Wednesday, 15 December 2010

As part of my subconsciousness’ never-forget-a-date plan, I have to point out that today is my grandparents’ 64th wedding anniversary. Though still far short of the record for longest marriage, I still think they have achieved quite a feat – good for them. Hopefully, at some future date, I will be writing here to note that they have entered the record books.

They were married on the same day as the Byzantine sack of the Vandals (though not the same year!) in New York. After a pit-stop in Minnesota (which lasted 3 decades) they now reside in Florida. They have five kids, seven grandkids, and nine great-grandkids (well, Owen and Isla are two super great-grandkids, but I won’t get hung up on technicalities).

Every year since I can remember, I sent them a card on their anniversary. When I sent one in 2008, I never received any sort of response (neither did Owen; he had enclosed a drawing for them). So, I’ll say here what they evidently don’t want to hear via snail mail: Congratulations! I should be so lucky to one day see my children and my children’s children grown into adulthood.

Here’s a picture of them with their kids. Don’t let the date on the photo fool you – it’s wrong, as camera calendars notoriously are. The picture is about a year old, taken during a party for my Dad and Stepmom’s tenth wedding anniversary. The kids are lined up in age order (or would that be reverse-age order?); my Dad is the friendly-looking one, second from the right:

Monday, 13 December 2010

My son’s school was canceled today. Man, barely three months into his school career and already he gets a snow day.

I don’t remember how many snow days my school had back in my early days of compulsory education, but I do remember they were a rare event in junior and senior high school.

In late 1991, when I was in 11th grade, we got quite the snow storm. So much snow fell that I thought for sure I’d get to miss a few days of school. Alas, they only called one snow day. My mom would always respond to my glee regarding snow days by saying, “It doesn’t matter, you’ll just have to make it up at the end of the year,” which somehow didn’t really matter to me.

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

So, the normally unhelpful electronic signs that are posted at various points on the interstate actually came in handy today. As I was driving through Minnecrapolis, I saw this:

35W     6 minutes

280       29 minutes

Since I was about four miles away from 35W, a drive time of 6 minutes isn’t really that bad. However, it was quite obvious that there was a terrible traffic build up somewhere in the 3 miles between 35W and highway 280.

So I decided to take 35W south and take my chances on that highway. This was a good decision, as traffic was running pretty smoothly there.

I could have taken the highway right out of the city and looped around to get home, but instead, I exited the highway and decided to take some regular city streets so that I could cross the river into St. Paul at a better spot (allowing me to run a couple of errands).

Bad idea.

It wasn’t that the traffic was bad, ’cause it wasn’t. It was the roads. Wow, they were terrible. At the first three intersections I came to, my car’s anti-lock breaks took effect, and I slid several feet in each case. At another intersection, I basically took my life in my hands, as the pile-up of snow was so high, I could not check for oncoming traffic, nor could any such traffic see me pulling out. I went verrry sloooowly, hoping that if there was a vehicle coming, they would have the decency to slow down for me (or at least just hit the front of my car).

When I needed to make a left to get off Hiawatha (a pretty major street), I had to drive my car about 1mph in order to not lose any tires in monstrous potholes. When I came to a stop at the red arrow, my car’s tires we deep inside icy craters. When the green light came, I had to ‘rock’ my car in order to get going again (all while hurrying to make the left before the arrow changed back to red again).

About a mile later, I was finally at the Mississippi River. As soon as I got on the bridge, the road conditions changed – for the better. I could go the speed limit, both lanes were cleared and (except for the entryway to my apartment’s parking lot), there were no snow pile-ups of dangerous size.

Thank you, St. Paul, for doing such a great job.

Thank you, Minneapolis, for not making me adjust my stereotype.

Sunday, 12 December 2010

There was no precipitation today. The sun came out, but the temperature dropped. Owen and I went outside to play – but only for about 5 minutes. I didn’t have any snow pants to wear, so my legs froze within 2 minutes, and Owen kept getting stuck in the snow that was taller than he is. He did find one packed-down snow bank, and he thought it was pretty cool that he could stand up on it and be taller than me. Then he slid down it like it was a slide. Then I said we needed to go in because it was too cold outside.

Here are some pictures from today:

This is the view from our deck.

Here’s the view from Owen’s window.

Here’s a snow plow doing what snow plows do best.

…And again.

Here’s the northern half of our deck.

Here’s the side of the garages. See my shadow, lurking sinisterly?

Here’s a car that’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Here’s the front of my Cavalier. This is child’s play to my hearty, brave vehicle (our old Jetta, on the other hand, would probably require a new transmission if it got stuck in this much snow).

You might wonder: What does the typical Minnesotan do on days like this? Well, depending on how limber you are, you might want to consider doing what this Minnesotan is doing…

Yeah, there are probably gonna be a lot of toe-sucking days coming up.

Here she is again:

Mmm…toes.

Here’s another funny thing: Lots of people must’ve been looking online for information about the weather; typing in “Minnesota Snow” into Google, no doubt. This resulted in my filmlet (titled Minnesota Snow) getting over 30 hits on Saturday and over 80 hits today. That’s the most it’s gotten in a single day this entire calendar year. Here’s the filmlet, by the way, if you care:

Thursday, 09 December 2010

Today, Owen said he wanted to count how many books we owned. He just randomly picked a spot on the bookshelf and began counting. After a couple minutes of counting, he lost track of both the spot on the shelf where he was and the number he was at. So I offered to give him a hand.

I pointed out to him that there were stacks of books above the bookshelf. From his vantage point, those are really hard to see, so I took the lead in counting those. Then we counted everything in the shelf, then we moved over to the other, smaller shelf. Then I showed him there were a few books hidden away in the cabinet above the refrigerator. He didn’t know about these (they don’t get much use: one’s a home repair book, another features drink recipes). Then I told him Mama had some books on her nightstand, and I told him I keep a book in my car. We added all this stuff together and came to 326.

He asked me to write this number down and said he wanted to count the rest another time. I presume he means the books in his room. I’ll keep you posted.

Friday, 10 December 2010

This evening, I had a few hours to myself, so I worked on some of my projects. While doing that, I turned on iTunes and listened to some U2.

U2 always makes me think of the person who first introduced me to U2. Of course, I had heard the name of the band before, but I didn’t know anything they sang back then. Then, one day, I went to a friend’s house, and he was positively surprised that I didn’t know anything about them. He promptly set about changing this by playing Rattle and Hum for me, which I agreed was a pretty good album. In time, I actually became the bigger fan, even inviting him to a U2 concert in 1997 (his mother-in-law wouldn’t let him go) and supplying him with a copy of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004. Even so, when U2’s music comes on, particularly if it’s not one of the five or six U2 songs that gets continuous radio play, I recall the days when my old friend first introduced the band to me.

I could tell a similar story about Billy Joel, but I’ll spare you the tedious nostalgia.

My point is, I was thinking how nearly every musical act I listen to was originally introduced to me by a friend. So I began thinking of every musician of band that I like and tried to think back to how I first came into contact with their music. The only time I could recall having ‘discovered’ the music myself was Paul Simon – who also happens to be my favorite musician…

Back in the early 1990s, I was trying to view every film that had any sort of historical, cultural or even financial merit. This of course brought me to The Graduate, a film I rented while staying at a friend’s house (since I assumed my parents wouldn’t let me rent it). The movie pretty much sucks, but the soundtrack was great! When I returned home a few days later, I immediately dug through my dad’s music collection and found that he had Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits on 8-track, as well as “I am a Rock” on vinyl. I listened to these until I had them memorized and, eventually, I scored a copy of their Greatest Hits album on CD.

Then, one day, whilst thumbing through my latest copy of The Guinness Book of World Records, I came upon a list of Grammy winners, and was surprised to see Paul Simon had not only won Album of the Year in 1970 for his work with Garfunkel (Bridge Over Troubled Waters), but had also won Album of the Year twice as a soloist. I immediately set about trying to secure these albums. And that pretty much cemented my Simon fandom.

And I did it without anyone else’s help.

Saturday, 11 December 2010

Happy half-birthday to me!

Mother nature decided to celebrate the midpoint by bringing a blizzard. When Owen first looked out the window this morning, he saw the bottom 9 inches of the window was covered in snow and asked, “Is that how high the snow is?” I explained that, no, that was just the snow piled up on the ledge, but that there was still quite a load of snow.

We went outside and played in the snow today. Or, at least, we tried to. The wind was blowing so hard I couldn’t see anything – it kept whipping around the snow and pelting our faces with it. It was also really cold. So, we spent the rest of the day indoors.

From our windows (when they were cleanly scraped by Owen), we could see several cars stuck in the snow during the course of the day. One car even got stuck in a snow bank while trying to leave the parking lot (of the neighboring apartment building, not ours). Man, they certainly didn’t make it very far.

Oh – and the mail didn’t come, either, which was just fine with me, because Saturday’s mail pretty much goes straight into recycling.

One of my friends works at the Mall of America and he had to go to work today. I think keeping the Mall open on a day like today was a great way for the Mall to let everyone know that they don’t care about their employees. Wow. I’m so shocked.

Wednesday, 08 December 2010

Today marks the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. Though the radio stations make a point of reminding everyone, I don’t need the reminder. It’s a day, like so many others, that I simply remember.

What makes Lennon’s tragedy stand out to me – besides the obvious facts of any murder being a tragedy and the fact that the world lost a great musician – is that I actually remember when it happened.

…Kind of.

He was murdered in New York City, just outside his home during Monday evening. Most Americans, therefore, first heard about the shooting while watching football. Here’s Howard Cosell’s announcement during Monday Night Football: CLICK THIS!

And though I lived in a house of non-stop TV viewing, we did not have the football game on. In fact (and here’s a great thing about my parents), we never had the football game on. I went to bed that night without knowing what happened.

But the next day, kids were talking about it on the bus. When I got to my Kindergarten class, some kids seemed really sad about it. I knew only the name “John Lennon” – I would’ve been hard pressed to have named any of his songs or to have named his former band. Still, when we sat in a circle on the floor around the teacher, she explained what had happened, and she told us how much she liked Lennon’s music.

I wasn’t yet alive when Nixon resigned, and I was too young to understand when the King of Rock and Roll died, but I remember where I was was during other big events;  when the Challenger blew up, when OJ Simpson was found not guilty, when Muslims flew planes into buildings, when the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck. Nevertheless, I will always remember Lennon’s death as the first world event that I felt a part of. In time, I came to learn of his songs, and I finally learned which band he had been in, and his death seems all the more tragic in retrospect.

Here’s the music video to my favorite John Lennon song, in which he answers the criticism that the five years he took off from creating music to be with his son were a waste of time. Lennon had the money and desire to stay home with his new son, something he did for five years. I had the desire, but not the money…so I didn’t do that. But now that my Kindergartener son is 5 and a half years old, he and I have lived together longer than John and Sean did. Man, that’s sad. Anyways, here’s the video:

That song was created at a time when Lennon was getting back to work, when he promised he would be “Starting Over” and that he wanted his wife to “Grow Old Along with” him.

In February 1982, while accepting the Grammy for Best Album of the Year, which she co-wrote and performed with her late husband, Yoko Ono said she and John “were proud and happy to be part of the human race; to make good music for the Earth and for the universe.” Well said.