This is how some people feel about winter around here. After a long run of fairly mild winters, this one seems to be packing some of the punch of the winters of my youth. Lots of snow, long periods of below zero temps, the kind of weather that makes people feel like the snow sculptor featured above. I was doing pretty well with winter this year. I have a theory that if you are out in the cold, don’t let it make you cringe and shiver, stand up to it and it doesn’t make you so uncomfortable. And on the snow removal side of the equation, my neighbor has a huge snowblower that he loves to use so much that he blows out my driveway for me when we get a big snow. So I was rolling through pretty well until I had a flair up of my Crohn’s disease right when the bottom fell out of the temperatures. Among other things, Crohn’s makes it hard to stay warm and saps your energy. For about three weeks I was really hating winter, I was cold all the time, I never went outside and I always had about ten layers of clothing on. I’m feeling better now and yesterday I went out to clean up my driveway, shovel the snow that the plow had pushed onto it and get off the light dusting we had gotten overnight. It was about 15 degrees and sunny, the driveway faces south so the snow wasn’t rock hard. After about 45 minutes of shovelling, helped by my amazingly cheerfull daughters, the driveway was pristine. And I was feeling great. It’s so invigorating to get out there on a day like that. Plus it’s February. How much longer can it last. And I have crocuses planted in my lawn. It’s gonna look so cool when they come up!

Yesterday the person in charge of sending out the company production schedules emailed a revised version. It’s a big deal and schedules are constantly changing. In the email, I think she meant to say “Pass this on to those who wanted to know.” Instead she wrote “Pass this on to those who whined to know.” Thank you Dr. Freud.

Cable Repair

History_Pig writes about computer struggles this morning. I was fighting with my techno buggaboo last night. TV. The background on this story is that when I called the cable company a couple of years ago and said I wanted high speed internet, but wanted to drop the cable tv package, cutting back to the one that only had the local channels, they sent out some recent Russian immigrant to disconnect me. He took the box off the tv in the basement, but never disconnected anything, so I’ve been enjoying cable tv for free for a couple of years. Beck and I sat down to watch West Wing last night and what we saw was a blur with a purple stripe down the middle and lot’s of noisy static. She discovered that the tv in the basement brought it in fine so techno genious figured there must be something wrong with the way the upstairs tube was connected or set up. I pulled everything out from the wall, wiggled all the cables, found nothing supsicious, put everything back. It was working fine again. The touch of genious I guess.

Seems like everybody’s doin’ it:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

I’m going to knock off Oregon this year, Benson is now living in Bend and I’m going to get out there at least once.
There were no coffee filters this morning. I improvised one out of a paper towel. Not bad.

Piggy would have hated me as a Junior High student. In seventh grade at South Jr. High in Moorhead Minnesota the class was divided into seven sections. That’s right, the Baby Boom was in full swing in ’49. Section seven-seven was obviously reserved for the miscreants. And even though I tested very high on standardized tests I was put in section 7-7. Two problems, I though I knew everything and I thought I was funny. I remember in seventh grade science I once had an argument with the teacher over the logic of the answer to a quiz question. I wouldn’t drop it. I think it went on for days. I researched material to back up my argument. He finally gave up and gave me credit. My eighth grade science teacher was one of those great teachers who makes the subject matter interesting by introducing some humor into the lessons. I can’t remember his name but he was a round little guy with a graying brush cut. Probably a WWII vet. Problem was, I was constantly trying to upstage him. In the course of that year my desk was placed at the front of the class, at the back of the class and finally out in the hall. I still got straight A’s. The nice thing about those days was that I wasn’t diagnosed as ADHD and put on drugs. I was just smacked around, which was kind of fun. Although still hold a grudge against the one guy who smacked me around the most, Iverson the sadistic shop teacher basketball coach. He not only was always standing behind me when I started acting up, but he used to love to humiliate me in shop class because I had absolutely no knack for that kind of thing. I still have daydreams of hunting him down in a nursing home and pummelling him with his walker. Come to think of it he’s probably only about 75 or so, he’d probably still kick my ass, and then he’d call me a girl.
Beck just informed my I woke her up in the middle of the night with a fart. The romance isn’t gone.

Did anyone else notice the legal disclaimer for one of the Viagra type drugs being advertised on the Super Bowl? “If an erection lasts more than four hours see a doctor immediately.”

I was listening to an interview of Roger Staubach sometime last week when he was credited with coining the term “Hail Mary Pass.” His last second pass to Drew Pearson that beat the Vikings and sent the Cowpies to the Super Bowl. It was 1975 and every Vikings fan old enough remembers the play. And we are all still pissed off. Obvious offensive pass interference. The worst call in the history of the NFL. The root of my eternal hatred of the Cowpies. But that’s not my point. In the sixties, Shocky Strand, the Moorhead Spud (that’s right, we were the Spuds) basketball coach referred to a forced shot as a “Hail Mary.” So on that particular play Roger not only stole the Super Bowl from the Vikings, he falsely is credited with coining a nugget of American colloquialism.

One of my pals dropped off his 2 year old boy this morning so Q could babysit while he was at a meeting. Oh, man is our house ever not childproof. It was a constant no, don’t touch, watch out. I’d forgotten what it’s like. Q is so patient and good with little kids. I wish she would extend that patience to her mom.

Tomorrow if you are watching the Superbowl and if you’re watching commercials think of me. one of those little bits of filmmaking caused a good deal of marital stress at our place last week. Beck doesn’t produce TV commercials anymore. She deals with talent and music and payments and the actors union and that stuff. But a week ago Friday she found out that there were revisions that needed to be made on the spot that her company was doing for the Super Bowl. And that the producer was going on vacation. And would she just take it over and see that everything got done. That put her as the liaison between production and client. Up one chain, down the other and you’d better not get far from your phone. Neither of us are what you would call workaholics, and we like to leave our jobs at the office, so working long hours and taking long phone calls at night at home makes us crabby. And I was cabby as only intestinal disruption can make one crabby. But we got through, I’m actually feeling a little better today and we had a nice long talk last night. When you’ve been married for 25 years, I guess you need to make sure you do an occasional “I still love you” check in. And we need to form a united front to defend ourselves from teenage girldom.

Not long ago we were sitting around the dinner table having one of our ever rarer family discussions. Q had just gotten back from a trip organized by a church group. She had been up to my hometown, Moorhead. “I saw the cutest nursing home. That’s were I want to put you guys when you get old. It’s so nice.”
L chimes in with her opinions about the aging. “I think they should all be euthenized. They’re not contributing anything and they have no quality of life. They’re just a burden to the economy.” It gave me a warm feeling inside to know I’ve given my children a good moral compass to navigate through life. And that if I ever get to the drooling stage, I’m going to have to watch my back.

I forgot to mention this last Sunday, but I think it’s worth the keystrokes. As I was driiving home from the Gopher’s embarrassing loss, just as I was crossing the Mississippi River at Hennepin Avenue, downtown Minneapolis, a bald eagle came flying up from under the bridge and landed in a tree about 20 yards away from me. I’ll bet that there aren’t many metro areas that can say they have bald eagles downtown.
I guess L doesn’t hate me. We were forced together in front of the fireplace because of the cold and I asked her why she was so mad at me and she said she wasn’t. We had a nice conversation about the Virginia Woolf book she’s reading for school.

I knew it.

Brrrr! Scientist finds South Pole warmer than North Dakota