May 2004
Monday, May 31
Well, if you don't have a laptop, here's one way.
Monday, May 24
Happy anniversary to me and my wife.
On this date, long about nineteen and eighty six, we made the ceremonial commitment. It's easy to remember how many years: I think of my son's age and add one. He is seventeen now. Eighteen years sounds like an awfully long time ago, and I suppose it is. Amazing indeed that she's stayed with me. I reckon we both did it for the children.
We are not out celebrating in a restaurant, a fleeting and potentially pricey diversion. (Such a sense of romance.) Rather, we attended the Hillwood High School Band ice cream social, to welcome new members and their parents, and provide them with information. Eighteen years later, and addressing the gathering is our son, then a work-in-progress, now President of the Band Council and Drumline Captain. Also present is our daughter, who has already played a season with the Marching band even though she's in Middle school, which is technically against the rules.
We had a very nice wedding day, way the hell back in the mid-eighties. We did the ceremony in her mom and dad's dining room in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with immediate family and a small group of close friends present. Officiating was the Reverend Frank Drysbach, one of Pattie's professors at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He pronounced us "Husband and Wife." A true, old fashioned parlor wedding.
The rest of the day was spent on the patio, with food, wine, liquor, and a keg of Leinenkugel's. (I could be wrong about the beer; distant memory wants to tell me that it was something indigenous, but there was a lot to remember that day, eighteen years ago.) We were joined by Pattie's ten thousand jabbering North country relatives of Scandinavian farming descent. At the end of the day, the younger and hardier of us convened two blocks away at Matt's, the venerable South Minneapolis neighborhood bar and grill, and home of the Jucy Lucy, a stroke-inducing cheeseburger built by stacking two beef patties with a big glob of cheddar cheese sealed in the middle, grilled with dark-fried onions. If you're gonna do it, this is the way. Rumor has it that they don't ever actually clean the grill. The flavor cannot be matched.
Eighteen years. I think beyond our problems and look at our young'uns, and am happy indeed.
Monday May 10
Honest day's work department: I spent the entire weekend (two full days)
working at the home of a longtime friend, a home and garden gig. My friend,
Diane, lives with a physical oddity that causes her eyes to involuntarily close, for an unpredictable length of time, and screws up her vision in general. Along with that, she has Lupus. She lives alone, and needs occasional hired help to do heavy domestic stuff.
So with the entire weekend set aside for her, my mission was to clean and weed the gardens, trim shrubbery, vacuum and scrub the front porch, and wash two cars that live under her carport. (Obviously she doesn't drive them, but if they weren't there, their absence might pique the interest of wrongdoers.)
Saturday was spent in the gardens. Eight actual hours, with a break, spent pulling creepers, crawlers, grasses and weeds, chopping, cutting, clipping and digging. I'm good at yardwork and gardening, and she was very happy with the results.
Sunday was everything else on the list, and washing the cars. An interesting dimension with the cars: one of them is a 1978 Lincoln Continental, all black, a classic Mafia-type car. It was originally owned by my father, who had sold it to Diane somewhere around 1985 before he passed away in 2000. My father kept himself in cars by leasing, and would keep them for three or four years before trading in for the next one. A Cadillac aficionado for many years, the Lincoln was a bit of an aberration, but he got it because it had so much room for his six-foot-seven, two-hundred-something bulk, and because it was an icon of American big-block luxury automotive engineering. It is a gigantic beast, an absolute monster of a car.
He loved that black Lincoln so much that, even when he later leased a black-on-black 1980 Cadillac Seville, he renewed the lease on the Lincoln too, so for a few years, he had both. For around four years, there was always at least one big, black, Mafia-style car parked at my parent's home.
Washing the car was a trip. It was also a two-stage job: first the front half, then the rear half. It sort of put me in a strange head, knowing how much he'd cared for it, and now here it was languishing beneath a carport, on semi-inflated (enormous) tires, and not likely to be started up and driven in the foreseeable future. My old man, like many of his generation, was absolutely nuts about his cars, and there were many echoes of his voice as I cleaned the leaves and pollen dust from the once-glorious and imposing black finish, now marred and fading where the morning sun has blazed on the same area for years.
I understand why she keeps it around, as she likes to keep lots of things around, but there has to be a collector somewhere that would offer a nice amount of cash for it. It deserves better, I think.
Tuesday May 4
Gran Fondo Cycles rules again. Yesterday morning, I rode in to work in an unseasonably chilly downpour. When I left the house it wasn't pouring, but long before I got to the workplace, the sky opened up and it rained buckets. The good part was, there was so much water everywhere that the post-ride wipedown was pretty easy, without the usual buildup of road silt, sand, and gunk. It turned into a sunny, clear afternoon. I mounted the bike to leave for home, and soon there was an ugly grinding sound coming from the drivetrain. I thought it couldn't possibly be that the rain and wipedown had removed all lubricant from the chain, and even stopped at one point take a close look. But I could see nothing (naturally), and the grinding persisted. Nothing to do but continue on to the house.
After arriving home, I messed about and futzed with it, and even tried drenching the chain and drivetrain components with GT80, all to no avail. So, off to the shop.
Well, before they closed for the evening, they called and said it was ready. They had replaced the rear cassette hub and repacked it. They also trued the rear wheel, at no charge.
The weather is gorgeous, and with a single afternoon turnaround, I am ready to ride. Did I mention that Gran Fondo Cycles rules?
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