This Post is Kind of Trashy

09 April 2010

I won a $25 gift card from my credit union today. And do you know how? Well I’m gonna tell you anyways: I scored the highest score in the NCAA brackets.

Yes, that’s correct, you read that right: I, someone who doesn’t even know what “NCAA” stands for, and has never once watched a college basketball game in person or on TV, performed better than any one else.

How did I do it? you ask. First, I used what little knowledge I do have about the College Basketball World Series (NCAA): I’d heard that this guy Duke is supposed to be pretty good, and I know that any team from Minnesota must surely be a disappointment. Then, I figured that if I’d never heard of the college, their team must also be pretty lousy. Then I wrote down my picks. I achieved 73 points; three points higher than 2nd place.

When I picked up my winnings, I asked for my bracket sheet, and I took it around to my co-workers, gloating, saying: “Do you want to see what a winner looks like?”

Yeah, they’re pretty sick of me at work.

10 April 2010

This morning, we visited Crosby Lake Regional Park, which is still flooded, but not nearly to the degree it was last week. The Happy Trails Nature Club organized a park clean-up for today, and we arrived with our thermos of water and grabber. The Club coordinator had donuts waiting, bags, gloves, and free copies of the Blue Sky Guide, which my wife tells me is like the Happenings book, only for hippies.

We started off down the path, kind of going a different route than most of the other people (what’s new?). Everything had signs of having recently been deluged by mud. The paved path had caked mud on it, and the bottom two feet of the trees and signs were dirty. Nearly all the garbage we found was dirty, which may sound redundant, but what I mean is: imagine taking an empty bag of Doritos and then burying it in mud for a few days, then pulling it out and setting it on the sidewalk – that’s the kind of stuff we found.

Owen seemed to enjoy scavenger hunting for anti-treasure. He was so proud of himself when he found a piece of garbage, at one point even spending ~3 minutes diligently digging out a plastic bag with a stick; “Like excavating in the Cretaceous time period,” he said. Sometimes, we found larger items, and we all seemed to feel a weird kind of satisfaction in locating such big pieces of trash.  Occasionally we’d find areas of heavy trash-concentration, and this, too, was somehow exciting. Our bag eventually weighed ~30 pounds (I’m guessing, it could’ve been more like 14 kilos for all I know). In between collecting refuse, we saw woodpeckers, earthworms, geese, ducks, and squirrels. Afterward, we lunched on a picnic bench near a fire in the pavilion’s firepit.

Items we found included:

-A foot-long rubber tube

-2 beer bottles and two beer cans (Michelob and Budweiser…typical)

-A condom wrapper

-The innards of an audio cassette

-The handle and first 12 inches of a fishing rod

-A Snapple bottle

-Several spent cigarettes

-Three tennis balls

-A maxi-pad

-4 lighters

-Those little orange flags that electrical company employees stick in random places to show their patriotism to Orangeland

-A perfectly clean, sharp, new pencil (in such good condition that we brought it home)

-Lots of plastic bag pieces

-Empty potato chip bags

-A human skull

Okay, so I’m kidding on that last one.

But seriously: nothing gets us out exploring the  metro area’s parks like this nature club. If you live within, say, 30 miles of St. Paul and you have at least one kid <12 years old, you should join the mailing list. The activities are free, fun, and good exercise. They’re free, too. Here’s Owen at Spingbook Nature Center during an outing in late November, which was a great opportunity for us to get out of the house:

You can join their mailing list right on the home page. Also, they have a Facebook group, too.