...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.

new career paths

I'm starting to wonder if my current job is really right for me.  Maybe it's just a touch of seasonal depression; it was, after all, a long winter and the commute up and down 94 has not gotten a whole lot more entertaining since last Halloween.  It's nice to see the lights on over Target Field as I make my way south on game days.  But that's a small pleasure when it's gonna be another 20-30 minutes before I get spit out, in slow motion, of the far end of the Lowry Hill Tunnel.

I know that I should have a distinctly better attitude about my work.  I should bask in the honor of serving the EnHenn community and the taxpayers.  While working for peanuts.  And while various overpaid higher-ups concoct ridiculous plans to sell me into even deeper indentured servitude.  What the hell's wrong with me?

OK, so I've got a bad attitude.  I'm not proud of it but it's set my little pea brain to working at fever pitch on coming up with some alternative ways to make the rent.  Something that's stuck in my mind (besides lunch) is a story I heard awhile back about some guy who decided to sell almost all of his possessions online.  And then, after shipping his stuff into new homes, arranging to visit the things he'd just sold and getting to know the new owners.

A few milliseconds of Google search found the story for me.  It goes all the way back to 2000 when John Freyer of Iowa City decided to sell much of his stuff on eBay.  With the help of some of his friends (I picture them as fairly well-lubricated), he put price tags on a bunch of the stuff in his apartment and started posting it for sale to the highest bidder on the Bay.  He got serious about it: registered a website to support the whole thing (allmylifeforsale.com) and ended up writing a book about it.  Coincidentally titled All My Life for Sale.

But the book came later.  He started selling the stuff he'd listed.  His first sale: his toaster.  He found that selling his possessions was changing his life.  For example, after the toaster got sent off, he stopped eating toast.  And he wondered if the buyer was eating more toast than before.  He started including a caveat in his listings' descriptions that he might want to come and visit the items after he'd sold them.

This was a book I had to own.  So I bought a copy.  Online, of course.  I should have paid full price at a local store (like Micawber's in St. Paul---go there soon and buy something) or, honoring the storyline, bought one on eBay.  But either of those routes would have cost more than finding a copy from a 3rd-party seller on Amazon for 30¢ and hitting the "Buy with 1-Click" button.  My credit card was whacked with a $4.29 charge (to include the $3.99 shipping fee) and within a week I had the book in my hands.

It's a great read.  I was a little worried about the book turning out to be some kind of Marxist rant about the emptiness of American consumerism.  Maybe that's a subtext of the book that I'm just not well-versed enough in Marxist rants to recognize.  If John Freyer's a Marxist, he's got to be one of the gentlest and funniest Marxists around.  The book is hilarious.  I had to stop reading yesterday afternoon because Miz Susan was trying to take a nap next to me and I was getting close to uncontrolled laughing.  And I was only a few pages into it.

All My Life for Sale makes for a nice companion piece to the book Material World: A Global Family Portrait which we used to sell the hell out of to unsuspecting Education Department students at Hamline.  That one is a photo essay consisting of pictures of families from all over the world, posed in front of their homes with all their possessions arranged around them.  I'm pretty sure that that's a book with some kind of a Marxist subtext but, once again, I'd be the last guy to cite as an authority on Marx or any of his isms.  I know infinitely more about Groucho Marx than Karl but I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know all that much about him, either.

Anyway, the concept behind Freyer's AMLfS had me thinking even before the book hit our mail slot.  What if I were to come up with a variation on this theme?  I'm already "visiting" my donations to the Goodwill when I see them on the racks in the store during my weekly (or more often) shopping trips.  So, I'm sorta there already.  But I need to figure out a way to turn this to financial advantage.

I've sold a smattering of miscellaneous stuff on Amazon.  Books I got stuck with after the doorknobs from Lincoln refused to buy everything at the Hamline Bookstore. Duplicate CDs I bought because I was too stupid to remember that I already owned them.  The occasional smart buy that I've spun and made a little money on.  I've got the records of what I sold to whom.  What's to keep me from visiting the new owners (unbeknownst to them, say in the middle of the night when they're asleep or while they're on vacation) and taking back what used to be rightfully mine and then selling it again?

If I'd have been thinking ahead, I'd have saved the return addresses on the packages that have contained all the crap I've bought off of Amazon and eBay.  With that info in hand, I could visit the homes of the people who were foolish enough to sell me stuff to see if there's anything else that I want.  I mean, if I bought one thing from someone, doesn't it stand to reason that maybe they've got something else of interest to me?  In this scenario, I'd be saving money I'd otherwise spend on buying identical junk from somebody who actually wanted to sell it.  Leaving me more money to buy other stuff.  Or to hire a good criminal defense attorney.

I suppose I could start small and try boosting some of my donations off the racks at the Goodwill.  There are at least three things that seem to argue against that.  First, what would I do with the stuff after I recovered it?  About the only thing that I can think of would be to donate it again and sooner or later the IRS would get wise to my double dipping on the charitable donation deductions.  Second, if I were to get busted for shoplifting from the local Goodwill, I'm pretty sure that the cool kids down in the county jail would beat the living beejabbers out of me.  Third, and most convincing of all, is that Miz Susan would certainly not just smack me around but likely kill me if she caught me sneaking the same sorry-ass stuff back into the house that I'd just given away.

one beautiful spring day after another

OUCH.

We're a day or so past mid-April but it would be foolish to think that we should expect something other than mid-December weather.  Maybe it's all our fault here on Laurel Avenue.  Miz Susan and I had just been saying that we needed some rain to green things up and wash away the evidence that several dozen sparrows had spent the winter hanging out in the shrubbery at the end of our back deck.  Whatever this mess is, it should do the trick.  And it will also allow me to postpone getting the car washed for another week or so.  It's bad enough that the Holiday Station can get away with charging us $3.47 a gallon for gas; should it really be allowed to soak us another eight bucks for a quickie carwash?  Which doesn't even include vacuuming the floor mats.  We've got to go down to one end or the other of 7th Street and pay $20 or more for the super deluxe car wash to get the wash with the floor mats extravagance.  Which doesn't even include a tip.  This middle class life style just ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Target Field in all its early season glory.  Really.  It's out there somewhere.

The Twins game got called off on Wednesday and I can't hardly wait to get to the sports section to see what the official cause will be listed as.  Rained out?  Snowed out?  Wintry mixed out?  Whatever it was, it would have been a bad night to be either standing around in the outfield trying to tell the difference between fly balls and baseball-sized snowflakes or sitting in some unprotected seat down the first base line. Either one of those would have carried a high risk of hypothermia.

For once, the baseball gods were smiling on the Twins.  Wednesday's postponement set them up for a day-night doubleheader against the hated Blue Jays.  The Jays usually play at Target Field as if they have the home field advantage.  But yesterday, the Twins won both games including a night cap that could have been mistaken for a 9th-grade scrubs game.  The Twins parlayed at least four walks, three wild pitches and a lone hit (I think) to score six times in the eighth to climb to the 5th best record in the American League.  They might not lose again all year long.

thank god!! spring, at last.

Another beautiful early-April day in the northwest suburbs, 4/3/14.

We're getting whacked again; this time with a predicted 4-9" in the metro.  My heart goes out to the poor souls who are gonna plummet back into severe seasonal affective depression.  But, good golly, what could they have been thinking?  It's not as if anyone with half an ounce of common sense or any historical perspective would be anticipating that they might be able to get out into the yard anytime soon and start hiding eggs for the coming Easter Egg Hunt.  Which, by the way, will take place on April 20th this year.  At our house.  Miz Susan tells me that we're hosting so that settles that.  I'm already plotting on how I might get away with hiding a twelve pack in the backyard for an Easter Beer Hunt.  I'll need some fortification as I tend the big-ass ham from Widmer's while it cooks in the dilapidated Weber kettle and is transformed into Easter Dinner's main course.  If I play my cards right and the weather turns a bit more cooperative than it's being today, I might be able to stay outside all afternoon and avoid getting yelled at for tracking mud into the kitchen.

But I'm counting my eggs and beers before they're found.  This year, I don't see any strong trends leaning to turning Easter into a party on the back deck.  I can hope for that but this winter (apparently still ongoing despite what the calendar says) and last year's would seem to counsel lowered expectations for sunny skies and soft, sweet breezes wafting about.

The most incongruous sight on I-94 eastbound this evening was this big-ass semi and trailer barreling down the road at 60 mph and weaving through multiple lanes of traffic as if it were a little MG convertible. Maybe it's a promising sign that spring is truly on the way despite all the other evidence to the contrary.  I'm reassured that, even with Mother Nature and Old Man Winter hooking up to try to break us, the radishes MUST and WILL go through.  If only I liked radishes.