So long, Robbin Rabbit
November 9, 2013
- Robbin was less than a year old, but this is still the best photo ever. Quintessential Robbin—friendly, curious, outgoing.
Robbin Rabbit exceeded all expectations. I’ve had rabbits with bigger personalities, but no one was king of the house like Robbin. This is his story.
Perhaps you wonder about his name. There used to be this place, the Robbinsdale Farm & Garden. It’s where I had been going to purchase my fifty-pound bags of Purina Rabbit Chow and I knew they sold animals. I was in the market for a new bun.* I chose the adorable little squirt with great grey splodges on white with a faintly orange stripe down his spine. In the car on the way home I wracked my brain about what to call him. I wasn’t feeling too creative, apparently, because Robbin after Robbinsdale is what I came up with.
- Robbin’s ears would wilt in the heat during his first summer.
- Yul, Dhia, and Robbin
- This photo made it onto cuteoverload.com
- Contentment
I had two cats, Dhia and Yul, and the three of them fell in together pretty quickly. Both cats had lived since kittenhood with my previous rabbits so having a hoppity brother was nothing untoward. They welcomed him into the family.
The rabbit cage had a front door. When I was around to supervise, my bun could come and go as he or she pleased and have the run of the place, all the while being able to return to the cage for refreshments or bathroom breaks. Every rabbit was reliable, and once he or she discovered the location of the cats’ litterbox were very good about using it as well. However, I never felt like I could completely let down my guard because they were, after all, chewing machines.
- The family that poops together…
That changed with Robbin. He had impeccable toilet habits and, strangely enough for a rabbit, seemed to have no interest in chewing on anything except cardboard. As a good rabbit mom, I always provided hay but Robbin couldn’t be bothered. I always joked that he would rather starve than eat hay (and he would—I tested him a couple times) or that he’d rather eat cardboard than eat hay. That was borne out by the evidence.
I grew bolder and bolder with leaving him out overnight while I was sleeping (no problem), with leaving him out during the day while I was at work (no problem), with leaving him out all the time (few problems). He had earned it. He was a free-range rabbit!
- I took Robbin to the Humane Society where he chose Bibi.
- Hanging out
- Matching buns
I had learned that rabbits are social creatures within their own rabbitdom and so I took Robbin on some bunny dates. He picked out Bibi and they quickly became best friends. Dhia and Yul welcomed Bibi and it was one big, happy, furry family. It didn’t take long before Bibi, too, earned her free-range stripes. But the joy was not to last.
- The happiest family. Believe it or not, they lined up like this all on their own! Best photo ever! Dhia, Yul, Robbin, Bibi.
We said goodbye first to Yul and then to Dhia. Soon, CJ Cat came into our lives. She is a sweetheart but she was already about two years old. She hadn’t had the advantage of growing up with a rabbit like the other cats had. She just didn’t know what to do about Robbin and Bibi.
CJ would nip their ears or swat their tails, tactics cats use successfully to provoke each other into playing. As a prey animal, Robbin would become very defensive and chase CJ, comically so. They’d run back and forth until finally the rabbit treed the cat on the bed or the windowsill or any place where the rabbit wouldn’t immediately go. He was very protective of Bibi, too.
- Dasie and CJ were never sure what to make of the rabbits.
So Dasie the cat was added to our family for CJ’s benefit. Dasie a friendly goofball who also had no idea what to make of rabbits. After being chased around enough times both cats developed the technique of giving Robbin, and to a lesser extent Bibi, a very wide berth when they needed to pass by.
Unfortunately, Bibi was soon departed. Her malady was gut stasis, a common ailment of rabbits, but I still wonder if it wasn’t brought on by the stress of dealing with two new, semi-hostile cats. She came from a multi-species household when I adopted her, so I’m probably making that up, and yet the timing was so coincidental. Robbin reverted to being an only rabbit.
- Robbin the mountain goat
- Is it suppertime yet?
Robbin was a very athletic rabbit as opposed to Bibi, who was an utter landlubber. There was no bed or sofa that was too tall for him. It warmed the cockles of my heart to walk in the door after a tough day at work to find him folded up on the end of the couch in the front room. When we moved to my current place, all the stacked boxes waiting to be unpacked provided a nice climbing range for my mountain goat rabbit. Sometimes I believed that he thought he was a cat. He had, after all, grown up with two. He loved jumping up onto things, including the tin in which I kept his food, a not-so-subtle hint that I should feed him now.
- Robbin camps out on my dad’s bed
- Getting a banana fix from his dealer
- Relaxing in the sheepskin basket
Robbin also always enjoyed my parents’ visits. Not only would he follow my mom around because she was his banana dealer, but he also would spend most of the day lounging on the poofy surface provided by my dad’s improvised bed of my big sleeping bag laid out on a futon. Robbin did enjoy luxury. While we had it, he could often be found in the sheepskin cat bed that I had put in a wicker basket.
A few years ago, Robbin had a health incident which I think was a seizure of some sort, and one hind side was temporarily weakened as a result. He seemed to recover fully but in the last months it was his back end that failed, particularly on the side that had been affected by whatever that episode had been all about. As he aged his flexibility declined, which inhibited his ability to do everyday rabbity necessities, and his quality of life gradually diminished.
Finally I could no longer deny that it was time to say good-bye. February 2003–October 2013.
- Robbin, CJ, and Dasie, the uneasy detente. Note the ear that remains cocked toward the cats.
*Disclaimer: Don’t worry, I long ago learned about [insert cute baby animal] mills. Robbin was my last pet not acquired from a rescue/foster organization.
Beer excitement: Hinterland White Cap White IPA
October 4, 2013
I interrupt my regularly scheduled blog posts for this important news: I have twelve bottles of my favorite new-to-me beer in my refrigerator! Well, ten, because I gave one to my neighbor to try (she likes it, hey Mikey!) and I’m sitting outside drinking one at this very moment.
(Full disclosure: I wrote the first half of this a week ago when it was 80F/26C, clear, and perfect for sitting outside. Tonight, it is 58F/14C, drizzly, and miserable. I don’t feel like drinking beer at all…)
Let’s get the business taken care of first. Hinterland White Cap White IPA is a pleasant, slightly-cloudy yellow beer that pours with a fizzy, long-lasting head that can be easily reagitated. It isn’t extremely aromatic but when you taste it, it’s an explosion of pink grapefruit in your mouth! That might lead some people to believe that it’s problematically bitter, but that’s not the case. White Cap is only 4.3% alcohol by volume so it all stays in balance. I say best part because I began to experience big beer burnout this summer. I am thrilled that many breweries have started producing smaller versions of hoppy varieties which are still big on flavor, and this is one of them.
I first encountered White Cap at Ginger Hop in northeast Minneapolis. It was my third trip to that bar-restaurant for their tuna tartare starter which has become an occasional payday treat to myself. It’s chopped, raw tuna that has been tossed in lime juice and sesame oil and is served as a mound of perfection topped with fresh cilantro and accompanied by buttered crostini. It’s perfect for a hot day, and so is White Cap.
I’m always up for trying something new, especially when it’s an IPA (my favorite style), so when I learned that an IPA that I had never had was on the menu, I ordered it without hesitation.
Today was a windy, unseasonably warm day here in Minnesota. Combine that with the diminished daylight that fall brings and even in the early evening, we have my preferred conditions for enjoying a beer—at home, sitting on my steps, after dark, warmly windy. And the White Cap is a perfect beer for warm days.
It’s true that White Cap is just good, but I’m trying to decide why I think it’s soooo good. I think I can pinpoint two reasons. The first, I’m sure, is what I said up above about being tired of the high ABV that has been the fashion almost regardless of style, and even (dare I say it) the trend of making every hoppy beer an out-and-out hop bomb. White Cap is gentle in both regards.
The second reason is because of what I think of as the Jameson Effect. Ever so many years ago, I attended an outdoor festival. Let’s call it 2001. It was a beastly hot day in July at a rib cook-off in a surface parking lot downtown—a very localized urban heat island. There weren’t many adult beverage choices. I had tipped over the divide to craft beer, so rather than slum it with the Coors Light or the malt beverage on offer, I chose the only other alternative—Jameson Irish Whiskey. At the time I was still more of a vodka gal if I had booze but I though what the heck and, since it was a stinky-hot day, asked for one on the rocks. The sweltering heat with oppressive humidity under the bare sun on asphalt with the smell of twenty kinds of ribs wafting through the air while watching Harry Casey & the Sunshine Band work their asses off on the music stage provided the perfect atmosphere for that Jameson to be the best drink I had ever had. Ever since then for sentimental reasons, every summer I buy a small bottle of Jameson to have on hand for the inevitable return of that kind of weather.
The first time I had White Cap was also during uncomfortable summer conditions, but not as extremely as the Jameson incident. The temperature was only around 80/26, but the dew point was in the mid-70s/24, so you worked up a sweat just lifting your pint glass to your lips. My Ginger Hop tuna tartare was on order and I eagerly gulped the first couple of sips of the beer. It was the hot weather magic all over again.
Eager to enjoy my new favorite at home, I looked for it at my local liquor stores to no avail. The distributor was no help, other than identifying that they were the carrier, but armed with that information, I got Chris at Sorella Wine & Spirits interested in the quest. Eventually he was successful and the result is tonight’s bounty!
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
This is what has transpired in the last week since I began writing this post. The very day after I acquired my booty, I attended the Autumn Brew Review beer tasting festival which is put on by the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild. If any of my Original Gravity friends have checked in, you might want to stop reading here 😉
I found the Hinterland table which was awkwardly unbusy. On the other hand, that gave me the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the regional brewery representative, Mitchell. He wasn’t pouring White Cap but he did have Saison. I eagerly tried that as it’s a favorite style and it, too, was a delight—a solid representation of the style but instead of sweet-spicy it was black pepper-spicy. I love pepper notes in beer.
While we were talking, Mitchell revealed that he was there alone with no back-up. Since to pour (but for Original Gravity but they were over-volunteered and I didn’t seem particularly needed) was the reason why I had gained entry to the festival, I offered to man the Hinterland table so that he could walk around for a short while. He gave me a crash course in the Saison and the Oktoberfest and away he went.
This is the weird thing about me and tasting festivals: as much as I love trying new beers, I about ninety per cent loathe being out in the beer fest crowd as a patron. I realized that about an hour into my first large festival four times ago. I pleaded with my Original Gravity buddies to let me help out and so they threw me into the fire behind the Alaskan table. Once I switched sides I had a blast, and that’s how I’ve been enjoying tasting mayhem since. This is also one of the few situations in which I’d say I’m actually good at and enjoy schmoozing.
So I was happy to help Mitchell out. You can’t fault me. I’m enthusiastic about beer that I like and that’s one of the things you like about me. He told me to wait a minute and dashed over to his car which was just across the street. He handed me two sixteen-ounce White Cap cans and said that I am the first consumer in Minnesota (or possibly anywhere, I don’t remember which) to possess them. I stuffed them in my jacket pockets and didn’t tell anyone. Until now. You people with cabins and boats, remember this for next summer.
So just one more thing before I wrap up this post that has gone on for longer than you ever thought it could, though to be fair this is like two entries in one with the week-separated writing sessions.
Tonight I cracked open the cans. As I was taking my traditional photo of the poured beer and its container, I noticed that the can design is quite a bit different from the bottle label design. The rocks and Lake Michigan photo from the label has been simplified and graphic-ized for the can, and though the typefaces are the same, the entire treatment of the can design reminds me more of a geographic atlas map. But that’s not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that I re-noticed the word white in the name. Not the white in White Cap, but the white in White IPA. I had ignore that second white with the draught and bottle versions because all I tasted was the grapefruit. But when I poured the can version, smelled it, and tasted it, I realized that the aroma I got from all three versions was the white-as-in-Belgian-style sweetness. And oddly, unexpectedly, the canned version of White Cap White IPA to me tastes more white-as-in-Belgian-style than the draught or bottle versions. I’d better compare against the bottle. I know that sorting the photos I want to add to this post will take at least another beer…
The bottle tastes a little more Belgiany than on previous occasions. My official assessment is that that’s just how my palette is tonight. Such is the joy of beer!
*The events presented are factual, though to help the narrative I may have massaged timelines somewhat.
Ugh, letter to 16yo me, not
September 26, 2013
Usually when I see that someone has written a letter to their something-year-old self I roll my eyes and move on immediately. And now I’m supposed to do that very thing. Groan.
There isn’t actually any reassurance or advice you can give your adolescent self because at that age, you’re going to think you know it all and not listen anyway. And that will just be frustrating for your current self. Nobody wins in this situation.
The thing I’ve always said with regard to this topic is that I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t lived my life the way I have and done the things I’ve done, and since I more or less like myself, I wouldn’t really advise myself to do much differently. And even if I had tried to advise myself, I certainly wouldn’t have listened to someone else giving me directions.
I still don’t.
Right. This is a dead-end.
My history of beer
September 23, 2013
I’ve been asked by a couple people recently how I came to adore beer as I do. If those folks were curious, maybe you are, too.
I always liked beer well enough, I suppose. In my youth in the early 80s, I tended to favor Stroh’s and Michelob. You can’t judge me—craft beer as we think of it today didn’t exist. I probably favored mixed drinks at that point anyway; I remember being quite fond of brandy old fashioneds at one point. The college years saw me drinking whatever macro beer was in the house party keg. Even in my thirties, I liked vodka tonics best, but it is at that point that I had my first memorable beer experience.
It was 1995 and I was spending a lot of time at Rosen’s, the bar next door to my office building. I had graduated to “dark beer” by that point which occasionally meant Guinness Draught, but Newcastle Brown Ale was far and away my favorite. My friends and I ordered some cheese sticks to accompany the beer. Rosen’s, like most places, served them with marinara sauce for dipping. I took a sip of my Newcastle to wash down the dressed cheese and was utterly gob smacked by the burst of cherry flavor that I suddenly detected in the beer. Where had that come from?! I tried the combination at other establishments, but nobody else’s marinara did that to the Newcastle. It was eye-opening in a way I didn’t yet have the knowledge to comprehend (I didn’t yet know of the concept of intentionally pairing drink flavors with food flavors beyond, you know, the basic red wine with meat, white wine with fish). But sitting here writing about it eighteen years later, I still remember the moment at the tall table in the front window like it was last week.
During the passing years I began to add Summit Extra Pale Ale to my “dark” beer repertoire, because that and Guinness were what my bowling alley had on offer. Because Summit was a nice caramelly, amber color as opposed to see-through yellow, it was considered ”dark.” This was still early craft days; I had no idea that Summit was a craft beer. This wasn’t one of my epiphanal beer moments but it bears mentioning, it think, because Summit EPA is the original craft beer in town and remains one of the best and one of my favorites, even with all the upstarts that have come onto the scene.
Fast forward to 2005. One of my bowling friends was well into wine, and invited me to a wine tasting on Nicollet Island. I dutifully tagged along, listening to him geek out on trying to learn things about wine. I enjoyed tasting different wines and gaining a little knowledge, and I really enjoyed the food samples from local restaurants and wished they served bigger bites. I eventually found myself wandering over to the side tent where there were a few brewery tables set up.
Thinking back, I suppose Summit had one of the tables, but it was the Bell’s Brewing beers that I was most interested in sampling. A coworker adored their Two Hearted Ale so I wanted to taste that one, though I hadn’t yet gone to the hop side (that could be a whole other post about me and beer!). I tried the three or four brews that they had there, and it was the Oberon wheat ale that tickled my fancy. I took my sample and went back into the main room.
The first food table I encountered was manned by the chef from Murray’s Steak House who was sautéing up some buttered steak and mushroom bites. I love steak. I love mushrooms. I love butter. I ate the sample. I washed it down with the last couple sips of Oberon. And that was when I had my beerpiphany.
Just as the Rosen’s marinara had done something to the Newcastle, so did the steak-mushroom-butter combination transform the Oberon into one of the most amazing taste moments I still have ever had. All the flavors complimented each other perfectly. That was when I realized that beer could be something special.
As I aged, I eased into hops, and focused my consumption on IPAs. The craft beer movement took off and there was more beer in more styles available. My same coworker who liked Bell’s Two Hearted also adored Chimay Rouge Belgian trippel. That was another style that I just didn’t like the taste of. Yet.
Now it’s 2009. Some friends of friends moved from California to Minneapolis and we became friends. They are foodies and drinkies. They invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner. They did the research and figured out that Ommegang Three Philosophers Belgian quad was just the right beer to serve with one of the courses. To me it didn’t taste as “Belgiany” as Chimay had when I had tried it. And again, it paired absolutely perfectly with the food. Are you noticing a trend yet? The Three Philosophers had a milder Belgian flavor along with prune and cherry (but there was no marinara in sight). I tried other Ommegang beers (which are mostly all Belgian-style of one sort or another) and found them all to be gentle versions of their styles. I decided maybe Belgian beers weren’t so bad after all.
By now, a couple of years ago in 2011, I had embraced the craft beer movement with full enthusiasm. I had beer geek friends and many acquaintances in the industry. I eagerly tried new, different beers whenever I could. I started attending beer classes. I was voluntarily ordering Belgian beers and liking them.
Except…
Within the Belgian genre live sour beers. And within sour are lambic and Flanders. I tried to wrap my taste buds around sours because many beer drinkers who knew far more than I really liked them and I wanted to be on par with my beer-smart friends. But I was struggling to get to a point where I could drink more than a sip or two.
Finally, one of the classes was about sour beers. We had samples of several of the major styles, including a Flanders. And then it happened again. As soon as the class leader described it as tasting like a barnyard or a horse blanket, I turned the corner. Now, those funky Flanders beers are my favorite of the sours. Horse blanket. HORSE BLANKET! What a fun way to think of a flavor! I’m glad I persisted in my effort.
I suppose the broad takeaway from this is that trying new things can lead to incredibly rewarding experiences. When you’re contemplating whether to go with something outside your comfort zone, remember, you’re not making a lifetime commitment and you might very well surprise yourself.
Horse blankets!
The day in the day: welcome to Wednesday
September 22, 2013
8:15. It is, of course, a workday for me. I bike to work every day in the not-cold weather. I’ve wimped out. I used to bike all year, down to about 15F/-10C and/or unless it was slippery-slushy-treacherous. Not any more. Now I only go down to about 40F/5C, mostly because I prefer to walk, but when it’s nice outside I can’t overlook the time savings of biking, even though it’s more stressful. I have to cross from one side of downtown to the other. I forgot to start taking photos, so you get the original of one I took to post on Instagram.
8:30. I am at my desk. I’ve eaten my breakfast and checked in with the kitten cam (eating breakfast while I’m dong things like checking email saves me precious minutes at home). It’s time to dig in. I’m project managing and art directing a 500+-page illustrated children’s story bible. No time to waste!
9:30. Oh damn, nobody made coffee yet.
10:30. My boss asked me to read a thing. It’s a series of sort of spoofy, fake news stories written from the points of view of characters from other books that we’re publishing.
11:45. Lunch at my desk. I usually eat at my desk whether I pack or go out and bring something back. Today it’s the veggie pie recipe I posted last week. In this week’s version I used brown rice, a poblano pepper, a red bell pepper, an onion, and three tomatoes. Still versatile, still delicious!
12:45. Post-lunch. This is the first and last bathroom mirror selfie you will ever, EVAR see of me.
2:00. I drink a lot of water anyway, plus the air in our building is really dry, so I feel better if I drink even more water. At a minimum I drink one glass in the morning, one with lunch, and one or two in the afternoon. Lately I’ve been getting two in before lunch, partly as a result of the weather’s having been incredibly hot for a stretch.
2:45. We play hangman with dry erase markers on the kitchen window. I’m the wordmaster this time around. The word is hubbub.
3:45. Still slaving away.
4:45. Freedom! Or at least it will be when I make it back across downtown.
5:00. First destination of the evening, a neighborhood, er, microbrewery?… brewpub? This is Minnesota and we still have on the books antiquated liquor laws from the Prohibition Era that restrict how breweries may behave. Because this one is classified as a brewpub (I think that’s what they actually are), they must keep production below 3,500 barrels per year. They’ve gotten around this by exploiting a loophole which allows them to increase capacity if they have additional physical locations. So they’ve opened a tap bar and a bowling alley bar, which garners them an extra two 3,500s of capacity per year. But I digress.
The bowling alley venue just opened up and I am in one of the inaugural bowling leagues there. I was talking to the owner as I bowled against him and he said I should get to the brewery and try the limited release very limited quantity wee heavy ale that they had tapped a few days earlier which wouldn’t be around for long and which had turned out particularly well this year (each of the three locations serve all the regular beers, but each also has one or two brews that are exclusive to it). Since the brewery is across the street from my actual first destination on Wednesdays, I complied. It was, in fact, delicious as promised. Not as boozy as some wee heavies and with a pleasant brown sugar and prune taste.
5:45. Now I’m across the street waiting for my usual early activity, beer school. Yes, I said beer school. There’s a really nifty organization called the Better Beer Society that was formed to be an educational facilitator both for people who offer and serve beer and for people who drink beer. To that end, they put on two thirteen-week sessions per year of Beer University. I am a longtime student.
6:45. This week it was learning about three of the four basic ingredients of beer (malted grain, yeast, hops, and water), which kinds of flavors each imparts, and how to taste beer, presented by beer smartypants Michael Agnew. We sampled five without knowing what they were and had to identify what we tasted, and then make a guess about the style if not the actual brand. I correctly guessed the first sample to be Victory Prima Pils and the fourth to be Rodenbach Grand Cru. I am ashamed that I did not recognize that the third sample was Odell Myrcenary, one of my top favorite beers. It was fun and interesting as always.
8:00. Now I’m at another neighborhood venue where I kill two birds with one stone. First up is to drink the Midweek Beer Geek beer, which is usually something limited that’s just been released for the season or ever, or something less common that maybe is in extremely limited release. This week it was Stone 17th Anniversary Götterdämmerung (whoa, iOS, totally impressive that you predicted Götterdämmerung after just the Gött!). Over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten pretty geeky with a lot of people who work in beer in town, so the local Stone Brewing brewery rep, Corey, was happy to mug it up with me for a photo. I’m going to leave the photo dark because he doesn’t know that I wanted the picture to post here.
9:30. The smartest thing I did in the context of beer, bars, and doing things was to defect from my Thursday bocce ball league to a Wednesday team (with one of my fellow Midweek Beer Geeks)—because I’m there anyway. There are two courts and four shifts, so our matches begin anywhere between 6:15 and 10:00 (there’s a schedule, of course). Tonight we played at 8:45. We actually won two of the three games. We’re very streaky.
10:30. As if I haven’t already had enough fun on Wednesdays, a year or so ago I realized that yet another other neighborhood bar has karaoke. If you’ve been with me on this blog for a long time, you may remember that I used to publish my Thursday Karaoke Report, where I’d share crappy iPhone recordings of my karaoke warblings after bowling. I still record every performance but I’m not currently doing that over here on WordPress, though I was thinking I might at least make a page to just list what I’ve sung each time.
Karaoke is where I get in trouble, because I love it so much that I tend to stay until the bitter end, and then I’m so amped up that it can sometimes be 2am by the time I get to sleep. That, of course, makes for some rather difficult Thursdays. Tonight, though I still felt compelled to go over there, oddly enough I wasn’t actually in the mood to sing, though of course I did. It was busy and I was tired already anyway, so I did actually hit the sidewalk after just the one song. Last week it was really fun because it was really slow, to the point that it was just me, another gal, and the bar staff, to Joel the host got it in his head that we all should. participate in running through the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. It was a blast! And yes, I recorded the whole thing.
Midnight. So I actually got home early for a Wednesday, though not nearly early enough for how tired I was the whole day. The cat’s got the right idea.
Good night!
I got caught doing what?!
September 15, 2013
I’d need a while if I were to recount all of the incredibly embarrassing moments I’ve endured in my life. But whenever the topic comes up, there is one incident that my memory invariably shoots straight to, even though it was, now, forty years ago.
I was about ten years old. I went into the Lawson’s Dairy, the 1970s version of today’s convenience store, I don’t even remember why. Maybe my mom had charged me with the important task of buying some milk, or maybe I merely intended to procure some candy with my allowance. I don’t recall that part. I only remember that curiosity got the better of the cat and I innocently picked up a Playboy or Penthouse and started leafing through it all wide-eyed with wonder.
The store attendant, an “older” man (so probably in his thirties or forties) with dark hair, glasses, and a mustache, bustled over to me and grabbed the magazine out of my hands. “You shouldn’t be looking at that!” I don’t know which one of us was actually more embarrassed. I do know that I nearly ran him over trying to push past him to exit the store as hastily as possible, absolutely mortified. It was a long, long time before I’d go back into that store.
9 things that bug the shit out of me
September 9, 2013
And now for something lighter: I can’t believe I’ve never shared a list of pet peeves before! Roughly in order, then, from most annoying.
Fingernail clipping. I don’t shave my legs at the office, please have the courtesy to at least go into another room if you must spontaneously groom in the middle of the workday.
Open-mouth chewing. I get that you’re enthusiastic about your baby carrots. But I have started leaving for my lunch break when you make your lunch because I can’t take another half hour of your open- mouthed chomping. Crunches carry. To twenty feet way.
Smokers in front of building entryways. This one particularly gets my goat when I get to work in the morning. I am all freshly showered and optimistic about how much ass I’m going to kick today. I get immediately cranky when I have to walk through your cloud of fumes and smell it in my hair for the next hour. Thanks for ruining my day before it gets started, chump. Move your stinky habit a few feet away from the door.
People in front of me walking more slowly but not in a straight line so I am unable to pass. I know I’ve ranted about this before. Walking in public throughways would go ever so smoothly if only people observed the same conventions when walking as they do driving. Stay on your side of the road, slower traffic to the side.
People in front of me walking three or four abreast so that I am unable to pass. Please have some awareness of yourselves in the wide world. You are not the only bodies in motion and some of those other bodies would like to get around you.
People walking toward me two, three, four abreast who don’t break rank and expect me to give way. I don’t. I’ve bumped into people. Why should I flatten my solo self against the wall because you’re too self-important to have common courtesy?
Fellow bicyclists who blow through red lights and stops signs. You are breaking the law. You are a safety hazard.
SUVs on the road. We live in Minnesota and we have snowy winters and you want to feel secure on the road. I get that, especially since I have a little gnat of a car and often feel very insecure in winter driving conditions. But so often it seems like you drive with an air of entitlement and complete lack of consideration toward your fellow road warrior. It is not all about you. We’re all rushed and trying to get somewhere.
Not saying please or thank you. I might have told this story before, too. One night at closing time in my youth, I barked a command at the night manager. He completely stopped what he was doing, turned to me with his full attention, and say, “You know, I would like my job so much better if you guys just said ’please’ and ’thank you.’” That has stuck with me for these last thirty years and I try very, very hard to abide by it every time. Every time. It’s not hard and it does make things so much nicer for the party on the receiving end.
Litterers. Show some respect for the neighborhood at small and the world at large.
Other people’s toddlers and small children, usually. It most often happens at the farmer’s market or other crowded gatherings such as the State Fair. Your child is not the most precious thing to the rest of the world and nobody wants to hear it badgering you until you give in because parents these days are afraid to say no and mean it. If it is so young that can’t self-locomote, leave it and your double-wide stroller at home.
Please, was that eleven things? Thank you.
Hard for me, harder for her
September 8, 2013
Two years ago, my cousin and her fiancé were in a car accident. They were stopped in traffic in an interstate highway construction zone. They were behind a semi-truck. Another one barreled up from behind. It turned them and their little Honda into sandwich filling. They both had serious head injuries. I suppose that’s redundant. When is a head injury not serious? When is it not life-changing?
I will preface whatever else I write today with the acknowledgement that anything I felt or feel is nothing compared to what my cousin, her fiancé, and both their families struggled with and will continue to struggle with for the rest of all their lives. I know that I’m just a bystander and that in life, it’s not about me.
But this blog entry is. The immediate aftermath of the accident ranks right up there as one of the hardest things I’ve been through. That’s why it’s been more than a week since I last wrote. I had to work up to this. Selfish.
Me and cousin A, a week after her birth. One of the only times in my life that I’ve held a baby.
I have a small family. I’m an only child, my mom’s an only child, and my dad has one brother. My uncle and his wife have two children. The oldest, A, the one in the accident, is seventeen years younger than I, and our two branches of the family never lived nearby geographically. My cousins and my parents are pretty close, but not them and me.
Nevertheless, when my parents called to tell me about the accident, the family instincts kicked in. The first thing to do was shepherd my other cousin, A’s sister M, through her overnight layover from Montana through Minneapolis to Michigan. I brought her back to my place for a few hours of fitful sleep, then got her back out to the airport. M is outdoorsy. She didn’t care about a refreshing shower.
The next day at work, I began making my own arrangements to go to Michigan. Fortunately my schedule usually can be pretty flexible, so I was the first of my family to be able to go. I didn’t know what I was in for.
Again, because of our tiny family size, I haven’t had to deal with many misfortunes. My parents are ridiculously healthy. My four grandparents all made it to old age, so there weren’t any big surprises when they died in their 80s, 90s, and, finally, 105. I’ve attended the funerals of friends’ loved ones, but those weren’t people I had a huge vested interest in. I had my own visit to the emergency room a few years ago for what turned out to be severe heartburn brought on by a week of eating tomato-based dishes breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Don’t laugh. Women tend not to think they’re having heart attacks. I didn’t want to be a statistic. Twelve hours later it all made sense.
My point is, nothing in my life had prepared me for the shock of seeing my cousin lying unconscious in a hospital bed.
You see it in movies and in soap operas. You see actors with fake needles in their arms and fake tubes in their mouths. You see actors weeping at the bedsides of their actor fake relatives. It doesn’t prepare you for the first time you see a real person whom you actually care about lying unconscious in a hospital bed with needles in her arms, a tube down her throat, a tube in her neck, her delicate hands that could play the violin so well lying limp at the side of her induced comatose body. It just doesn’t. And then you go into the next room and see her beloved lying there in the same condition.
A and A (my cousin’s fiancé is also an A, also a musician, and I think it’s appropriate that I’m not using their full names) had just finished packing up their Michigan home to move to Boston for job opportunities, with their wedding to follow soon thereafter in Wisconsin where my aunt and uncle live(d).
I am an emotional ice queen. It’s not that I don’t feel stuff, but I don’t often give much away outwardly. I partly get that from my dad. With my mom, nothing is unknown. She doesn’t filter, and she kind of badgers and passive-aggressives to have things go her preferred way. My dad, on the other hand, internalizes, maintains a pretty even keel, and mostly goes with the flow. I internalize, too, combined with the life experience of failed relationships and not wanting to make that emotional commitment too soon. I try to save my energy for the things that matter more.
I guess I had been saving it up for the moment I saw my aunt and uncle, which was followed closely by the moment I was ushered into A’s hospital room. I became a puddle of mush. My aunt and uncle had the advantage of having had a week already to culture their disbelief and numbness. I was fresh.
I stayed for a week. I met A’s good friends and cousins-in-law from my aunt’s side. Everybody was trying to be optimistic about A’s chances. I feel guilty because at the time I was more in the realistic camp as it seemed in those early days. I felt guilty for not having been a better cousin in the previous thirty-one years. At A’s bedside I promised to do better, but I haven’t. I still feel guilty.
I’m happy to report that I’ve been proved wrong about A’s recovery, at least. Again I’ll say that nothing you learn about head injuries leads you to think that things will return to the old normal. But A is leading a decent life, considering her circumstances. She remains in Michigan and my aunt and uncle live there with her. She has resumed many professional musician activities, though she has issues with short-term memory.
I don’t know the status of A’s relationship with her fiancé, whether they are still considered to be engaged. He, too, has made a recovery, but is not as well physically. He has paralysis, which includes not being able to swallow, and is confined to a wheelchair, though his mental faculties are intact and strong. He is back in Indiana with his parents.
I don’t know how to deftly wrap this up. Thanks for reading.
Lies, lies, lies, yeah
September 1, 2013
I fib regularly. So do you. If you claim not to, then you’re lying! I massage the facts, I don’t tell the whole truth, I say I like the food or the beer when I didn’t quite. Everybody does it. Then there are the things that I’ll tell to health professionals in whatever field but about which I’ll keep stumm in casual conversation. You don’t need to know some of those details.
But have I ever told a whopper of a lie? I honestly can’t remember. Continuing on the theme that has cropped up the last couple of posts of remembering back to my youth (which is longer ago for me than it probably is for you), I imagine there must certainly have been things that I lied to my parents about. Well, no imagining about it. You’re a teenager, you lie to your parents.
Actually, going back to that list of things that I remember about where I grew up and the peeing along the side of the church incident, I know I lied to my mom about that. She, of course, wanted to know why I hadn’t just come home to use the bathroom. Home was two doors down. I told her that I just had to go so bad that I wet my pants. I didn’t confess that Lulu had shown me how she always did that and goaded me into doing it with her, sans pulling down my shorts.
When I was an older child, maybe eight or nine, I perpetrated some vandalism. I ended up being questioned about it by the administrators of the building and I did out and out lie and say I knew nothing about what happened. I imagine the adults all really did know it had been me because after it happened I was no longer taken along to that place. Don’t ask, I’m not telling more than that!
Some youthful indiscretions I didn’t get away with. The main one I remember was when I stole pocketfuls of penny candy from the drug store. Naturally, my parents wanted to know where I had gotten it all. I could maintain the subterfuge for only so long, and then it turned into a confession, and then into the inevitable kid learning experience of taking the unconsumed items back to the store and shaming myself to the owner.
The other one that I remember “getting away with” was in high school when I had entered into my rebellious phase the second year after we moved. I stayed out all night for the first time ever with my friend Kurt. When my parents and I were having the heart-to-heart in the aftermath I told them everything except where we had actually been, which was behind a rollaway bed in an upstairs back hallway in the Holiday Inn.
I can’t think of any major lies that I’ve told as an adult. Of course I pull the occasional sickie—again, who doesn’t? And I suppose I do have to count the times when I’ve proclaimed “I’m fine to drive” knowing I probably wasn’t actually.
Lying is an uncomfortable thing to think about. What’s your biggest lie?
Age 6-1/2, amusing myself at home drawing a picture, which doesn’t require lying. Note how my mom artfully framed me off-center so that she also captured the Christmas decoration on the coffee table behind me.
Good luck moving up ‘cuz I’m moving out
August 31, 2013
I don’t exactly remember the day I moved out. By that I mean it was either when I moved into the boarding house or into the college dorm. I have a document at home (I’m writing from elsewhere) that I believe will shed light on the matter. I haven’t updated it for many years because I’ve lived at my last two addresses for eleven and eight years respectively, and I’ve had my job for over eighteen.
I’m inclined to think that it was the boarding house to which I moved when I first left the nest. When I get home and can refer to my sheet we may find that it was the dorm, but the boarding house is where I’ll start. The only thing I can say that I remember for sure without consulting the reference material is that I was at university for only two and a half weeks my first go-round. (Also, geez, life-changing high school occurrence and first moving out, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown remembering these things from my youth!)
I tried college for a couple of weeks. It didn’t work out. The following semester I tried again. I lasted a little longer but still nowhere near a full term. I think it was about then that I made my move.
It was my first experience, so I knew nothing about anything, not what “a room” meant, or “shared,” or “boarding,” or any of it. I just knew it was what seemed like an inexpensive price that meant I wouldn’t be living with my parents anymore. As a post-high school teenager, not living with your parents can seem like the most important thing.
I wasn’t savvy enough to have gone over and looked the place in advance. I only reacted to the “facts” in the newspaper ad. If I had been, I wouldn’t have been surprised when my part of the arrangement turned out to be as the (bed)roommate of another young lady. The “private” room was merely the semi-divided off area in between the stairs to upstairs and the other divided-off area beyond which my comrade and I slept. She and I had to go through “private” room to go back downstairs to the bathroom. There were not, as I recall, any doors in our upstairs area, just half-walls.
Here is where you will either roll your eyes or think, huh? One of my favorite memories of the place involves the house TV downstairs. By which I mean the television that we young squirts could watch after our older landlord-couple retired for the evening. When you’re eighteen or nineteen, the age I am now (fifty) seems like the end of the world. They were probably about that age then.
I remember coming home after work one night (again, I’d have to consult the document in order to say exactly where that was). It seemed that the old people had gone to bed so, it being the age when MTV actually played music videos (first half of the ’80s), I took advantage and turned the TV on real low to MTV. It was about two-thirds through Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” video when the old man came in and said the equivalent of “turn that long-haired hippy-freak music down you damned kids!”
That was the last time that I dared to turn the television on in that house.
It wasn’t long after that that my coccaine-snorting though good-looking acquaintance Jon sent some flowers to the house. Everybody got very excited and thought a proposal as imminent. I did not, but they were all a little sheltered.
It was a month-to-month arrangement, I stayed there only a few months. I think I also remember that I had bought some pans to use in the house kitchen, because we had to supply our own supplies. I think my two porcelain pots are those original equipment.
When I attempted to resume university the next time (after a year at a technical college where I learned some computer programming on punch cards), I decided it would be a good idea to move into a dorm. I didn’t go away but I still wanted to get away.
I had an adjustment or two of roommates, but it wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination. There are some boy things I could go into (like a crush starting a rumor about himself just to see how gossipy we all really were, and we were) but my fondest memory was about Def Leppard.
The album “Pyromania” had just come out. Pauline, who lived across the hall, and I both possessed it. For a few weeks we loved nothing more than to fire up our record players and play dealing turntables with Pyromania. I think we had fun just coordinating the synchronization, but I enjoyed also the imprecise phasing in and out of how the 33-1/3 revolutions per minute happened (you know, 33rpm) and how that sort of simulated cross-hall stereophonics. You know, hi-fi.
The other main memory about moving out over the years is that the first time (or two or three), everything I took with me fit in the back of my 1973 periwinkle AMC Gremlin—with the back seat folded down. Eight years ago for my last move (some twenty-five years later), I rented the largest U-Haul truck and filled it to capacity. Next time, I’ll probably have to hire an actual moving service.
I often have nightmares about having to move back in with my parents. Shiver me timbers. That would never work. That’s why it’s a nightmare!
– – – – – – – – –
Now that I’ve been able to consult my sheet, I see that time has clouded my memories. I lived in that boarding house for only one month, it looks like, and I had two other addresses besides my parents’ house before I moved into the dorm two and a half years later.
I was going to give you the Street View shot of the boarding house, but the town doesn’t rate full coverage so there’s only a low resolution satellite view. Then I thought I’d show you the dorm, but Street View only goes on the parallel street a block away. So I guess you’ll have to make do with this photo of me in the dorm. One of my finer moments, for sure!
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