what are you, eight?

For anyone who knew me in the ca. 1985-1999 era and visited my house, you know about the kick-a$$ bunk bed my dad built for me in third grade, which I insisted on using throughout high school and, during school holidays, throughout college as well. When I left the state for grad school, my parents took the opportunity to dismantle the bunk bed, marking the end of an era. Well, consider this the Great 21st-Century Bunk Bed Renaissance, because it's back:

I got back a fixture of my childhood, and my parents got back a good chunk of storage space in their garage; everybody's happy. I thought about putting a desk in the underneath area by the white chair, but I think I'll make it into a reading cubby with cushy floor seating instead. Are you jealous yet? Despair not, friends, because you're looking at the guest bed. Come on over! (Aerobed available for the faint of heart, faint of heights, or notably tall among you.)

the ankle monitor comes off at last!

There's still some paperwork to sign, but I have now passed my probation! I bet you didn't know I was on probation. If you're wondering what my offense was, it involved getting hired by Hennepin County Library. Apparently, the County considers getting hired by itself something worthy of punitive measures.

Okay, so maybe my probation was in the probatio, "testing time" sense of the word. But since my library shares a building with the district courts, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe I would show up to work one Saturday morning, someone down the hall would hear that I was still on probation, and I'd get press-ganged into wearing a reflective vest and picking up trash all day. Well, no more living in fear! And better yet, no more curfews and keeping my nose clean! It's back to my old, degenerate self now. Or not.

I may officially and fully work for The Man now, but don't worry: I'm keepin' it real.

good neighbors

I opened my front door on Sunday afternoon to figure out what sound I was vaguely hearing from next door. It was my Ukrainian neighbor, singing melancholy Russian folk songs at full voice with an impressive Russian-style baritone. It was lovely. Especially compared to my neighbor in Champaign during grad school, who liked to play Cher dance remixes at 2 in the morning. We'll soon find out how far Nadia and Vasily's neighborly tolerance and devotion to music go; I need to practice my oboe.

thunder sucks

That's how my dog feels about it, anyway. She gets this pathetic look on her face and hides under/behind/in the most secure place she can find. Today, that meant cuddling up with the power adapter under my little computer table. One thing about dogs, they can really emote long-suffering with the best of them.

snapshot

Here is a snapshot of my week:

A partial catalog of contents: me; Brynn (not a fan of the flash); boxes; piles of books I'll never have time to finish; hidden on the left, Brookdale's Guitar Hero equipment (I want to make sure this guitar isn't broken like the other one- I know, how selfless of me); in the front, my oboe and Plymouth Concert Band folder for a veterans event tomorrow morning; on my feet, my happy new sandals- thank you, REI employee discount! Such has been my week, conveniently piled in a corner of my living room.

Maybe they should have worn seat belts...?

This article appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press earlier this week and really struck my fancy:

A late-night couch-towing stunt in Hartland Township, Wis., led to the hospitalization of three men Sunday.

Joseph M. Schoeder, 23, of Beldenville, Wis., was in a Chevy pickup pulling a couch through a pasture about 1:30 a.m. - with three other guys on the sofa, authorities said.

It's unclear what went wrong, but...

The article goes on, but let's stop there. Unclear? I think I've got a pretty good idea what went wrong. They were towing a couch...behind their pickup...through a pasture...with three passengers. What, were the cows already tipped?

And what's better, it turns out that this was an annual event for the group in celebration of the fishing opener. A follow-up article states, "The incident remained under investigation Monday, and the sheriff said she could not yet say whether drinking was involved, if any laws were broken, or where the group got the couch."

Welcome to the Satellite of Sorbo

Hello again! My posting gap wasn't due to mere laziness this time. I moved into my new place Sunday, and I didn't have an internet connection until now. Plus, I've had my head buried in a variety of cardboard boxes, but the end is in sight. Sure, I'm missing a few key pieces of furniture like a kitchen table, but I'm sure IKEA and/or spring garage sales will solve that problem soon. A big thank you to the two Jasons who helped me move: one willingly, and one through trickery. I assured my cousin Jason that I would use my NetFlix connections to get a hold of Walking Tall: The Payback, the Kevin Sorbo sequel to the The Rock remake of the 1970's Joe Don Baker classic tale of vigilante justice. That adds up to a movie that's twice removed from what was already B-grade material, but Jason being the bad movie aficionado that he is, he really wanted to see it. I graciously offered to host the viewing at my new place, and oh did I mention that we'll need to move the TV and a few other things over there first? Clever, eh? But there was indeed a Payback, or more like a Payoff, because the movie was Sorbo-rifically bad, in a very entertaining way. And as Jason pointed out, the first movie I ever watched in my home was Kevin Sorbo's Walking Tall: The Payback, and nothing will ever change that. In the tradition of MST3K's Satellite of Love, he christened my digs the "Satellite of Sorbo." See, Mom- more good uses for your label maker. I'll never mock again.

"best forgotten by" date

One unfortunate difference between my old job and my new one is that the bureaucracy and politics in my life have about tripled. That's to be expected in a big system, I suppose, but it's amazing to me how much mental energy is wasted by people worrying and/or complaining about issues big and small- not to mention the people causing issues big and small for petty reasons. The phenomenon certainly isn't tied to my line of work; a friend of mine recently told me that the hens in his office are all clucking about the unwelcome changes forced on them by new printers. So I've devised a method of screening what scuttlebutt is worth my time. I'll ask myself, will this issue outlast the milk in my fridge? When that last inch I never manage to use goes sour, will this latest drama still have any bearing on my life? If not, I'll save myself some time and blow it off now.

because "Senior Wrangler sauce" doesn't fit on a paint chip

I discovered this week that home ownership translates almost instantly into trips to Home Depot, and today it paid off. My mom, our friend Barb, and I tackled the walls of my condo, and I am quite happy with the results so far. [note: we didn't literally tackle the walls, or we'd be all sticky and orange now.] This photo is a little shady, but it captures the color pretty decently:


The darker shade in the living room is "Amber Wave" (just one), and the lighter kitchen color is "Brandy Butter," which I only recently realized is an actual holiday-related substance, not just the brain child of the fine folks in the marketing department at Behr Paint. Alternative names for the edible, non-acrylic-based version include "Senior Wrangler sauce," care of Cambridge, and thanks to a Euro-urban legend, "brandy spreadable fat." Mmmm. I love Wikipedia. And I think Behr missed out on a real winner of a name.

Donner and Blitzen, or dah-nah-endableet-zoon?

We had a nice, healthy thunderstorm roll through the Twin Cities this evening. As I sat on the floor of my new condo (no furniture) listening to rain bounce off the skylight (very cool), my mind drifted to thoughts of German (for no reason). 'Donner' and 'Blitzen', as you may well know, are German for 'thunder' and 'lightning', respectively. Now I'm sure Santa had their speed, power, and skyward association in mind when he named two flying reindeer after thunder and lightning, but were these truly the best name choices? I mean honestly, how many thunderstorms do they have at the North Pole, or in Europe at Christmastime, for that matter? There are other cold-weather phenomenon he could have chosen that would've been much more appropriate. Blizzard, for example. Or Wind Chill. Heck, he could've used a nice Inuit word for "freakish jingling flying horse pulling a fat man"; it's not like he'd have to travel all that far to ask them for ideas.

Or maybe I'm giving Santa a bad rep. Maybe his reindeer do have lovely, culturally and meteorologically relevent names. Maybe Clement C. Moore, in the grand tradition of dead white guys everywhere, couldn't pronounce Inuit and therefore made up his own names that were perpetuated in "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Just as "Ojibwe" became "Chippewa" and "Ho Chunk" became "Winnebago" (don't ask), the Inuit word for "freakish jingling flying horse pulling a fat man" was transliterated in the poem as "Donner and Blitzen." I'm no linguist, but it sounds good to me. Scholars specializing in 19th-century Christmas poetry now believe that Moore probably didn't write the poem anyway, so I say it's open season on the shoddy Inuit transliteration!

Welcome to 2037!

At high noon on Friday, I discovered a time machine. I activated this vision of my future by merely signing my name 29 times, and just like that I owned a home and a 30-year mortgage. Not that I really plan on living in this condo for 30 years, but in one of endless possible worlds, I will be 60 years old and finally full owner of my 780 square feet.

There were a couple weeks between when I paid off my student loan and when I closed on my new home. In those weeks, I was debt-free for the first time since college, and the last time until, well, 2037. Those were some great weeks. That said, I really like my new place. Now if I can just find the time to paint and move in...

How do you spell slacker? A-L-I-A-S

It's been a while since my last post. I blame Jennifer Garner. I just discovered Alias, only 6 years late. Thanks to Netflix and...other...sources, I've been burning through them like it's going out of style. Wait- can you do something "like it's going out of style" if it already went out of style? It's too soon for my Alias obsession to have retro or ironic coolness. I'm simply behind. That's okay; at the rate I'm going, it won't be long before I'm out of Aliases to cut into my reading pile.

I'm thinking of inventing an Alias drinking game. Or jelly bean eating game, whatever. I'm sure someone has already done this, but I've avoided a Google search to keep my ideas pure. Here's a sneak peek:

1 Drink when Sydney's (Jennifer Garner's) hair is a color other than brown
2 Drinks when it's a flourescent or neon shade
1 Drink when the bad guy keeps his secret lair in the back room of an ultra-hip night club
1 Drink when anyone says "let's go".
1 Drink when Syd speaks a language other than English
2 Drinks if she speaks two or more other languages in one episode
1 Drink when Marshall digresses into a random story during a mission briefing
1 Drink when Marshall's co-workers interrupt his digressions by saying, "Marshall!"
3 Drinks if Marshall ever gets through a briefing without digressing
1 Drink for every meaningful, romantic tension-filled look between Sydney and Vaughn
1 Drink when Jack Bristow responds to a direct question or statement by simply staring
3 Drinks if Jack demonstrably smiles
1 Drink for every new Rambaldi device or manuscript that's introduced
2 Drinks when said devices or manuscripts are assembled into a powerful and mysterious uber-device
3 Drinks when said uber-device causes a gi-normous red ball of water to hover for no apparent reason

You get the idea. Any additions?