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?

...and a glimpse into the past

All sorts of experiences and influences from my formative years (which I'm undoubtedly still slogging thru) probably made me, for better or--more likely--worse, what I am today.  Slackering my way thru high school and college on not much more than native wit and charm, getting drubbed in Strat-O-Matic baseball season after season, putting off doing whatever was necessary until that whatever became urgently necessary, hearing the Basie band's recording of Li'l Darlin' for the first time from far-off WLS radio in Chicago, picking up charcoal grilling tips at my Dad's elbow, rummaging thru dusty old antique stores and countless refinishing projects at my mother's elbow.  Maybe I shouldn't be saying it, but I'm pretty sure that, amidst all of those, broomball was pretty benign.  It wasn't completely innocent but it mostly kept me and a crowd of other guys off the streets during our late teens and early 20's.

I stumbled across broomball one winter night in my sophomore or junior year of high school.  I was plagued by teenaged angst and unrequited love(s) and, rather than plotting to blow up my school or axe-murder my family in the middle of the night, I'd go out for long solitary walks and feel sorry for myself.  Even in the dead of winter.  It was on one of those walks that I noticed bright lights and loud voices coming from the backyard of 145 Amherst.  This was Kurt Wiessner's house and he was one of my friends from Highland Park High School and, before that, Ramsey Junior.  Drawn by the lights and the voices, I walked up the driveway to the backyard and discovered broomball.  I was allowed to play, became a regular and found meaning for my otherwise sad and doubt-wracked life.  Turns out that there were plenty of others from my high school crowd who were happy to find meanings in broomball for their similarly pathetic lives.

145 Amherst is a big white-stuccoed slab of a house smack dab in the heart of St. Paul's Tangletown, south of the Macalester campus. It was the home of  Kurt, his three older brothers and their parents.  Tangletown is full of charmingly winding streets and alleys, streets with collegiate sounding names like Princeton and Amherst and Cambridge.  I suppose that whoever platted that quarter of a square mile, apart from being drunk, named the streets with an ear to charm and prestige to match the grid.  I leave it to others to argue if those names come off as more pretentious than prestigious.  I've lived within a half a mile of this little neighborhood since 1964 and know it for what it is: a secure little enclave of the upper middle class with housing stock to match.  Mostly.  My swim coach at Macalester lived a block down the street from 145 and his placed looked liked it had been lived in hard by a family with four kids.  Which it had.  When Coach retired and moved to Lake Tahoe, the new buyers quickly gussied up the place to the point of making it unrecognizable to me from the curb.

The Wiessner place was similar.  It was in a constant state of remuddle and visions of the next project.  Just as soon as the current one got finished.  It was a great house.  We played more than our share of broomball in its sprawling backyard but we also did our share of beer drinking there since the senior Wiessners were frequently absent on the weekends.

Oh, but that sprawling backyard.  The twists and curves of Tangletown's faux-medieval street map made for building lots of various shapes and sizes.  The backyard of 145 benefited from this; it went rambling away from the back door's little concrete stoop toward the alley for easily 150 feet.  The yard wasn't wide in the same way but its shape was perfect for flooding a broomball rink enclosed with banked piles of snow.  The rink didn't take up anywhere near the whole back yard but it was at least 60' by 40', plenty of room to handle a dozen or more players at one time.  And there were lots of times when a dozen or more players would descend on the Wiessner backyard on a Friday or Saturday night during broomball season.  The season ran from about Thanksgiving thru Valentine's Day with allowances made for minor weather fluctuations.

Broomball mostly kept us off the streets and sober during those winters though there was some bad behavior that went along with the game.  Broomball "brooms" are now high-tech items with high-impact plastic heads rather than our brooms' bristled ends; today's broom looks more like half of a kayak paddle than the ones we played with.  Our brooms broke constantly in the heat of the game and needed replacing.  Some nights, play couldn't start until we'd fanned out into the Mac-Groveland and Highland Park neighborhoods for an hour's worth of snatching brooms off of people's front steps and porches.  Kurt was especially brazen.  He'd work the apartment buildings up and down Grand Avenue for the brooms he knew he'd invariably find in their furnace rooms.  This was long before landlords started installing locks on the outside doors of their buildings but the petty broom larceny might have pushed those security steps along.  Jim Theirs kept a machete in his truck, not for dealing with rival gangs from Central or Monroe but for shortening the bristles of newly acquired brooms for better ball handling.

Kurt's mom and dad were remarkably tolerant of the hordes which took over their house every weekend for 3 1/2 months every year.  Maybe his mom more so; she would make huge batches of Kool Aid punch for the players.  As the last of the players headed for home every Sunday at midnight, they both probably breathed huge sighs of relief  that their homeowner's insurance had survived to cover them for another weekend and that sleep-deprived neighbors hadn't called the cops.

Broomball at the Wiessner's didn't last much past our high school graduation in 1970.  The core group of players scattered to college and jobs and, if we still got together to play occasionally, it was never in that backyard again.  Kurt's was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly after broomball gave way to other entertainments and lived out the rest of her life in a residential care facility a couple of blocks away.  I went to her funeral service in the mid-90's.  Kurt's dad stayed on at 145, probably manning the place at all hours like a ship at sea.

I wasn't ever even close to being a good broomball player (the best was Kurt's brother Todd, an amazing natural athlete who reveled in making me look stupid) but I parlayed what skills I picked up into a successful intramural carer at Macalester and as a ringer at the U of M.  After I graduated from Mac, I somehow managed to scam a key to the old gym and permission to flood the broomball rink in the dead of night while most everyone else in the zip code was fast asleep.  I remember a great sense of peace and purpose at 2 in the morning on those freezing cold January nights.  Much like playing the game.

My sister called me a few weeks ago to tell me that there was an estate sale at 145 Amherst that weekend and hadn't I known the family that lived there.  Well, yes, I had.  I got over there on Saturday about midday and the place was pretty picked over.  Not that I went looking to add to the already unmanageable piles of stuff I've got cluttering our house. But I found a few things that cost me four bucks: an LED flashlight (I'm always a sucker for a working flashlight), a 19-tools-1 Leatherman knockoff still in its plastic clamshell, an 18" drafting ruler minus its cork backing.  That wasn't why I'd gone, of course.  I went, mainly, looking to poke around in my childhood and pay my respects to something that had once been an important part of my life.  And. judging from my continuing fondness for the people I played and committed petty larceny with and what I've written here, still is.

40+ plus years ago...

The real score came from a closet at the top of the staircase to the second floor.  Propped up against the wall just inside the door was the beauty pictured here.  There's no way to know and no reason to believe that the broom I found and paid for with the other stuff actually saw game action in the late-60's.  I'm not making any such claims.  I shouldn't even be thinking about ever playing broomball again; not in this lifetime, anyway.  And not touch football and not softball either (though I'd be interested in a diagnosis of what led me to buy that nice MacGregor outfielder's glove at the Goodwill several weeks ago; even at $3.99, that purchase makes no sense whatsoever.).  The sketchy condition of my battered left knee has me convinced to stay away from games like those. But. if I'm ever actually stupid enough to get back out on an ice rink again, the broom from 145 Amherst will be the first thing that I'll have grabbed.  And I have great faith in my stupidity.  Now, what did I do with those damned knee pads?

a glimpse into the future...

A few weekends back, I answered my mother's emailed call for help. She'd heard about a possible crackdown by the owners of the building where she lives.  One of the neighbors had been forced to give up one of the building's storage lockers that she was renting.  Mom, as the keyholder to three of the damned things, was worried that the boom was about to get lowered on her and decided to go proactive.  Her building is under new ownership and, along with the gaudy (even gauche) new furniture in the lobbies, new tenants are actually filling up some of the formerly vacant units.  Before this infusion of fresh cash customers, my mom probably could have rented a whole apartment for a song to store her extra jun...er...treasures.   That's a scary thought because she'd've done her damnedest to fill the thing up to the same bursting point that her three storage lockers are at.  But that was then and this is now.  The new tenants will require storage lockers of their own; she's been forced into a different sort of crisis management mode.  I spent six hours with her going through carton after carton of old books from just one of her three storage lockers.  We didn't clear that one out completely but we did the worst of the heavy lifting that will be inevitable after the sheriff's deputy arrives with an eviction notice.

I know that my opinion was a matter of public record, that most of those books should never have made the move from 254 Macalester to 1910 Graham 10 years or so ago.  They'd been sitting, mostly untouched, ever since the day in about '66 that they'd been poured onto the shelves at the back end of 254's dining room.  I have no idea where Doug had been keeping them in a succession of houses and apartments before we moved into 254.  But there they were. Old Macalester College textbooks (and not from when I went there), Literary Guild selections of the month, the occasional recent (relatively speaking) acquisitions like three volumes of Robert Caro's LBJ biography that I'd given Doug over the span of 20 years, my mother's collection of 19th century childrens' readers (if it's old, it's gotta be valuable, right?), not-so-current events titles from the '60s.

I'd been pulling plums from those shelves for years.  I got my starts on John LeCarre and Bruce Catton and Ernie Pyle in books that I borrowed and never returned.  I know that I still have some of those books.

That wasn't all.  Books had materialized from all over the house to get packed for transport to the storage lockers at their new home.  Cookbooks of every size, shape and diet craze.  Gardening books by the dozens.  Books on sewing and knitting and miscellaneous needlecraft and decorative arts and antique furniture and home improvements and Native Americans and Scots and Minnesotans and travel.  Macalester and Kaehler School of Nursing and Windom High School yearbooks.  Dear God, I now know why I stumbled into a career (of sorts) in the book business.  It had to have been some sort of a contact high from formative years of rubbing elbows with all those old, slowly disintegrating books.

I got to Mom's apartment a little after 10:30.  After she introduced me around the place a little (the mail carrier and a couple of the residents) and a few muttered curses about goddamned rosaries as we walked past the crowd gathering in the chapel for Mass, we hit the books.  Yes we did.

I had to clear a path in the locker (actually a plywood cube about 4' x 8') and then wriggle around a structural column that rises inconveniently from smack dab in the middle of the floor plan to get at the books.  Out they came, one or two boxes at a time.  Marj plunked herself down in a lawn chair and pawed thru the contents as I shoved the boxes up to her feet.  We made pretty good progress for the first half a dozen or so; she set a few from each box aside for distribution to friends and family or for keeping or for further consideration.  But the sight of the growing stack of cartons on my faithful Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler, prepped for transport to the back of the Tahoe and, after that, to God only knew where must have had a sobering effect on her.  She seemed to reconsider, to imagine the horror of not knowing what the future held for her stuff, to dig in her heels and to start making careful decisions about who in her inner circle should have these books, her books.  We slowed to a crawl.

Mom catching up on a little of her reading.

Granddaughter Anna had never had home-ec in high school so she should have a huge-ass stack of sewing and knitting books.  The tall, skinny cookbook dedicated to beans got rerouted to granddaughter Keely because she "lives on beans; she eats very frugally".  Anna's two kids were awarded a couple of titles, one of them a Sacajewa biography, which will irretrievably turn them away from any other literary pursuits for years.  My sister Susan got the lion's share of the gardening books except for the one on shade gardening.  That went to Keely because her new house has so many trees in the back yard.  Grandson Brendan's bride Natalie got a couple of outdoorsy items, right up her alley as a nature educator.  Marj struggled long and hard over the little book about Isle Royal until she came up with the inspiration of consigning it to Natalie and Brendan because "they might go there some day".

On and on it went.  Marj and I both did pretty well when you consider that our relationship has tended to contentious over the last few years.  Maybe decades.  I only rolled my eyes maybe 18 or 20 times and I don't think that she caught me at it.  She accused me of being the one who would pull the plug on her life-support.  To which responded that I sure as hell wasn't because I was going to make her come back from any imminent demise to help me clean out the rest of her crap from the storage lockers.  Well, it's not like it was Mother's Day or anything like that.

I made three trips to the Tahoe with the two-wheeler piled high like back in its glory days.  I knew all along there'd eventually be a reason that I'd let it clutter up our garage for the last seven years.  Among the booty (no pun intended; you'll see) were three plastic milk cartons full of meticulously arranged-by-date Playboy magazines, most of them still in their USPS Manual required opaque plastic mailing sleeves.  The Post Office goes to great lengths to protect the morals of its personnel if, at the same time, sacrificing something of their morale.  How and why Doug got started on those, I will never know.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Old Saint Peter met him as he was trying to get thru the Pearly Gates and vouched for him with a a roll of his own saintly eyes.

I drove the truck up the alley behind our house and laid out a couple of  2x4's to keep the books off the floor of the garage.  And then stacked the boxes (and don't forget about the plastic milk crates) back in the corner by the barber's chair.  I think that there are about 10 boxes out there; I'd dropped one off at Nan and Dan's house and one at Anna Morley's and one got hauled into our house and I poked thru the contents of a few of the others.  Mom has since told me to go out to the garage and find some books for the Morley boys, sports and American literature and such.  Good luck with that.  I found a few possibilities but their value will be in Doug's bookplates inside the books rather than any content.

These books had, at some earlier point, been my inheritance.  The mishmash of furniture which Mom had collected over the years was to get split between my sisters.  That stuff had held it's value and some of it has maybe even appreciated.  The collection of books was slated for me.  I don't think that a single one of those books has increased a penny in value since long before Mom and I were poking through them.  In a world of 1¢ books for sale on Amazon, they've turned out to be not much of an investment.

I've still got a pile of work ahead of me, sifting thru those things to decide what's not too musty to donate to the Goodwill or a library.  Most of 'em literally aren't worth the paper they're printed on.  Culture and knowledge have become so disposable lately.

Apart from this story's entertainment value, I recognize that it'll be me sitting in that lawn chair after just a few clicks of the fast forward button.  The jun...er...treasures I've piled up still hold a world of potential for me.  Books, CDs, records, collectibles of all sorts are witness to the strange trajectory of my life.  I suppose that everyone's stuff bears similar witness to their owners' lives.  And I can foresee not only me clinging to my belongings a few years up the road but Liz and Kate cracking the whip and pushing me to pass 'em on.

Anybody interested in a 10-year run of '80's and 90's Playboys?

the joys of home ownership in a time of global climate change

Here's a quick update on the water hazard that had been our backyard earlier in the week.  Some of you may have seen Miz Susan's Facebook posts about it but here's another visual for those who watch the Weather Channel just to see middle-Americans' lives turned upside-down.

Hmmmmm.  Who can I blame this one on?  Fine.  Whom.

Even with the low-tech camera on my borrowed cell phone (Miz Susan keeps me hanging around with promises that we'll go out and shop for new phones "next weekend") you can see the effects of the downpour Wednesday night thru Thursday's AM hours.  When I left for work at 7:30 on Thursday, the backyard was nowhere near as bad as this.  But when I got home at 12:30 after Susan's desperation call for help, this was pretty much the scene.

We had trickles of water coming into the basement from all sides and corners of the foundation but that's business as usual after heavy rainfalls or spring snow melts.  But the basement's biggest issue was the well in the northeast corner, dug once upon a time, perhaps for a sump-pump.  We're used to seeing that 18" deep pit fill halfway up with water once in awhile.  But on Thursday morning, the water level was threatening to come up past floor-level and threaten all of the junk we've got haphazardly strewn around in cardboard boxes.

Susan had been playing human sump pump and had emptied dozens of buckets' worth of water into the laundry tubs.  She was exhausted and near at a breaking point with the downside of the dream of owning her own home.  I think her line went something like, "Forget this!!!".  Or maybe something more colorful.

I took over the bucket brigade duties and started making a little progress.  She'd been working with a two- gallon pail and barely keeping ahead of the flood.  I put the 5-gallon bucket (known affectionately around the basement as Big Green) into play and even with me staggering up the steps, out the side door and out to the street to dump the water, I was able to start to get ahead of the threat.  Not for long, though, as the saturated front lawn kept forcing more water into the hole.  I think we were finally able to catch our breath on that job at about eight that night.

All that lower level progress didn't encourage the lake in the backyard to go away though.  What you can see in the picture was still just sitting there come early evening, an occasional soft breeze stirring up a slight ripple across it's otherwise smooth, mirror-like surface.  Picturesque and even romantic when seen from the end of the dock up at the cabin.  In our backyard, nothing like that.

At that point, I headed out to try to find a utility pump to start moving some of what was covering our backyard back to its proper place in the water cycle.  That's what these things are called apparently, utility pumps.  This is a tool which had never really been on my radar before.  Not so surprising as I am about the unhandiest of all handymen.  I mean, I can conceptualize what one of them is supposed to do but what it's called or where to find one in the big boxes or the local hardware stores...not a clue.  Up until now.

I now know what they're called and where you should be able to find one in a store (except at Walmart where all I got were uncomprehending blank looks though pleasant enough) and what the price ranges are and even a little bit about their maximum pumping volumes in gallons per hour.  Note that I said "where you should be able to find one in a store".  The nice people at Menard's and three local mom and pops told me that they'd sold out of their stock by 1 that afternoon. Maybe they'd have more in within a week.  By which time our house might have either floated away down Laurel Avenue toward the river or collapsed into the basement when the foundation gave way.

So, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place.  I went groveling to the neighbors.  Larry (who had been kind enough to lend me the above-mentioned cell phone while I waited for Miz Susan to motivate to shop for new ones) lent me his utility pump.  He was using Michael's utility pump because Michael had convinced Larry that his (Michael's) pump was far superior to Larry's.  Larry told me that the two pumps were probably equally effective but he and I both know that it's tough to say no to Michael when he's trying to lend you something.  Between the two of them, Michael and Larry own at least one of every hand tool invented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  But if they both own one, Michael's is probably better.  That's just the way it goes in the world of hand tools on this stretch of Laurel Avenue.

I got the damn thing across the street and waded across the back yard where I hooked the pump up to 50' (or more) of garden hose and plugged it into an outlet in the garage (I had to disconnect the garage door opener; we're short on outlets in the garage).  I'd run the hose out to the alley and as soon as I plugged that bad boy in and plunked it down in about six inches of water, the far end of the hose began to spew out water in a rush.  It was coming out at about the same rate that our garden hose produces when we've got it tapped into the spigot on the side of the house.  This utility pump was going about its business in earnest.

We let it run all night.  Kelly next door was trying to drain her decorative pond into the alley at the same time so we had quite the torrent headed westward down the alley.  I woke up at 4AM and checked the sump pump well in the basement and the utility pump in the back yard,  It was making progress; the shoreline of the lake in the back yard had definitely receded but there was still plenty of water left to go.  The pump was still doing it's work when I left for mine at 7:30.  Susan told me that she finally shut it off at about 10 that morning when it started to suck air.  When I got home in the afternoon, I plugged it back in to dry up some low spots in the yard.

The major casualty in this flood seems to have been our clothes dryer.  It's been three and a half days now and Susan's dad's advice of blowing a fan on the back of the dryer hasn't panned out.  We'll probably be calling a repair service tomorrow.  There's undoubtedly some sort of karmic justice in our clothes dryer taking a fatal hit even though most everything else is on it's way to drying out.  But I'm damned if I can see it.

Miz Susan and I have a trip planned to Menard's, probably Wednesday this week.  We'll be looking for another dehumidifier for our basement (we'd needed that before the latest natural disaster), a large pot into which to re-pot her gi-normous jasmine plant which had outgrown its current pot a couple of summers ago and at least one new handle and lock set for the sliding door from the kitchen out onto the deck.  Maybe two sets if Miz Susan's esthetic sense is offended by mismatched handles on the two doors.  But you can bet that we'll be looking to pick up a utility pump, as well.  There is no way that I'm going forward into a world full of  changing and uncertain weather patterns without at least one utility pump of our own.  Please God, let Menard's get those things back into stock.

don't i have anything better to do?

Two dozen of the damned things.

The picture to the left is one I took a few Saturdays ago at the local Goodwill and comes from the aisle which features coffee mugs and glassware.  And, for the time being, these godawful Easter bunny mugs.  I've had good luck in this aisle: a bunch of 4 oz. beer samplers (or, as Miz Susan calls them from her childhood in the Lamberton Legion Hall, nickle beers) and a fistful of coffes mugs which I'm proud to have cluttering up our kitchen counter tops or, less frequently, our dish drainer.  If I'm industrious enough to get them into the dishwasher, they can stay there almost indefinitely.  We've put almost all of my finds from this aisle into regular use.  Those finds have even forced us to weed out some of the old and seldom used mugs and glassware (much like me cleaning out my closet and dresser drawers to make room for the new old stuff I'm regularly hauling home) for donation at the back end of the Goodwill complex.

But I'll admit that seeing the 24 bunny mugs all in one place has forced me to ask myself, "What on God's green earth are you doing with your time, you sorry-assed slacker?".  Even if I asked myself that question, the asking wasn't enough to make me turn away and do any serious soul-searching.  Not without taking this picture first, graphic evidence of how I'm squandering what may once have been a promising life.  Or some of its Saturday mornings, anyway.  But, without the picture, who'd have believed it?

Despite the allure of couching out at home and flipping back and forth between the Twins game and the Wild in Chicago for game two of that series, Miz Susan and I went to a family celebration a few Sundays back.  The basic elements of my ensemble, jacket and pants and shirt, all came from the Goodwill.  Miz Susan had sneered at each of those individually as I'd tried to sneak them into the house but she gave their cumulative effect a grudging thumbs-up as we left the house for Marcy's confirmation service.  There are prices to be paid for chic on the cheap and the trauma of seeing the horrifying lineup of bunny mugs could qualify as one of those prices.

I've been back to the Goodwill a few (OK, more than a few) times since I took the bunny mugs picture.  This past Saturday, the stock had dwindled from 24 down to 13.  It's not like they've flown off the pegs but I texted Miz Susan a snap of the depleted supply and suggested that maybe the time had come for us to get in on the bunny buying frenzy.  Her reply was that I should get over it but, yes please, would I get her the little mug with the apple design which I'd also sent her a picture of.

It's not that I've got the thrift shop bug so bad that I'm feeling compelled to buy a couple of the heinous bunny mugs.  It makes for a nice running gag with Miz Susan and about the only way that I can think of to use them would be for throwing at the real live bunnies that have, at times, taken over our backyard.  But that plague of rabbits has abated since our cat Olive discovered that she had both a taste for baby bunny and an innate talent for stalking and catching them and then dragging then, sometimes still kicking and squealing, home.

On the other hand, I still managed to drop $50 at the GW on Saturday.  If pressed, I could probably recreate a list of the haul along with prices so I can't be accused of mindless, wanton, lowbrow consumerism.  Needless to say, though, none of this stuff was essential for survival.  Hey, I'd missed shopping the weekend before while we were in California so please don't sneer at me too much.