cleaning up the community. 43 cubic feet (and them some) at a time.

Miz Susan and I were excited to find the Citywide Community Cleanup flyer laying in the entryway of the house a few weeks back.  We're too cheap to buy a mailbox so we rely on a mail slot in the front door.  This allows the carrier to jam our bills and junk mail through the slot and onto the floor of the entry way.  I wonder occasionally if we're in violation of U.S. statute by not having a mailbox even though we're pretty sure that our cheapness defense is airtight.  I remember reading years ago  that a residential mailbox is actually the property of the feds.  Which leads me to further wonder if our house, mailboxless as it is, is transformed by the slot in the door into one gigantic mailbox.  And is therefore the property of the federal government.  The whole damn thing.  But...I digress.  There's a surprise, right?

I've done a few of the neighborhood/community cleanup events in the past.  Though, as anyone who's had a peek into our garage or basement already suspects, not in the recent past.  The last one I remember took place down at the Ford Plant when that place was still on the tax rolls.  I'd clearly forgotten that this event constitutes real work and is far more effective at gobbling up half of a weekend than at cleaning up the community.  But we were psyched up at the thought of getting some of the accumulated junk out of the house and even started a mental checklist or two of things we could get rid.  But what we mostly did was to let the flyer lay on the library table inside the front door and forget about it.

Until I found the damn thing again, probably while looking for something else that I'd left laying on the library table and forgotten about.  And found it just a day or two before the big event rather than, sensibly, a day or two afterwards.  "Aw, that's too bad.  But we'll get on that next year."  Nope, found it in plenty of time to do some housecleaning last Saturday.  Hmph.

On Friday night, Susan was busy firming up her mental checklist of stuff that we (meaning me) should wrangle into the back of or onto the top of the truck and then deliver it all to the collection site at the north end of the State Fairground.  She told me that I'd be getting rid of a defunct dehumidifier which had shorted out during the beastly hot and sticky summer of 2013 and flipped off a bunch of circuit breakers for the wiring in the basement.  We also agreed that I could scrounge thru the garage for computer components and haul the queen-sized box spring out for disposal.  That box spring had defied all of our efforts to coax it up the steep and narrow staircase to our 3rd floor, former-attic bedroom.

The real prize in the cleanup was the horrible, god-awful heavy Kenmore air conditioner.  This beast had been blocking out any hope of natural light penetrating the window at the landing of the staircase between our first and second floors.  My brother-in-law Dan and I had double-teamed it into that window shortly after we'd moved in during the summer of '06, another beastly hot and sticky one.  I've known all along that it was probably inefficient as hell, cost an arm and a leg to run and was most likely shaking the interior framing of the west side of the house to pieces with it's sad old banging and clattering motor.  But that machine had served us well over the years.  I don't think we had it on more than two or three times this past summer but, in hotter seasons, it kept the main floor of the house almost comfortable.  I won't miss the darn thing but I'll tip my hat to it.

Oh yeah, one more item.  A toaster oven rendered hors de combat by a few too may English muffins and bagels.  This former fixture of our Saturday and Sunday mornings had been pitched out onto the little annex of our back deck where it had been getting dirtier and more disreputable looking by the week.

Everything was a breeze to load into and onto the Tahoe.  Except for the Kenmore air conditioner.  This example of Sears finest workmanship could have been used as a auxiliary anchor for about 3/4 of the ships in the Navy's fleet.  Heavy as hell?  Yes.  Clumsy as hell?  Yes.  Almost totally lacking in any convenient handholds that didn't have sharp protruding chunks of metal as integral parts of the purported handholds?  Yes.  Yep, it pretty much had it all.

It took me the better part of an hour and a half to get that thing out of the window and onto the floor of the landing.  What with its size and all of the precautions we'd taken to keep it from falling out of the window and crushing one of the next door neighbors' kids, it was a struggle to carefully undo all of those precautions without letting it fall out of the window and crush one of the next door neighbors' kids.  What also ended up on the floor of the landing at the end of the hour and a half were piles of dirt and at least half the pine needles that had fallen off of the Martinson's towering evergreen tree over the past eight years.  How could that have possibly have happened?  Shouldn't more than half of those ended up on the ground somewhere else?  Some days, it seems as if those all fall onto our front porch.  Annoying as that might be, it makes shopping for Miz Susan's major Christmas presents pretty easy since she wears out a broom every year keeping the front porch pine-needle-free.  I am running out of inventive ways to disguise what her present is with just wrapping paper and ribbon.

I moved the air conditioner down the steps, carefully and one at a time.  But not so carefully that it didn't land on each step with a resounding thump while leaving a new pile of even more pine needles with each thump.  It was as if the stupid thing had an infinite supply of pine needles, perhaps being piped in via a wormhole from some parallel universe.  From the foot of the stairs, I picked it up and staggered out onto the front porch with it.  How in hell was I going to get it down the stairs without dropping it on one or both of my feet or somehow stumbling with it in such a way as to rip the living daylights out of my left knee again?  I had my doubts but I picked it up again and tottered down the steps.

It was touch and go and there were times when it felt as if all of the weight (considerable between me and the AC) was on my quavering left leg.  I know!  Let's not do anything quite that stupid again anytime soon.  OK?

From that point, it was easy enough to manhandle the brute onto my trusty aluminum Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler and roll it out to the back of the Tahoe.  Susan said that I looked like a coal miner coming out of the hole after a shift.  I insisted that she take a picture but it was so disreputable looking that she refused to put it on Facebook.

I got cleaned up and headed for the drop-off site.  The entrance was off of Larpenteur up at the far end of the Fairgrounds and there were cars and trucks backed up practically out to street.  The traffic moved along fairly quickly though and before too long I was being grilled by a couple of women about just what the hell I had in the truck besides the box spring lashed onto the top of the truck which they could see for themselves.  I ran over the contents: the big-ass air conditioner, the shorted out dehumidifier, the three printers from the garage (yes, I'd salvaged the copy paper from the guts of the printers before I surrendered them) and the toaster oven.  The two women snorted in contempt at the toaster oven and I cautioned them not to laugh at what had once been a beloved member of the household.  They didn't seem impressed.  I drove the itemized bill they created for me up the line to the next station where another attendant took my check for $60 ($20 for the AC, $5 each for the printers, $10 for the dehumidifier and $15 for the box spring.  They threw in disposal of the toaster oven gratis).  From there, I moved to the head of the line where the geography of the place was explained to me.  I complained to that guy about the ridicule my toaster oven had been subjected to.  He seemed sympathetic but he may have just been humoring me.

When I was done with all the dropping off of junk at the various stations, I headed south thru the Fairgrounds for the main entrance (or in my case, exit).  I reveled in clipping along at 10-15 mph over the same ground I'd covered just three weeks earlier at a tenth that speed while being shoved and jostled and assaulted by a quarter of a million insane State Fairgoers. I'll guarantee that I didn't look for some defenseless pedestrian to run over from behind.

All in all, I figure that I moved 40+ cubic feet of junk off of our premises and into the capable care of the City of St. Paul.  Not that you'd notice the difference.  I've got a couple of boxes of my mom's books in the back of my car that I'll drop off at the Goodwill today.  If I remember; I've already forgotten twice.  Each of those two boxes probably take up a good two cubic feet.  I'll count it all as progress.

On the way back home from the Fairgrounds, I stopped in at Micawber's bookstore for an hour and swapped lies with my friend Tom.  Any attentive reader of my previous posts will remember that I recommended last spring that everyone go there and buy a book or two.  Or three.  That advice still holds.  I left with an armful of books which I hope to read and/or give away.  All in all, I figure that that armful may have been about a cubic foot's worth of books.  Even dragging all of those home left me well to the plus side of the ledger in  the community cleanup category.  I'm kinda proud of myself.

i hope i'm not being stalked by vampires

I don't get the tracking widget on blogger and the stats that it displays.  I started writing this stuff about four and a half years ago and the tracker says that there have been close to 3,000 views.  Or something like that.  Not likely.  I'll admit that I'm a fool but I'm not falling for that one.

I understand that most of those aren't real views but are generated when some automated trolling robot takes a peek to see if I've inadvertently included my credit card and bank account numbers within one of my posts.

But seriously?  21 hits from Romania over the past day or so?  Is it really spelled that way now?  I like Roumania so much more; it looks more exotic.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's theories on this.  Especially if any of you think that I should take this Romania thing seriously and stock up on garlic.

and we paid to do this.

This year, Miz Susan and I put plenty of thought into picking the best possible day to go to the State Fair.  I can't remember for sure what the exact thought processes were.  But I'm sure that they were rational, well-considered and took into account all of the various factors important to us to ensure an optimal State Fair Experience.

The one thing we didn't give adequate enough consideration to was who'd be going to the fair with us and just how goddam many of them there would be.  This turned out to be a fundamental miscalculation on our part.  The place was jam-packed, ass-to-elbow with crazy Minnesota Fairgoers and they did their darnedest to kill us.  It turns out that the second Saturday of the Fair, the one on the Labor Day weekend, attracted somewhere in excess of a quarter of a million people, us among them.  All of whom paid real money for the privilege of paying too much more real money for food and drink and entertainments.  And none of those were probably all that good for any of us.  This amounted to a new all-time single day attendance record.  And, I'm guessing, an all-time single day spending record   I don't know whether I should be proud of myself or disgusted with myself for being a part of it all.  Maybe a little of both.


Gee whiz...who'd'a thought?       August 30, 2014

It didn't start out too badly.  We managed to get out of the house by 10 in the morning.  This amounts to pretty quick-stepping for us on a weekend.  But we had our agenda and we were motivated.  Maybe we should have started to suspect that we were getting sucked into something close to an epic disaster movie scenario when we had to wait up on Snelling for 30+ minutes for a bus to come along.  But we had visions of corn dogs and the art work of hundreds of K-12 students in the Education Building dancing in our wee little heads.

It didn't seem that bad when we went in thru the main entrance opposite Midway Parkway.  Maybe my dad's benevolent spirit was looking down on us and was deflecting some of the horrors to come.  Doug was a huge fan of the Fair; back in the day when he was playing politics he'd go several times during each year's run.  Even further back in the day, he'd parked cars at the Fair as a Boy Scout and it seems like he never really got it out of his blood.  It hadn't occurred to me before I was writing this but maybe there was a certain justice in his having passed away at the Lyngblomsten Home just two and a half blocks east down Midway.  He was definitely on familiar ground.

O'Gara's newish building is right inside the Fair's entrance and I'd decided in advance that I needed to try their pretzel cheese curds.  These would definitely not have been good for me but they'd been touted in the media as one of the Fair's hot new foods to try.  Surprisingly, Miz Susan agreed that I should try them but, even at 10:30 in the morning, O'Gara's was a mob scene in miniature (clue #2 as to what we were in for).  So we deferred on that idea.  And headed south and west around the Agriculture Horticulture palace for the Dairy Building and breakfast malts.

Malts in the Dairy Building are one of our must-haves at the Fair.  The lines (more like anxious mobs frantic to board the last ship out of Dunkirk) have tended to feeding-frenzy long in previous years.  On our chosen Saturday, not too bad.  Chocolate for me and stawberry rhubarb for Miz Susan.  She proclaimed that hers was better.  Hers of almost anything is almost always better so I'm gonna give her that one.  We got separated as we spilled out the exit chutes from the milk shake franchise when Susan stopped to gawk at the glass-windowed butter carving cooler.  I'd have stopped, too, but the carver was just doing rough preliminary work without a suffering Princess Kay candidate shivering with goose-bumps and chattering teeth.  What fun would that have been?.

She came out of the butter carving spectator section looking around a little frantically.  This would be the first of many separations that day.  I never did get a chance to ask her what she was worried about.  We couldn't have possibly been more than 30' apart, we each had cell phones, I was wearing a bright red Twins cap (chosen for easy spotability) and we were at most like 3 miles away from home.  Maybe the excitement of the butter carving had gotten the best of her.  But it wouldn't be the last time I saw the look of fleeting panic in her eyes after we'd chosen different routes around an obstacle in our path (and God knows there were plenty of those) or when she squeezed thru a little opening in the crowd that I couldn't exploit.  She tends to forget that I'm about twice her size.  Which may have served me well on the broomball rink but isn't really an advantage I can parlay in polite society.

Leaving the Dairy Building, we joined the crowd pressing west down Judson.  The pedestrian traffic seemed to have grown considerably during the 20 minutes we were off the street.  This took us past the MPR Empire display (which Susan enjoys and which I don't give a hoot about) and up to the Minnesota lottery booth.  I've always said that the Lottery has scratch-offs at the fair with higher odds of winning than the ones that get sold out of the SAs and Holidays.  Makes sense to me; kinda like the dope pushers of urban myth handing out free joints thru the chain link fences of elementary school playgrounds as a business expense write-off against the big paydays with the hard stuff in high school parking lots.  My theory fell flat as not a single one of Miz Susan's three bucks worth of tickets paid off.  I'm not dissuaded; it was a pretty small sample.

We bounced back and forth across Judson to take in the sights at the KARE 11 and Miracle of Birth Barns.  All of the on-air talent had fled the KARE building and about the only excitement in the Miracle of Birth building was the anticipation that one of the visitors would pass out and maybe die.  Jam-packed, hot and humid, people moving around the place like marbles in the bottom of a shoebox.  It was pretty random.

We decided to cut across the swelling east-west traffic and head north toward the Grandstand.  Once we bumped into that dead end of a towering brick wall, we veered left for the newly rehabbed West End Market.  This spot is home to the Schell's Beer Bandstand and, more importantly, the Schell's Beer Garden.   Besides the Schell's Beer attractions, the former West End Market had been made up of a cluster of low-lying ramshackle wood-framed buildings which resembled nothing so much as stables on a low-rent horse farm.  The rehab transformed the Market into a cluster of low-lying steel-girdered and mesh buildings which did away with most of the dimly-lit, poorly-ventilated (think being inside a pizza oven) and claustrophobic stalls of Fairs past.  Balance the improved amenities with a loss of familiarity, though: we had to circle the individual buildings, all five or six of 'em, before we found what had drawn us there in the first place, the I Like You shop.  Miz Susan was greeted with adoring open arms by her former student whose mom runs the place.  I Like You is a regular stop for us during the holiday shopping season at its full-time location on the fringe of the usually-too-hip-for-us Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood.  It specializes in local artists' hand crafts.  It was nice to see a couple of friendly faces.

I don't think we bought anything at I Like You.  We'd seen all that stuff before.  I'd have certainly bought something at the Schell's Beer Garden if the lines hadn't been so damn long.  But we needed to push on; there were corndogs in our futures.  As we came out of the West End Market between the big-ass Sweet Martha's and Fresh French Fries concession stands, the picture above captures what greeted us.  The West End Market had been a relatively calm backwater compared to the Amazon of humanity which clogged Dan Patch in raging full flood.  Where had all these people come from?

From that point on, it's pretty hazy and my memories are dreamlike (or nightmarish).  There are some pictures in our cell phones which seem to suggest that we waited in line for 30-45 minutes to try Giggles's walleye mac and cheese and that we saw a chunk of the daily Fair parade (did they really have that many different gigantic cow sculptures collected in one place at one time?) and that we finally got corndogs at about 3:30.  When we got home, I found that I'd managed to buy a fistful of Fair-themed postcards.  Did I really think that we had that many friends who'd want to get one of those?  My most vivid recollection is of the insane driver of a motorized wheelchair.  She must have decided to test her chair's off-road capabilities by running the damn thing up the back of my left leg.  I don't think she got very far though she did manage to scuff up my ankle and hamstring. This memory is so far-fetched that I'd write it off as pure nightmare except for the picture Miz Susan took of the tread marks on my ankle.  It could have been worse.  When all was said and done, our bankroll was only $70 or so lighter than when we we'd left the house.

I started to come to as we stumbled off the MTC bus at Snelling and Laurel.  Our front porch had never looked so good.  Miz Susan managed to drag herself upstairs and collapsed onto the bed for a long nap.  I had other ideas.  Still smarting from the indignity of getting shut out at the Schell's Beer Garden, I hopped in the car and headed for Big Top Liquors in the Midway Shopping Center.  Yep, just as I suspected.  They'd gotten their first shipment of Schell's Oktoberfest into the store.  Of which I hauled two twelve-packs home.  Sometimes, good things do come to those who wait.

It was a pretty crazy day at the Fair.  I don't remember a crazier one.  Do we really have to wait a whole year to go back again?