I'd committed myself to paying zero attention to any and all media coverage of today's Coronation...oops...Inauguration. And I told Ms Susan as much: no TV watching while that cockroach was on camera. I did pretty well but Susan buckled with the line, "I wanna see what he has to say." She watched and I caught only the opening lines of his monologue in which he thanked the assembled formers and the 28.5 % of eligible American voters (give or take) who voted for him and the citizens of the world (even, presumably, Mexicans and radical Islamic terrorists) for their roles in his ascension to his Imperial Throne. I was a little disappointed that he didn't single out the Russian electorate. After all, those comrades hadn't gotten to vote for him even though they had to bear some amount of deprivation while Putin was pouring state resources into the Trump campaign. Oh well, the Russians have always been long-suffering.
I couldn't help but see some clips from the body of his address during the evening newscasts. It was vintage Trump stump rhetoric: one and two syllable words delivered in that strident slo-mo whine of his. So much for getting presidential and unifying. I'm sure that his supporters lapped it up even as it's becoming more and more obvious that he has no intention or even the wherewithal to implement the sweeping measures he's been promising up to the eve of the election and beyond. My question (well, one of my many questions) is: How long is it going to take for those supporters to realize that they've been gulled yet again? And not by a politician this time but by a reality TV game show host and serial bankruptcy filer. Go effin' figure.
This is a guy who'd rather tell lie after lie than a simple truth. This is the guy whose tax returns we're never gonna see. This is the guy who's never gonna lock Hillary up. This is the guy who's never gonna sue each and every one of those women who came forward to put some meat on the bones of his self-admitted sexual assault exploits. This is the guy who's never gonna build that wall though that will relieve him of trying to track down the President of Mexico to collect a check for construction costs. Heaven alone knows what he's gonna try and do about deporting undocumented aliens and banning Muslims from entry to the country. This is the guy who's promised to cut taxes while beefing up our military and strengthening law enforcement and balancing the budget. I'll give him credit for following up on one of his promises. He's nominated a passel of unqualified and uninformed lackeys to head various branches of the federal government.
My other question (among those many) is: when do we get to start talking openly and publicly about the mental state and stability of this walking, talking doofus with bad hair and an extra long tie? OK, OK. Make that really bad hair. Do we have to wait until this phony starts rolling around on the floors of the White House and chewing on the carpets? How soon does the shrink on retainer get a crack at the new inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Even with the specter of Mike Spence hovering in the shadows, I'd love to know that something is being done to reel crooked, lyin', little Donald down from the clouds of his megalomania. Don't we all deserve that?
Friday, January 20, 2017
Sunday, June 28, 2015
cutting and running...
Miz Susan wondered aloud on Friday morning how long it would take me to stop waking up so damn early. To be fair, I don't sleep thru to the alarm on my crummy little cell phone (now set for 5:10 in the AM) more than twice a month. But it hadn't been much earlier than 4:30 on Friday. And it's not like I'd been sneaking out of bed and leaving the phone upstairs to go off an hour and a half before her usual wake up call. So what right did she have to get all bent out of shape with me? She was still getting her coffee delivered bedside, as usual.
OK, so it had been at 4:00 on both Wednesday and Thursday. And at least once at 3:30 the week before. But still, just because I was slipping into a sleep-deprived psychosis, I hadn't taken to going outside and baying at the moon when almost everyone west of the Atlantic coastline was still sound asleep. Or threatened Susan with one of the tennis balls we keep on the back deck to chuck at the rabbits which Olive and Grey haven't slaughtered.
I'd had a lot on my mind. I'd finally turned in a letter of resignation from my prestigious and highly paid position (ha!) as the textbook manager at North Hennepin Community College up in Brooklyn Park. It had gotten to the point that the 40-mile round trip slog up and down I-94 was one of the bright spots of the job. The pace and the pressure felt like they were both on the uptick since last fall. And at some kind of exponentially accelerated rate. It was getting close to either killing me or moving me to kill someone else. I tempered that threat by telling people that if I felt like I had to kill someone, I'd go after one of the publishers' sales reps before I focused on the campus community at large. Jeez, sales reps are a dime a dozen.
This past Friday was my last day and the previous two weeks had been a frenzied whirlwind. Is that redundant? I'd add more adjectives for effect, if necessary. How about fevered, panicked, disjointed, stretched-thin? I felt as if I needed to get 2 months' worth of work done in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc days. I had plenty to do and it was coming home with me both in the forms of overtime from my laptop's keyboard and injections into what should have been hours of restorative REM snoozing.
Now I feel as if I've had a huge weight lifted from my back. Maybe that's because quitting a job that had become overwhelming lifted that weight but was also a step into a free-fall void. We'll see if the gravity of the free-fall is easier to bear than the weight that had been on my back. I dashed home at 2:15 on Friday afternoon to meet with a real estate agent about getting a for sale sign in front of our now unaffordable house. Maybe I've traded one painful pressure for another.
But that said, both Miz Susan and I are almost giddy with the prospect of spending a chunk of our summer together without job pressures hanging over us. Hopefully, we'll avoid our tendencies to niggling micromanagement and voicing opinions about each others' questionable behaviors. Questionable to the voicer but, of course, perfectly rational to the behaver. But if those are gonna be the worst of our problems, sign me up.
I slept in until 5:30 yesterday which ain't bad for me. Today, though, I woke up at 3:00 in the middle of some incomprehensible bookstore-flavored near-nightmare. But I shook that off, crawled back into bed and didn't wake up again until 6:30. I think it's gonna get better.
OK, so it had been at 4:00 on both Wednesday and Thursday. And at least once at 3:30 the week before. But still, just because I was slipping into a sleep-deprived psychosis, I hadn't taken to going outside and baying at the moon when almost everyone west of the Atlantic coastline was still sound asleep. Or threatened Susan with one of the tennis balls we keep on the back deck to chuck at the rabbits which Olive and Grey haven't slaughtered.
I'd had a lot on my mind. I'd finally turned in a letter of resignation from my prestigious and highly paid position (ha!) as the textbook manager at North Hennepin Community College up in Brooklyn Park. It had gotten to the point that the 40-mile round trip slog up and down I-94 was one of the bright spots of the job. The pace and the pressure felt like they were both on the uptick since last fall. And at some kind of exponentially accelerated rate. It was getting close to either killing me or moving me to kill someone else. I tempered that threat by telling people that if I felt like I had to kill someone, I'd go after one of the publishers' sales reps before I focused on the campus community at large. Jeez, sales reps are a dime a dozen.
This past Friday was my last day and the previous two weeks had been a frenzied whirlwind. Is that redundant? I'd add more adjectives for effect, if necessary. How about fevered, panicked, disjointed, stretched-thin? I felt as if I needed to get 2 months' worth of work done in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc days. I had plenty to do and it was coming home with me both in the forms of overtime from my laptop's keyboard and injections into what should have been hours of restorative REM snoozing.
Now I feel as if I've had a huge weight lifted from my back. Maybe that's because quitting a job that had become overwhelming lifted that weight but was also a step into a free-fall void. We'll see if the gravity of the free-fall is easier to bear than the weight that had been on my back. I dashed home at 2:15 on Friday afternoon to meet with a real estate agent about getting a for sale sign in front of our now unaffordable house. Maybe I've traded one painful pressure for another.
But that said, both Miz Susan and I are almost giddy with the prospect of spending a chunk of our summer together without job pressures hanging over us. Hopefully, we'll avoid our tendencies to niggling micromanagement and voicing opinions about each others' questionable behaviors. Questionable to the voicer but, of course, perfectly rational to the behaver. But if those are gonna be the worst of our problems, sign me up.
I slept in until 5:30 yesterday which ain't bad for me. Today, though, I woke up at 3:00 in the middle of some incomprehensible bookstore-flavored near-nightmare. But I shook that off, crawled back into bed and didn't wake up again until 6:30. I think it's gonna get better.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
cruel disappointments
OK, I've had some disappointments in my life. I'm not complaining; that's just how it is. Losing my gig at Hamline may have been one of the worst of those. That was when a crowd of hapless administrators swapped me out for a crowd of comparably hapless Nebraska turd farmers posing as booksellers. It's a good thing that I've left that bitterness behind. In retrospect, none of those disappointment events, as dark as their days may have been, killed me and I'm left pretty happy with life as it plays itself out.
I remind Miz Susan over and over again that, yes, our lives suck to a certain degree but that we've got it easy compared to way too many people. Those wise reminders don't hold us for long, of course, and we fall back into pissing and moaning mode. Oh well, p+m'g is one of our few rights and it beats the hell out of kicking the cats or trying to smuggle stink-bombs into work to stuff up into the ventilation ducts.
My latest disappointment has to do with, of all things, the Goodwill. That's right, the Goodwill. That which has brought so much fun and meaning into my monotone (but not unhappy) existence. It might all work out for the best but I have to wait for the late returns on that one.
The Goodwill disenchantment came at me like a two-pronged attack and started maybe a month or a month and a half ago. I'd been noticing that my home Goodwill store on Charles off of Fairview and University wasn't providing me the wow-factor finds that I'd gotten used to over the last couple of years. It used to be a given, much to Miz Susan's displeasure, that I could practically count on a grab bag full of keen stuff as a result of my weekly (OK, maybe biweekly) visit(s). Not that I actually needed any of it. What on God's green earth made me buy those two MacGregor baseball gloves? I'm as likely to ever play softball again as I am to play centerfield for the Twins. Or even rightfield. And all the shirts and jackets and sweaters and pants which I already had in more than abundance in several closets and dressers at home? Plates, bowls, cups, nickel beer glasses, coffee mugs. Like I wasn't able to have a cup of coffee without the Cleveland Indians or Pioneer Press mug I found? I was doing my best to spread the stuff around to friends and family but that wasn't doing much to clear the clutter. Not to mention the strange looks I got when I gave people stuff which still had the 99¢ Goodwill price tags stuck to them.
But it was the thrill of the chase and the occasional pot of gold at the end of the Goodwill rainbow that kept me coming back for more. And more and more. I guess that dragging all of that junk into the house motivated me to clear some space in the closets and dressers and cupboards and to box and bag up all the displaced stuff to haul off to the Goodwill donation dock. But that was, at best, a zero-sum game even with minimal disposal of stuff scoring me a few points with Miz Susan. At least I think that I've never bought anything after I'd donated it. I've bought a few things which were pretty close matches to what I'd just gotten rid of but nothing that's come home was making a round trip. I'm pretty sure.
But the Charles Avenue store was definitely getting depressingly more bare and barren by the visit and it sure as hell wasn't because I was buying anything. There just wasn't anything appealing enough to buy.
Just as I was starting to despair that I'd outgrown the Goodwill and that I'd have to take on some new hipster affectation, like maybe heroin addiction, a possible solution presented itself. It looked like the Goodwill was coming to me and opening a new store in Brooklyn Park!! I was excited, to put it mildly.
I'd been passing by a building site in BPark twice a day for the past several months on my daily drives to and from work. It was a monstrous cinder block building, maybe three stories tall by three football fields long. I'd casually wondered who in their right mind was choosing to invest in a warehouse building in the northern suburbs when it came clear. Signage got tacked onto the outside of the building in the form of the familiar white lettering on a dark blue field. Goodwill was coming to town and right on my way home. I was in heaven as this was all revealed to me.
The reason that my home Goodwill was looking so desolate must have been because the GW merchandising geniuses were pulling stock from it, and probably all of the 42 other metro area stores, to fill the racks and shelves of the Brooklyn Park store with wow factor. I had visions of stopping at the new store every day on the way home. Miz Susan would never notice and my only problem would be how to smuggle the new booty into the house so that she wouldn't notice it piling up. Life was good.
In a fever, I called the Goodwill home office where the merchandising geniuses were housed. This happened to be in the complex of retail and office space at the Charles Avenue location. My breathless email (is that possible?) asked when the new store would open and the response told me that it was going to be on the coming Saturday. Well, I wasn't going to make a 40-mile round-trip on the weekend even if it was for a new Goodwill store. I might be crazy but I'm not totally stupid. I could wait until the following week.
I played a little passive/aggressive on Miz Susan on Monday afternoon. I called her from the car as I was exiting the NoHenn parking lot and told her that I was going to try to hold off on stopping at the new Goodwill until later in the week. I heard her long sigh (and if I'd had a picture phone I'd have seen her rolling her eyes) and she told me to go ahead and stop. I might have heard her whisper through gritted teeth that she didn't really care if I ever came home but maybe that was just the hum of the tires and the wind whistling past the Camry.
But, oh boy, had I been played. I wish that I had a copy of the store's security camera footage as I walked through the door and looked around. My jaw must have dropped a good 8 inches. I'd stumbled into a Goodwill Outlet store. The place was fixtured with a bunch of low-lying...somethings...which could have been feed troughs for cattle or horses. Someone has told me since that that's exactly what they are. There was junk poured onto these troughs in no discernible order with no apparent discernible pricing system. Far from skimming the cream of their other 42 metro area stores' inventories, the Goodwill merchandising geniuses seemed to have chosen to stock this store with whatever they'd been able to fish out of trash cans as they cruised up and down the alleys of the metro area. I left as quickly as possible so that I could get home and take a shower. I felt dirty and betrayed. I think that I broke into tears as I walked in the door and blubbered out my story to Miz Susan. She sent me straight to bed. I think she slept in one of the spare bedrooms that night. Or maybe on the couch.
The one-two punch of two crummy Goodwill stores was like a couple of body blows. I stayed away from any and all Goodwill stores for better than a week. I snuck in a trip to the St. Vincent de Paul store down on 7th Street. I should have known better; no wow factor there either.
This past Wednesday, I stopped in at the Charles Avenue store. And was greeted with signs announcing a clearance sale at 50% off everything in the store. None of that everything was worth buying even at 50% off but the real news, the heart-gladdening news, the news that's fired up my will and desire to go thrift shopping again was in the lower half of the signs. The Goodwill was going to close down their Charles Avenue Store to pave the way for a brand new, two-storied, Taj Mahal and Mecca of a Goodwill store at 1239 University Avenue. Which would be doing a Grand Opening on Saturday the 28th, now less than a week away. Talk about being pulled from the very depths of desolate depression to the heights of glorious new thrift shop possibilities. I think that Miz Susan was happy for me when I blurted out the great news after I got home on Wednesday.
It turns out that what was news to me was ho-hum for others. Big surprise there. When I saw Sue's sister Jill at the gala opening of this year's version of the Monroe 4th Grade Opera (named Electric Catastrophe: Save the Energy; there's probably YouTube video out there), her first question for me was, "Are you ready for the Grand Opening of the new Goodwill store?" She'd known for weeks. Or maybe just days. But ages longer than I'd known. She suggested that we get a big group together to make the scene. Which would be fine by me. I doubt that we'll be able to strong-arm Miz Susan into that excursion. She puts up with my thrift shop shenanigans, if barely, but I don't think that she's ready to surrender to the idea that her life is as silly as mine. She's undoubtedly right. I'm doing my best to drag her down but she's remaining above it all. Class will win out, in the end. She's got it. Me? Not quite so much.
I remind Miz Susan over and over again that, yes, our lives suck to a certain degree but that we've got it easy compared to way too many people. Those wise reminders don't hold us for long, of course, and we fall back into pissing and moaning mode. Oh well, p+m'g is one of our few rights and it beats the hell out of kicking the cats or trying to smuggle stink-bombs into work to stuff up into the ventilation ducts.
My latest disappointment has to do with, of all things, the Goodwill. That's right, the Goodwill. That which has brought so much fun and meaning into my monotone (but not unhappy) existence. It might all work out for the best but I have to wait for the late returns on that one.
The Goodwill disenchantment came at me like a two-pronged attack and started maybe a month or a month and a half ago. I'd been noticing that my home Goodwill store on Charles off of Fairview and University wasn't providing me the wow-factor finds that I'd gotten used to over the last couple of years. It used to be a given, much to Miz Susan's displeasure, that I could practically count on a grab bag full of keen stuff as a result of my weekly (OK, maybe biweekly) visit(s). Not that I actually needed any of it. What on God's green earth made me buy those two MacGregor baseball gloves? I'm as likely to ever play softball again as I am to play centerfield for the Twins. Or even rightfield. And all the shirts and jackets and sweaters and pants which I already had in more than abundance in several closets and dressers at home? Plates, bowls, cups, nickel beer glasses, coffee mugs. Like I wasn't able to have a cup of coffee without the Cleveland Indians or Pioneer Press mug I found? I was doing my best to spread the stuff around to friends and family but that wasn't doing much to clear the clutter. Not to mention the strange looks I got when I gave people stuff which still had the 99¢ Goodwill price tags stuck to them.
But it was the thrill of the chase and the occasional pot of gold at the end of the Goodwill rainbow that kept me coming back for more. And more and more. I guess that dragging all of that junk into the house motivated me to clear some space in the closets and dressers and cupboards and to box and bag up all the displaced stuff to haul off to the Goodwill donation dock. But that was, at best, a zero-sum game even with minimal disposal of stuff scoring me a few points with Miz Susan. At least I think that I've never bought anything after I'd donated it. I've bought a few things which were pretty close matches to what I'd just gotten rid of but nothing that's come home was making a round trip. I'm pretty sure.
But the Charles Avenue store was definitely getting depressingly more bare and barren by the visit and it sure as hell wasn't because I was buying anything. There just wasn't anything appealing enough to buy.
Just as I was starting to despair that I'd outgrown the Goodwill and that I'd have to take on some new hipster affectation, like maybe heroin addiction, a possible solution presented itself. It looked like the Goodwill was coming to me and opening a new store in Brooklyn Park!! I was excited, to put it mildly.
I'd been passing by a building site in BPark twice a day for the past several months on my daily drives to and from work. It was a monstrous cinder block building, maybe three stories tall by three football fields long. I'd casually wondered who in their right mind was choosing to invest in a warehouse building in the northern suburbs when it came clear. Signage got tacked onto the outside of the building in the form of the familiar white lettering on a dark blue field. Goodwill was coming to town and right on my way home. I was in heaven as this was all revealed to me.
The reason that my home Goodwill was looking so desolate must have been because the GW merchandising geniuses were pulling stock from it, and probably all of the 42 other metro area stores, to fill the racks and shelves of the Brooklyn Park store with wow factor. I had visions of stopping at the new store every day on the way home. Miz Susan would never notice and my only problem would be how to smuggle the new booty into the house so that she wouldn't notice it piling up. Life was good.
In a fever, I called the Goodwill home office where the merchandising geniuses were housed. This happened to be in the complex of retail and office space at the Charles Avenue location. My breathless email (is that possible?) asked when the new store would open and the response told me that it was going to be on the coming Saturday. Well, I wasn't going to make a 40-mile round-trip on the weekend even if it was for a new Goodwill store. I might be crazy but I'm not totally stupid. I could wait until the following week.
I played a little passive/aggressive on Miz Susan on Monday afternoon. I called her from the car as I was exiting the NoHenn parking lot and told her that I was going to try to hold off on stopping at the new Goodwill until later in the week. I heard her long sigh (and if I'd had a picture phone I'd have seen her rolling her eyes) and she told me to go ahead and stop. I might have heard her whisper through gritted teeth that she didn't really care if I ever came home but maybe that was just the hum of the tires and the wind whistling past the Camry.
But, oh boy, had I been played. I wish that I had a copy of the store's security camera footage as I walked through the door and looked around. My jaw must have dropped a good 8 inches. I'd stumbled into a Goodwill Outlet store. The place was fixtured with a bunch of low-lying...somethings...which could have been feed troughs for cattle or horses. Someone has told me since that that's exactly what they are. There was junk poured onto these troughs in no discernible order with no apparent discernible pricing system. Far from skimming the cream of their other 42 metro area stores' inventories, the Goodwill merchandising geniuses seemed to have chosen to stock this store with whatever they'd been able to fish out of trash cans as they cruised up and down the alleys of the metro area. I left as quickly as possible so that I could get home and take a shower. I felt dirty and betrayed. I think that I broke into tears as I walked in the door and blubbered out my story to Miz Susan. She sent me straight to bed. I think she slept in one of the spare bedrooms that night. Or maybe on the couch.
The one-two punch of two crummy Goodwill stores was like a couple of body blows. I stayed away from any and all Goodwill stores for better than a week. I snuck in a trip to the St. Vincent de Paul store down on 7th Street. I should have known better; no wow factor there either.
This past Wednesday, I stopped in at the Charles Avenue store. And was greeted with signs announcing a clearance sale at 50% off everything in the store. None of that everything was worth buying even at 50% off but the real news, the heart-gladdening news, the news that's fired up my will and desire to go thrift shopping again was in the lower half of the signs. The Goodwill was going to close down their Charles Avenue Store to pave the way for a brand new, two-storied, Taj Mahal and Mecca of a Goodwill store at 1239 University Avenue. Which would be doing a Grand Opening on Saturday the 28th, now less than a week away. Talk about being pulled from the very depths of desolate depression to the heights of glorious new thrift shop possibilities. I think that Miz Susan was happy for me when I blurted out the great news after I got home on Wednesday.
It turns out that what was news to me was ho-hum for others. Big surprise there. When I saw Sue's sister Jill at the gala opening of this year's version of the Monroe 4th Grade Opera (named Electric Catastrophe: Save the Energy; there's probably YouTube video out there), her first question for me was, "Are you ready for the Grand Opening of the new Goodwill store?" She'd known for weeks. Or maybe just days. But ages longer than I'd known. She suggested that we get a big group together to make the scene. Which would be fine by me. I doubt that we'll be able to strong-arm Miz Susan into that excursion. She puts up with my thrift shop shenanigans, if barely, but I don't think that she's ready to surrender to the idea that her life is as silly as mine. She's undoubtedly right. I'm doing my best to drag her down but she's remaining above it all. Class will win out, in the end. She's got it. Me? Not quite so much.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
breaking news
Just this morning, which started for me at 3:30 when I couldn't get back to sleep, I learned of developments involving two Minnesota luminaries. Oh, what the heck, make that icons.
The early AM newscast had Paul Molitor being called back in for a second interview with Minnesota Twins brass in the search for a new manager for the team. I've loved Paul Molitor even before the day I bought a "Paul Molitor for Rookie of the Year" t-shirt at the liquor store up on Snelling at Hague. The one which was a long-time inhabitant of the corner which is now a Play-It-Again-Sports outlet. I also remember playing IM touch football against him at the U (as a ringer, of course) back when I could be counted on to do something else with a football other than drop it. We kicked their asses. Just sayin'.
How do I get off on these tangents? Back to Paul Molitor and his future with the Twins. Molitor was a great player with the Brewers and the Blue Jays and even the Twins as he wrapped up his playing career. He was an All Star multiple times and a deserving inductee into the Hall of Fame. Those credentials are beyond question.
Lately, he's been a coach for the Twins. This probably earned him an inside track at a first interview in the wake of Ron Gardenhire's departure. Still all well and good even if the Twins have stunk during much of Paul's coaching days.
However, it was reported this morning that he'd earned the second interview based, in part, on his familiarity with the Twins' system. Ouch. Hopefully that's only a very small part cuz the Twins' system has been pretty dysfunctional lately.
And Michele Bachmann's back in the news. Thank God; I've missed her re-election commercials this cycle. But now it sounds as if the Congresswoman has earned some extra security protection. Based on threats from, get this, ISIL. ISIL, I was told by Kim Insley or Carla Hult, has made threats of some sort against Michele. Apparently those maniacs are pissed off at her because of her outspoken public criticism of their organization's operations and methodology. Hmmmmm. I wonder who else ISIL is targeting based on the targets' public criticisms. That would pretty much be all of us, right?
I've been pissed off at Michele Bachmann for years because of her outspoken public criticism of any number of things. But I've never been pissed off enough to broadcast any threats against her. And I've given her grudging credit for the inventiveness and entertainment value of her public criticisms. Fortunately, this country has enough checks and balances in place to have kept Michele and her like from rising any further than she has. Unfortunately, the checks and balances in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan are in need of some fine tuning.
I have no idea how much further ISIL will advance its agenda. I hope that they're approaching a high water mark and that that agenda of hate and ignorance will start to wither away. For now, I'll take some comfort in the fact that Michele Bachmann and her agenda of hate and ignorance have reached a high water mark. Even if that's not without some fresh lunacy making the headlines.
The early AM newscast had Paul Molitor being called back in for a second interview with Minnesota Twins brass in the search for a new manager for the team. I've loved Paul Molitor even before the day I bought a "Paul Molitor for Rookie of the Year" t-shirt at the liquor store up on Snelling at Hague. The one which was a long-time inhabitant of the corner which is now a Play-It-Again-Sports outlet. I also remember playing IM touch football against him at the U (as a ringer, of course) back when I could be counted on to do something else with a football other than drop it. We kicked their asses. Just sayin'.
How do I get off on these tangents? Back to Paul Molitor and his future with the Twins. Molitor was a great player with the Brewers and the Blue Jays and even the Twins as he wrapped up his playing career. He was an All Star multiple times and a deserving inductee into the Hall of Fame. Those credentials are beyond question.
Lately, he's been a coach for the Twins. This probably earned him an inside track at a first interview in the wake of Ron Gardenhire's departure. Still all well and good even if the Twins have stunk during much of Paul's coaching days.
However, it was reported this morning that he'd earned the second interview based, in part, on his familiarity with the Twins' system. Ouch. Hopefully that's only a very small part cuz the Twins' system has been pretty dysfunctional lately.
And Michele Bachmann's back in the news. Thank God; I've missed her re-election commercials this cycle. But now it sounds as if the Congresswoman has earned some extra security protection. Based on threats from, get this, ISIL. ISIL, I was told by Kim Insley or Carla Hult, has made threats of some sort against Michele. Apparently those maniacs are pissed off at her because of her outspoken public criticism of their organization's operations and methodology. Hmmmmm. I wonder who else ISIL is targeting based on the targets' public criticisms. That would pretty much be all of us, right?
I've been pissed off at Michele Bachmann for years because of her outspoken public criticism of any number of things. But I've never been pissed off enough to broadcast any threats against her. And I've given her grudging credit for the inventiveness and entertainment value of her public criticisms. Fortunately, this country has enough checks and balances in place to have kept Michele and her like from rising any further than she has. Unfortunately, the checks and balances in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan are in need of some fine tuning.
I have no idea how much further ISIL will advance its agenda. I hope that they're approaching a high water mark and that that agenda of hate and ignorance will start to wither away. For now, I'll take some comfort in the fact that Michele Bachmann and her agenda of hate and ignorance have reached a high water mark. Even if that's not without some fresh lunacy making the headlines.
Friday, September 26, 2014
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'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.
Monday, September 15, 2014
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.
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.
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.
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| Gee whiz...who'd'a thought? August 30, 2014 |
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?
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