The top image is a self portrait I took the lower
We’re taking Lucia down to Ames today. She’s moving into an off campus appartment with three Landscape Arcthitecture students. Them in two weeks we deliver Quinn to the University of Minnesota and we will be alone in the house together. For years I’ve joked about how glad I’ll be to get them both out of the house, but faced with the reality of the situation, I’m starting to feel a little anxiety. I know I’m going to miss them a lot. They’ve grown up to be such vibrant young women.
When I look at my “Footprints” I keep seeing what seems like someone from Ukraine googles something that connects them to my guestbook. Is it the same person? Or is there something in my guestbook that just happens to be hot in the former Soviet Union. Is there a way to find out what the search terms are for these google references?
This morning I put my underwear on backwards.
I heard a good Minnesota joke yesteday. But you might have to be from here to get it.
Many of our towns and lakes have Indian names, like Wayzata (why-zetta) Minnihaha, Winnibigoshish, Pokekegema and Shakopee (Shock-o-pee).
Shakopee is an old Indian word for “electric fence.”
A picture is worth a thousand words
The whole two yards
Count ’em, sixty biopsies.
Many, I suppose most, of you have not yet reached 50. Katie Courec has made it well known that everyone should get one of these at 50 for early detection of colon cancer. Good idea. But of course the very thought of a six foot long black rubber tube inserted in our asses scares the crap out of almost everyone except rache. Lucky me, because of crohn’s disease, I get to have one every two years. Let me assure you, my children, when your time comes, it’s not nearly as bad as you would imagine. They give you great drugs and depending on the skill of the driver, it’s barely noticable. For some reason, I didn’t have my regular guy today, and I was a little tender, there was some discomfort, but not as bad as, say having a cavity filled. I mean a cavity in a tooth.
Having said that, I’ll tell you the really shitty part is the twenty four hours preceding. First you can’t eat. Even at my age I have a metabolism similar to a chickadee. I get hungry. I’d be one of the first to go in a famine. Then that evening you have to take three eight ounce glasses of the clear, chilled, nonalcoholic beverage of your choice mixed with a tablespoon of a laxative that is only rivalled in foul taste by effectiveness. Do not, I repeat, do not plan to be more than 25 feet from a bathroom at any time. Repeat in the morning. So you show up for the procedure in a weakened state with a very clean bowel.
Tip: After several of these, I’ve found that tonic water is the best thing for masking the taste of the laxative. This is important, the thing that fills me with dread as I approach my appointment is not the black rubber hose, but the salty motor oil taste of Fleet Phospho-soda. Last time I puked before I could choke down the last dose.
A final note: They found a couple of polyps today. Never had one before. One was just a tiny lump, but the other one looked like a potato (oh, yeah, you get to watch the whole thing on TV, like Journey to the Center of Your Bowel) hanging down from the top. They told me that they were inflammatory, not cancerous, but the hypochondriac in me says, “Doctors Lie!”
This is where I went to College
and some of the people I went to college with
These are my daughters, one goes to college and one is on her way
These are my daughters eclectic friends
This is my daughter and her friends auditioning for the musical version of Car Wash
This is what I’m doing on Wednesday
Busy weekend ahead. I’m deserting my family for Father’s day. Quinn and Rebecca are going up to Duluth to watch Quinn’s BF and bf, Andrew and Chase, run Grandma’s Marathon. I’m headed south to my 35th, that’s right, I’m a fossil, college reunion.
This entry was private because I was going to write more, but the time has passed.
At Quinn’s graduation party, an all night affair at the Blaine Sports Center, I was dealing blackjack. I found it difficult to ad up the numbers. I can do fairly complicated math in my head. But I was having problems with 7+5. I had a group of young girls at my table for about an hour. They kept calling me Bob. Some of them I knew from youth soccer and I thought they knew me through Quinn. I was flattered. Later Quinn was at my table and I mentioned that to her. She rolled her eyes and pointed at my name tag.
I keep forgetting my password at work. Drawing a complete blank. I type it twenty times a day. And every time I have to hesitate.
I left the gas grill on to burn off the crap after I made some ribs this weekend. I never went back out and turned it off. Used up a full tank of propane.
I keep mixing up the names of my daughter’s boyfriends, calling Andrew Patrick and Patrick Andrew. My father used to call me Bill all the time. That’s my brother’s name.