee Harvey Oswald made his wife take years ago down in Dallas. The clenched newspaper isn't Lee's free Cuba rag; its headline says something about the icy blast in the title of this post.  I couldn't match LHO's smarmy smirk but I like to think that the picture captures my spirit of a grim commitment to the task at hand.  I'm starting to believe that we're gonna beat this winter thing after all.

what is it exactly that we're being punished for?

The pic to the right is of one of our poor decrepit plastic snow shovels, most likely from Menard's, which is now being officially listed as KIA in the undeclared war against winter, v.'13-'14.  It's stuck in a snowbank as its own headstone.  This guy had gone into action already suffering from wounds received last year; in retrospect, he shouldn't have been sent into battle in any role more dangerous than as a prop for a snowman.  As if I've had a chance to build any snowmen lately.  What with driving to and from Brooklyn Park five times a week, moving cars around during the far-too-frequent snow emergencies and tooling around St. Paul's prestigious Midway District and Highland Park as chief commissary officer for both the human and feline populations of 1614 Laurel, it's been all I can do to keep the sidewalks cleared.  I've thrown plenty of snow around since the landscape went white but I haven't had much of a chance for any outdoor sculptures.  I looked for a Hawaiian shirt at the Goodwill yesterday morning (yeah, I'm still allowed that entertainment) thinking that if I ever did have the time to build a snowman, I'd outfit him in tropical gear as a thumb of the nose at whatever powers are toying with us this season.  I wrote somewhere else recently that this winter now officially sucks.  I'm standing behind that statement.

For the record, the shovel pictured above expired as I was trying to clear a path from the far edge of the back deck up to our back door.  There's a good foot of snow on the deck out there and it was just too much for the poor, old, overmatched shovel.  His previous cracks just couldn't take the pressure.  He did manage to make a dent in the deck's snow cover before succumbing; I can't say that he didn't go down fighting.  I'll save the handle in the hope that I'll be able to find a replacement blade but I know that's likely a forlorn hope.  Of all the shovels I've sent off to early deaths, I have yet to put a handle back in business with a new blade.  They take up a good-sized corner of the garage already and their numbers are growing.  Not to mention that this particular winter is far from over.

I've gotten pretty good at knowing in advance when the St.Paul City shakers and movers will declare snow emergencies.  But I'm clueless this time.  We've easily had enough 1-3" snowfalls over the past week to 10 days to merit the plows hitting the streets again.  However, the wind has become a wild card.  Right now, the winds are howling across the entire state from the northwest corner down to where Minnesota meets up with Wisconsin and Iowa.  And I mean howling.  I've heard that there were wind gusts of nearly 60 mph down in the Windom area.  My mother didn't get out of there any too soon even if it was nearly 70 years ago.  We had a couple inches of the light and fluffy stuff last night but I don't think that a single flake of what fell then is still sitting where it landed.  I'm pretty sure that most of our snow has up and taken wing across the Mississippi for West St. Paul or Mendota Heights.  With any luck at all, every bit of recent Minnesota precipitation is airborne again and headed beyond the eastern suburbs, bound for Wisconsin.  That might save us the annoyance of another snow emergency.  Let that little simpleton Scott Walker deal with all of it.

I've just gotten the word that North Hennepin Community College won't be open tomorrow.  Good news for me though Miz Susan has been ordered to work at her St. Paul school even if the 4th graders have been given another day off.  She acts like she's disappointed that she won't get to hang at home with me for a 3rd consecutive day but I suspect she's secretly pleased.  Guess I'll be headed down University Avenue again.  To Menard's for a couple of replacement shovels and to the Goodwill for that Hawaiian shirt.

thanks a lot...revisited

I started the following piece eight weeks or so ago and there are plenty of good cases that could have been made for just letting it lay as a draft forever, maybe tweak it a bit next year and put it out then.  But, I've finally realized that it's not the quality of my work that's gonna attract the attention of of the Times or the Atlantic.  Nope, it'll be the sheer prolific mass of what I crank out that will finally get me the notice I deserve.  Or get me permanently banned from Blogger.com for being so terminally boring.  There's no such thing as bad PR, right?

We're now nearly a full two months past the holiday and I'm ready to brag it up that we've survived the Thanksgiving crunch here on Laurel Avenue.  And did so with style and grace, at least by our pathetically low standards.  It seemed remarkably smooth though I suppose that there could still be some unforeseen repercussions which might surface.  Like when the credit card statements come due.

I finished off the last nub of pumpkin pie a couple of weeks after the fact and did likewise to the last of the squash lunch the same week.  I'm like David Sedaris's father when it comes to scraps of food; I'm still willing to eat them long after Miz Susan has lost interest.  We still have a few quarts of my turkey soup in the freezer along with a single homemade TV dinner (having eaten one earlier this week) so Thanksgiving will actually stay with us well into the new year.  If we survive that long.  The Christmas season, though also past, could still do us in.

It was a smallish family gathering at our house.  Damn smallish, to be honest: Miz Susan, my mom and me (for muscle and dishwasher loading acumen).  Smallish but lovely.  We may not have had all the traditional Thanksgiving fare; no Lamberton corn nor green bean casserole, for example.  But we had more than enough to fill our plates to overflowing with plenty of leftovers to divvy up.

It took some advance preparation and fancy footwork in our challenged-for-space kitchen and oven to pull it off.  But good, old-fashioned American ingenuity and classic Puritan work ethic won out in the end.  What could me more fitting for the best of all American holidays?

We baked up a butternut squash or two and Susan made stuffing balls the weekend before and froze them until Thursday.  We moved our 14-pound turkey from the freezer to the fridge on Sunday.  Our fridge has been acting more like a freezer than a fridge ever since the weather turned cold and, consequently, the turkey was still a bit on the frosty side on Wednesday night.  But that wasn't anything that a night in a tub of brine didn't take care of by Thursday morning.  And into the oven he (or she?) went.

Our oven is so small that we had to bring some auxiliary cooking  methods into play.  The microwave, the toaster oven, the top of a radiator to raise the frozen buns.  I offered to fire up the gas grill out on the deck but Miz Susan wasn't buying into that idea.  Despite having grown up in Little House on Plum Creek territory, she's apparently lost some of her pioneer, make-do spirit.  We had to start the turkey on the lowest oven rack in the covered roaster and then, for the final hour of uncovered browning, took off the cover, moved the rack up a notch, slid the turkey back in and positioned it just so that the drumstick peeking up over the top of the pan was exactly between the heating elements at the top of the stove.  A team of heart surgeons couldn't have done it any better.  We didn't do as well with the toaster oven (RIP) which burned out after some food stuff or another came in contact with the heating coils.  Sigh.  Oh well, Menard's needed our $29 for a new toaster over, didn't they?

Like I said, it was lovely.  Turkey, stuffing balls, squash, Alison's corn souffle, mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin and pecan pies, nary a sign of a vegetable unless you count the onions in the stuffing balls.  It was quiet and conversation took center stage.  Which beats fighting the young adult crowd for seconds (their thirds and fourths) on the mashed potatoes.  No 40-mile round trip.  Maybe we'll give some thought to making this more than a once-in-a-lifetime event.  There are plenty of things to be less thankful for.

posting office hours

I think that I'm going to post office hours on the door of my office.  Not that my office has a door.  Come to think of it, I don't even have an office.  At work, the room where my desk occupies a solid 36 square feet of floor space could possibly be termed an office.  But, mine, it ain't.  It's the copier room and the lunch room and the cloak closet room and the shredder box room and the Accounts Payable file room and the thoroughfare to the locked backroom where we have a monstrous old safe to store the ill-gotten gains of the EnHenn Bookstore.  It's a lotta things to a lotta people but it's definitely not my office other than that I usually get stuck washing the sink full of dirty coffee cups.  This, despite the fact that none of them are mine.  I definitely spend way too much time there but, still, it's not my office.

Where I really want to post my office hours is on the front door of the Goodwill store off of University and Fairview in St. Paul's prestigious Midway district.  I'm there pretty regularly on Saturday mornings so that seems like a logical place to post office hours.  I'm sure that the staff of the store wouldn't mind a bit.  I'll be heading over there tomorrow morning (it'll be Saturday, after all); I'll check with a couple of the cashiers to see if it's okay.

I don't remember how long ago I started making the Goodwill a regular stop on my Saturday tour of the Midway (along with visits to the bank and Menard's and the post office and my Cub).  The Goodwill's always been there and it's always held an allure for me even after its bosses didn't hire me to run the internet end of their business.  It must have been last spring but I'll have to take a look through my closet to go over the stuff I've bought and see if the physical artifacts can help me narrow it down.

I've lost some weight over the past six or seven months; nothing dramatic but enough to make some pants and shirts make it look like I've lost some weight.  So, out with the old, oversized stuff (mostly donated to the Goodwill) and in with the new old stuff which fits me marginally better.  Yes, I worry about buying my donated stuff back but it hasn't happened yet.  I did buy an Eddie Bauer button-down shirt in a dark navy and white check that I already owned one size up but that doesn't really count.  Especially since I donated the larger size to the Goodwill soon after buying the other one.

Miz Susan puts up with this hoarder bullshit because I'll occasionally buy her off with a piece or two of china. She has, however, resisted all of my invitations to make the trip with me.  You don't suppose that she's happy to have me out of the house, do you?  Ouch.

I did manage to zing her last Saturday when I told her that I'd bought a pair of socks at the GW.  I hadn't really though I'd worn them that day.  This was far and away the the ugliest pair of socks I own, a black and brassy brown hounds-tooth pattern, which I love dearly.  I told her that I'd bought them that day and she accused me of buying back something I'd donated.  She was sure of it and she's still miffed that I'd conned her.  For the record, I don't believe that I'll ever buy socks (or underwear, for that matter) at the Goodwill.  That said, though, I have no idea of how much lower I'm capable of sinking.  Time will tell.

I've run into a number of family members and friends on various Saturdays: my sister taking a retail therapy break to avoid killing one of her kids, a sister-in-law and her partner out shopping for their little stall in an occasionally-open junk shop, a former Macalester food service coworker and Linwood parent (who dresses even rattier than I do) and a ex-co-owner of a toy shop on St. Clair who is one of the few people I know who can out-talk me.  He leaves me panting and gasping after spending fifteen minutes trying to squeeze in a few words edgewise.

It's like it's already old home week.  Why not make it official and post my hours?