I've taken a rare day off and called in sick. The groundwork for this got laid yesterday when I was sneezing like a fiend and my nose was running like a dripping faucet. I know, I know; gross, huh? And I almost fell asleep at my keyboard before noon. I usually hold that stunt off until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. It might have been the less-than-exhilarating job of updating projected enrollments for classes which start later on in the term. Normally, I'd be all over that work; I must have been off.
Miz Susan approved my sick leave but only with a few conditions attached. Incuded among those conditions:
1) that I'd iron a bunch of the shirts that have piled up in the front bedroom.
2) that I'd check with Wet Paint to see if they've restocked the Stabilo markers she uses to deface her 4th graders' written work and which she's demanded as her Valentine's Day gift. She'll pick out her own flowers but thanks for asking.
3) that I'd customize the "St. Paul Kids Deserve" sign which will soon grace our front lawn. Or the snow banks that cover it, anyway. More on this later.
4) that I'd pull ingredients together for the big-ass salad that's on the menu for tonite's dinner.
5) that I take a nap and take it easy. And that I not leave the house.
Well, I've already left the house to start her car and sweep it off for her commute to Monroe Arts Plus. And I'll probably have to get out at least once more for the Wet Paint stock check and salad ingredients. She'll be disappointed that I didn't follow her advice to the letter but she's probably used to that by now.
Miz Susan might be in for a few unscheduled (but unpaid) days at home herself. The higher-ups of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (her union) voted to authorize a strike vote and set February 24th as the date for this. It's been a long time coming.
Her employer and her union have been negotiating a new contract for teachers since sometime last May. I recall reading or hearing that the two sides have settled on less than half of the points under discussion. Now both sides have got their heels dug in. At stake are classroom sizes, additional staffing (both in the teaching and support ranks: social workers, librarians, school nurses among others), the heinous emphasis by administration on standardized testing and the huge blocs of time dedicated to preparing for and taking them, addressing special needs in the classroom: language, remedial learning, behavior, etc. and, not least of all (though administration loves to put it at the top of the list: translation: greedy teachers. some media outlets have been quick to forward this practically rote), teacher compensation.
This standoff comes about after years of the St. Paul Public Schools ruling class slashing budgets, cutting back on staffing in the separate classrooms and buildings, increasing class sizes, ignoring the increasing challenges of the necessity to meet special needs of students. And all the while slyly intimating with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge that the teachers and other front line staff aren't doing their utmost to provide a top flight education for the district's students and families. Nothing of the of current negotiations deadlock should be much of a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to to the system's upper tier's previous program of denial, cutbacks, duck and cover and deliberate spreading of misleading quasi-information. And I'd fall over in a dead faint if I were to learn that administration's budgets have suffered cuts at the same levels as the classrooms' and support functions'.
It was particularly stomach-turning to read SPPS Superintendent Valeria Silva's quotes in the paper today. If she was quoted accurately, she pretty much laid the blame for the situation squarely on the teachers and their union. If rank and file votes to approve a strike and goes out onto the picket lines, Superintendent Silva knows that all the negative consequences of a strike (closed schools and the pre- and post-school day programs, the district's food services, forced layoffs for non-union employees, a likely lengthening of the school year into the summer, the general collapse of western civilization as we know it) will be solely on the shoulders of those greedy and lazy slacker teachers. I'll give her credit for keeping a straight face as she slopped this pap out into the microphones and cameras and reporter's notebooks of an attentive media. She may have been engrossed in calculating the savings the district will realize if the System shuts down for one or two or three weeks and the effects that those savings will have on her annual performance bonus. That'd be some high-powered arithmetic and enough to keep a smile off anyone's lips. Until, of course, the check arrives.
So, despite administration's longstanding war against teachers and the work they do (and, by extension, against kids and families), the Superintendent's conscience is clear. She and the rest of the inhabitants of 360 Colborne (many of who are honest and honorable and hardworking) bear no responsibility for this impasse. Here's another fine mess you've gotten us into.
There's a comforting continuity in this empty, amoral rhetoric of the current Superintendent. Her predecessors Patricia Harvey and Meria Carstarphen were shameless bullies and blowhards and elitists. Ms Silva has either dug up some of their old scripts or she comes by her behavior naturally. Is this a great country or what?
I actually stuck pretty close to the conditions that Miz Susan laid down before she went off to work at her low-intensity and overpaid job. I ironed and I checked on markers at Wet Paint (beware 4th graders, your slacker teacher is rearmed), the St. Paul Kids Deserve sign is now customized and graces a snow bank on what is hopefully still our lawn underneath and I pulled salad ingredients together which led to a rave review. I even took a short nap though I couldn't do the markers without venturing abroad to Grand Avenue and Wet Paint and over to the Midway for General Tso's chicken wings and peapods at Cub. And I might (might) even have swung through the Goodwill but, if I did, I didn't buy anything. To quote Miz Susan, "You can stay home sick any day."
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Friday, February 7, 2014
it's already 2014 and the Winter Games are on? where does the time go?
The media, both print and electronic, are full of news of the impending start of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. NBC has the Opening Ceremony tonight. Which actually already happened 7 or 8 hours ago. Ho hum.
Once again, I've been skipped over for a spot, any spot, on the U.S. Olympic team. I guess I could still be asked to fly in as a replacement if one of our athletes gets thrown into a modern-day gulag for over-enthusiastically hugging up on one of their like-sexed teammates. Apparently the Russians frown on that sort of behavior on a par with the Texas legislature.
I shouldn't be all that surprised to have been ignored since I have absolutely no talent or skill for any of the games or sports that turn this event into one mongo marketing and advertising (ka-CHING!!!) extravaganza. If any of the scouts had been watching me round the clock (talk about a boring assignment), they might have seen me take two spills on the ice and pop up unhurt. But falling down and not killing myself or tearing up my knee again probably doesn't count as much of a qualification to compete in one of the luge events. But boy oh boy, I could really do some damage on one of those little speed-racer death traps.
I have to take the good with the bad. The good was worth waiting for. Football season is finally over and I won't have to figure out ways to avoid football again until August. Please don't anyone mention spring practice at the U of M. I said a year ago that the amount of football I watched during the '12-'13 season didn't add up to a whole game's worth. I think I pared it down to a half this year, maybe as little as a quarter. That was a hell of an effort and I need a rest.
The bad will be that the Olympics will be clogging up NBC's airwaves for weeks (it'll seem longer). As if I'm interested in slope snowboarding or team figure skating. Synchronized swimming, anyone?
I suggested some new events for the Winter Olympics when I first started writing this collection of random stupid back in 2010. I'm too lazy to go back and read my old post to be reminded of my suggestions. I think that they were somewhere along the lines of side-by-side tandem bobsled races with a marksmanship component tossed in for added spice. No more of that lighthearted nonsense for this year's Games.
I've decided instead to come up with a list of alternate activities to occupy myself with when I might otherwise be tempted to hang out in the kitchen watching the junk sports on TV and eating potato chips. In no particular order:
1) Check the air in the tires on the Tahoe. Our fancy-ass big Chevy SUV has tire pressure sensors which display on the dashboard if we could only remember which buttons to push and in what order. Both Miz Susan and I suspect that those sensors somehow become escape routes for the tires' air when the temperatures plunge. Or maybe it's just 9th grade science at work along with 20th-century digital technology. Cold temps reduce the volume that the air takes up and the tire pressures drop, regardless of the vintage of the car. The fancy sensors call it to our attention in the semi-late model Tahoe though we were blithely unaware of the same phenomenon in something older, say my brown 1970 Buick LeSabre. I've always been a sucker for GM products.
2) Restack the shovels out by the front steps. Winter here is shaping up to linger well past Easter and the arsenal of snow removal hardware needs to be scientifically arranged for maximum effectiveness.
3) Clean up the house a little bit. Pick a room, any room. Start in any corner and work my way outwards. Like the west side front bedroom. I could iron shirts from the mountain of shirts that has built up there, casually strewn across the easy chair. Perhaps then Miz Susan would stop asking me every other day what I was planning on doing with all those f---ing shirts. I could put a new set of mounting clips on the picture that fell off the wall a few weeks (months?) back when the old set of mounting clips succumbed to a severe case of plastic fatigue and busted. Don't you think that the manufacturer should put a warning on the box that those clips might not last more than 10 or 12 years? I could clean up and organize the dozens of CDs that are stacked in piles all over the turntable and the CD player and the floor and...well...you get the picture. Miz Susan snarled at me awhile ago that I couldn't hang any more junk on the walls in that room. Shelves for all those CDs wouldn't qualify as junk, would they? And that's just the one room. Let's not even consider the basement.
4) Take a quick spin up and own University Avenue. I hear the bank and Menard's and the Goodwill and Cub and Target calling my name. I might even be able to find a CD storage rack of some kind at the Goodwill to help me make some sense of the west side front bedroom. I've almost talked Susan into going to the Goodwill with me next weekend; it would be her first trip ever. She says she's going to look for costumes for the 4th Grade Opera but I know she's gonna love it.
5) Talk Susan into watching an episode of Homeland or Foyle's War or, if it's Sunday night, Downton Abbey (note to self: pretend to be interested). Those have been our TV entertainments lately but we're down to just four episodes of Homeland, Season 2 which we haven't watched and the Foyle's War shows run nearly two hours each. That's alot of TV for two oldsters to stay awake thru on a school night.
Having just put this all to paper (digitally speaking), I wandered upstairs to see what Miz Susan was up to. We'd planned on watching the first of the four remaining Homelands. I'll be damned if she wasn't watching the Opening Ceremonies. Sigh.
Once again, I've been skipped over for a spot, any spot, on the U.S. Olympic team. I guess I could still be asked to fly in as a replacement if one of our athletes gets thrown into a modern-day gulag for over-enthusiastically hugging up on one of their like-sexed teammates. Apparently the Russians frown on that sort of behavior on a par with the Texas legislature.
I shouldn't be all that surprised to have been ignored since I have absolutely no talent or skill for any of the games or sports that turn this event into one mongo marketing and advertising (ka-CHING!!!) extravaganza. If any of the scouts had been watching me round the clock (talk about a boring assignment), they might have seen me take two spills on the ice and pop up unhurt. But falling down and not killing myself or tearing up my knee again probably doesn't count as much of a qualification to compete in one of the luge events. But boy oh boy, I could really do some damage on one of those little speed-racer death traps.
I have to take the good with the bad. The good was worth waiting for. Football season is finally over and I won't have to figure out ways to avoid football again until August. Please don't anyone mention spring practice at the U of M. I said a year ago that the amount of football I watched during the '12-'13 season didn't add up to a whole game's worth. I think I pared it down to a half this year, maybe as little as a quarter. That was a hell of an effort and I need a rest.
The bad will be that the Olympics will be clogging up NBC's airwaves for weeks (it'll seem longer). As if I'm interested in slope snowboarding or team figure skating. Synchronized swimming, anyone?
I suggested some new events for the Winter Olympics when I first started writing this collection of random stupid back in 2010. I'm too lazy to go back and read my old post to be reminded of my suggestions. I think that they were somewhere along the lines of side-by-side tandem bobsled races with a marksmanship component tossed in for added spice. No more of that lighthearted nonsense for this year's Games.
I've decided instead to come up with a list of alternate activities to occupy myself with when I might otherwise be tempted to hang out in the kitchen watching the junk sports on TV and eating potato chips. In no particular order:
1) Check the air in the tires on the Tahoe. Our fancy-ass big Chevy SUV has tire pressure sensors which display on the dashboard if we could only remember which buttons to push and in what order. Both Miz Susan and I suspect that those sensors somehow become escape routes for the tires' air when the temperatures plunge. Or maybe it's just 9th grade science at work along with 20th-century digital technology. Cold temps reduce the volume that the air takes up and the tire pressures drop, regardless of the vintage of the car. The fancy sensors call it to our attention in the semi-late model Tahoe though we were blithely unaware of the same phenomenon in something older, say my brown 1970 Buick LeSabre. I've always been a sucker for GM products.
2) Restack the shovels out by the front steps. Winter here is shaping up to linger well past Easter and the arsenal of snow removal hardware needs to be scientifically arranged for maximum effectiveness.
3) Clean up the house a little bit. Pick a room, any room. Start in any corner and work my way outwards. Like the west side front bedroom. I could iron shirts from the mountain of shirts that has built up there, casually strewn across the easy chair. Perhaps then Miz Susan would stop asking me every other day what I was planning on doing with all those f---ing shirts. I could put a new set of mounting clips on the picture that fell off the wall a few weeks (months?) back when the old set of mounting clips succumbed to a severe case of plastic fatigue and busted. Don't you think that the manufacturer should put a warning on the box that those clips might not last more than 10 or 12 years? I could clean up and organize the dozens of CDs that are stacked in piles all over the turntable and the CD player and the floor and...well...you get the picture. Miz Susan snarled at me awhile ago that I couldn't hang any more junk on the walls in that room. Shelves for all those CDs wouldn't qualify as junk, would they? And that's just the one room. Let's not even consider the basement.
4) Take a quick spin up and own University Avenue. I hear the bank and Menard's and the Goodwill and Cub and Target calling my name. I might even be able to find a CD storage rack of some kind at the Goodwill to help me make some sense of the west side front bedroom. I've almost talked Susan into going to the Goodwill with me next weekend; it would be her first trip ever. She says she's going to look for costumes for the 4th Grade Opera but I know she's gonna love it.
5) Talk Susan into watching an episode of Homeland or Foyle's War or, if it's Sunday night, Downton Abbey (note to self: pretend to be interested). Those have been our TV entertainments lately but we're down to just four episodes of Homeland, Season 2 which we haven't watched and the Foyle's War shows run nearly two hours each. That's alot of TV for two oldsters to stay awake thru on a school night.
Having just put this all to paper (digitally speaking), I wandered upstairs to see what Miz Susan was up to. We'd planned on watching the first of the four remaining Homelands. I'll be damned if she wasn't watching the Opening Ceremonies. Sigh.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
going all in vs. the icy blast
 |
| photo by Susan Marina Dammann Young |
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.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
what is it exactly that we're being punished for?
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.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, January 17, 2014
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?
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?
Monday, December 2, 2013
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?
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?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)