Walt Disney Lied To Me!

Happy New Year, Everyone!  I spent the afternoon behind my refrigerator, toweling up poop and bleaching surfaces.  I guess it's an apt finish to 2021, but I could have done without 2022 introducing itself with me bagging a corpse and putting it out into the subzero cold.

This past Autumn, when Lisa and I winterized our back porch off the kitchen, we found some droppings in the bin that holds our lanterns and bug spray.  There were apparently mice living in the shelter of the porch.  We found the storm door wasn't fully sealed, and so I fixed that after a full Clean'n'Bleach of the room.  About two weeks later, I was in the kitchen standing at the sink and I saw something scurry from under the kitchen island to under the fridge.  It would seem that when I sealed off the porch, there was someone still inside, who then came into the kitchen when outdoor access was cut off.

At this point I was pretty naive, and panic didn't even cross my mind.  I bought traps, confident that this would be a minor hiccup in the holiday season, but the traps went neglected.  We pulled the fridge out and discovered the extent of infrastructure that a mouse can build when left to his/her own devices.  There was very little evidence of anyone living in the kitchen, other than the distinct, hamster-cage odor when we pulled the fridge out of its cubby.

But then I crawled back there and pulled the access panel off the back of the fridge, and I began to comprehend just how heedless I had been to the original evidence of infestation.  I found the remains of two towels, disassembled and reimagined into a nest surrounding the nice warm compressor, along with a quarter cup of pilfered kibble from the cat dishes.  This mouse meant to hang out for a bit.  So we took away the nest.  I cleared the area of all fibers and food, and I bleached the bottom of the tray.  We re-baited the traps and figured we'd have a dead mouse to dispose of soon.

But then we went out of town for Christmas.  We were only gone for three days, but when we got back the kitchen smelled like the old pet shop at Har Mar Mall.  I actually got my hopes up - had we caught the thing in one of the traps?  I checked, and no.  It was still living here, mocking us with its nonchalance.  Now dread was starting to take hold, but we all have work and the holidays to deal with, so we let it go until I had a day off.  On New Year's Eve we pulled the fridge back out and I again took the panel off, only to find that they were still pooping under there.  I spent more time than I'd like to admit cleaning poop again and scrubbing again and bleaching again.

Throughout this ordeal, I feel I need to state that a prominent proprietor of cartoon mouse content, et al., lied to me.  I was led throughout my youth to believe that if mice chose to grace my life with their presence, it would be in a benevolent way:  tailoring my suits, cleaning my kitchen, helping me solve mysteries...  No one ever once implied they would just shit under my refrigerator.  That is not helpful to me at all!  And so prolifically - this has been a LOT of mouse shit.  According to Don Bluth they're always wearing colorful shawls and offering sage advice, but in reality they don't even understand English.  And it makes sense, I mean they obviously have to poop somewhere - Rankin & Bass just never zoomed in on their asses when they were dropping pellets all over the clock tower.

Meanwhile, Jebus the cat had really dropped the ball.  She had two choices, and she neither chased down and drove out the menace, nor did she strike up an unlikely friendship with it in an adorable way.

So I got a couple more traps.  The mean kind.  We had the little igloo-shaped spin traps originally, with the tiny door that Mickey goes in, which then slams shut and crushes his head.  But those require engagement from the mouse.  This time I bought the old-fashioned, tried and true, Snap Shut On Their Necks type of traps.  I didn't use the recommended peanut butter as bait - since this prick was just stealing cat food, I piled three kibbles on each trap under the island, took the cat dishes up off of the floor, and went about my holiday evening.

Then, after I went to bed, Lisa was still out in the living room when she heard the snap.  She got me up, and had me look under the kitchen island.  This fucker was big.  No wonder it hadn't gone into the igloo traps - there's no way it would have fit.  I even did some research into the difference between mice and rats, but it turns out it was just a VERY LARGE mouse.  So big in fact that the mean trap had not snapped shut on its neck, but smashed across its head.  When we moved the island to reveal the horror show it still had its face stuck in the trap, but it was most decidedly dead.  We dropped it into a bag and put it out into the -12F temps out back.

I am ambivalent about the killing of household pests.  I don't like to be personally responsible for the end of living things (except centipedes - fuck those guys), but at the same time they can't live in my house.  They shit a LOT, and they carry diseases and they steal kibble from my cat.  I do not apologize for crushing this giant mouse's skull, but I still felt a pang dropping it into the bag and putting it out into the cold.  And this speaks to the Disney point I raised earlier.  I have been conditioned to believe a mouse is an adorable anthropomorphic oaf who just wants to be a sidekick to whatever adventures I am piloting.  This is not the case.  A mouse is 100% id.  It wants to eat and poop, and it absolutely does not want to die. Even when you slam a metal bar across its face it'll take a couple minutes to expire, legs twitching while it respires agonally.  Again, no apologies, but mixed feelings nonetheless.

Don't shit under my fridge though.

Cherry Crumble

I just started cutting up my cherry tree.  His name is Steve.  Of all the things I was most excited about when I bought my house fifteen years ago, the prospect of having a fruit tree in the backyard so that I could have company over and present a bowl of cherries that I made was at the top of my list.
As it turned out, Steve produced tart cherries.  Good for baking and preserving, but not so much setting in a bowl on the coffee table for guests.  And while I myself disagree with this assessment (I actually love sour cherries right off the Steve), I accepted the fact that Steve was, like me, a bit antisocial.  His talents were better appreciated with a little behind-the-scenes finessing.
Over the years Steve and I have made crowd-pleasing slab pies, decadent sorbets, and even infused some Basil Hayden's with tart cherries and orange peel to the tune of a campfire manhattan for the ages.  Now that I'm thinking of it, about the only thing I haven't used his fruits for over the years was drying.  That would have been a perfect way to introduce him to company - some dried cherries on a coffee-table cheese board next to a funky blue and some salted almonds?  Missed opportunities, for sure.
The first few summers, while he ramped up production, I had to fight the birds.  Those little pricks were relentless in their pursuit of Steve's goods.  I tried netting, foil strips, and even a slingshot, until he finally got big enough in about the fourth year that there were plenty of cherries for the birds to take the top third and I could still get around a quart per day for my own use.  The birds and I had an understanding.
One of the things I used Steve's cherries for most often was to make jelly that I then submitted to the MN State Fair.  Repeatedly.  Over and over I spent hot summer afternoons pitting, mashing, straining, and processing dozens of pounds of cherries into jelly, and it was always delicious but it never judged well.  I spent hours passing the juice through coffee filters until that shit shone like stained glass, leveling off the top and measuring a quarter inch of headspace without allowing any bubbles on the surface.  And though I never got a ribbon for my efforts, they did make judging notes so I got some free advice on how to improve my product.
Meanwhile, Steve himself grew to absurd proportions.  He's a North Star Cherry, a cold-hardy dwarf hybrid developed by the University of Minnesota to thrive in our frost-heavy climate.  And thrive he did.  He was supposed to top out at 8-10 feet, but in the last few summers he's grown up into our electrical lines, which are at least 16 feet off the ground.  Either I have magical soil or Steve is a goddamn wizard of a tree.  Every year just before Memorial Day or so he would explode into a thousand beautiful tiny white blossoms, and a couple weeks later, for almost a month straight, I had to spend an hour a day picking, pitting, and refrigerating a quart or more of small tart cherries just to keep up with production.
So two summers ago, I'd finally given up on a positive outcome for the cherries from the wise elders at the state fair, so while I went ahead and made jelly, I had all kinds of other things going on too.  I froze some, made some cobblers, was planning some infusions.  That year I had three other Fair submissions because I expected nothing more than free input on my process for Steve's jelly.  As it turned out though, all three other submissions were busts, and the jelly garnered me a State Fair Blue Ribbon.  The best cherry jelly in the state of Minnesota came from my backyard - it came from Steve!  I considered setting a couple jars out on the coffee table when we had guests over, just for effect.
Then, we had an unusually hard winter.  The following summer Steve blossomed out like he always had, but all his fruit was kind of smallish and shriveled.  We didn't really have a decent harvest, but I chalked it up to the harsh January that we weren't used to after being spoiled by a series of easy winters in the early teens.
Last summer though, Steve checked out even further.  He has three main branches coming off his trunk, one growing toward the garage, and the other two arching houseward. The house-facing two had no leaves or fruit last year, and the garage side branch leafed out and seemed to bloom just fine, but the fruit didn't come.  They were tiny pea-sized pebbles that just didn't develop into cherries.  And the trunks of the dead two branches had these scaly, lichen-y fungi on them.  Sadly, it looks like Steve has bloomed his last.
It's weird that he stuck around long enough for the accolades to roll in, and literally as soon as he had won the recognition that he'd reached a zenith, that was that.  Steve had done what he'd come here to do, and was done doing it.  So I started cutting him up today.  Mostly he'll provide twigs for kindling to start bonfires next summer once they're dry, but a decent amount of trunk cherrywood for smoking will also be harvested and dried.  I'm already thinking of the pork tenderloin that I'll cook over his charred torso alongside my next summer's sapling.  Is that macabre?  I think maybe I'll try pears next.  Those look good in a bowl on the coffee table, right?

A Few Observations on Weather

Talk about your second takes.  Banana Blossom reopened.  I know, that’s old news, it happened months ago, but it’s great news to me because I still haven’t dropped in yet, and I am so excited to try this place.  I thought I had missed my chance.  They were open for a couple years with me driving by at least five times a week and thinking I really wanna try the food there.  Then it was hit by a tornado.  Not just grazed, either, but really slammed into like a hockey puck to the larynx.  It was over.  I lost my chance.  And chances don’t come along everyday on the north side.  When I moved into this neighborhood seven years ago there was a fantastic Caribbean joint a block from my house.  They had the best food, a spectacular happy hour, and plans for a delightful & sunny patio.  They got a glowing review from Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl back when she was with the City Pages.  Even with all of this going for them they took on too much debt and closed within the year.  I’ve read the statistics - 60% of restaurants fail in the first three years, and by five years the failure rate jumps to 75%.  I’ve worked in the industry for over a decade (I even waited on Dara once, when I briefly worked at Tryg’s), and I knew how the cards were stacked.  I knew I had completely missed my window of opportunity to try Banana Blossom’s fare, and that they were not coming back.  Yet somehow they did come back after the tornado!  Last fall the new glass went into their large front windows, and now they’ve been reopened for some time, and their food looks spectacular in photos!  I shall not continue to squander this blessing.  I shall support these ridiculously lucky NoMi entrepreneurs, and go there this week, I promise.

The end of May was the anniversary of that North Minneapolis tornado.  MPR made a huge deal about it.  I was on the bus on my way to work the next week, and noticed they had taken another house on the block on the northwest corner of Broadway & Penn Aves.  Now there is the old fast food place that’s boarded up, and one house still standing.  That is all.

I honestly don’t know if anyone is living, or considering living, in this house (it’s doubtful, but there’s no plywood over the doors or windows, so it’s not unthinkable), but still it occurred to me how odd it would be to wake up one morning and be the only house left on your block.  What do you do, with no fences, no hedges, no gates or delineations whatsoever, when you have a WHOLE CITY BLOCK to yourself?  On a major crossroads?  It’s not like this house is down by the park or tucked away along the creek or anything – it is smack in the geographical center of the poorest neighborhood in the city, and it’s alone on an EMPTY block.  The building I wanted my start-up business in used to be there, but has since been torn down (a result of the tornado).  St. Anne’s Catholic Community is right across 26^th  Ave, too, so it’s not like no one is ever walking around here.

Take a moment to imagine yourself at home.  Now imagine waking up one morning to find you could peer across the street in every direction without obstruction.  Weird, right?  One recent Sunday I found myself on the 50^th floor where I work, and from 750 feet above street level you can definitely see the stripe of no trees slash diagonally across North, from Broadway & Penn to Lyndale & 42^nd.  I always found it difficult to locate my house from up there, now it’s right next to the white stripe, half way up, a few blocks off the left side.

No, we haven’t completely recovered.  A year later there are still houses with bright blue tarps on their roofs.  Many of these houses will probably never again support human life.  Many have already been taken by the bulldozers and the excavators, but of those that remain, few will stand in another year.  My favorite anchor on Penn & Broadway is trying to recoup & rebuild across the street from their now demolished building, on the empty block – I assume just because they have half a century’s worth of ties to the neighborhood.

I was at ALDI the other day buying some groceries, and there was a woman in front of me in line with the words “Project Bitch” tattooed just above her waistline, in a cursive tramp stamp.  I thought it was an apt metaphor for our shared neighborhood.  It IS a project.  It is a project that we’ve been working on for years, and one that is consistently frustrated by profiling, or stereotyping, or tornadoes.  It is something of a bitch, and there is still a narrative on the north side of a person with their fists up, a person who resents the scrutiny.  We take care of our own here; it’s just what we do.  We don’t need local TV news to pat us on the back for it.

So now everybody’s impressed with how many things have returned to normal on the north side.  Really?  It’s been A YEAR.  Many homes weathered the winter snows (thankfully sparse this year, but still…) WITHOUT ROOFS INTACT.  That is not normal.  Nor, in any other neighborhood, would you dream of saying, “wow, they’ve come so far” if that were the case for any fraction of the housing stock.  A year later they are still bulldozing tornado homes.  That’s how many were affected.  And the sad thing is most of them had only minor damage.  They just didn’t have any tenants or non-bank related interested parties to fix the minor damage, so exposed to the elements for a year it has become major damage.  If you want to know how far we’ve come in a year, come park at Penn & Broadway and get out of your car.  Take a moment to turn 360 degrees and really take in the cityscape.  You’ll wonder how many DAYS it’s been since the storm.

So feel free to congratulate us on the progress we’ve made, but don’t pretend there aren’t still empty lots full of crabgrass that no one wants to own.  We live in a vacuum that can only be filled by investment.  We need people to want to live where we live in order to recover, and right now on the north side of Minneapolis that prospect seems like something of a pipe dream.  All I can say is how much I love my neighborhood, and how much you’d love it, if only we could get some commerce up in here, and if only we could get some positive press.  I’m still waiting to see a billboard that says, “North Side: Come weather the storm with us, and rebuild something today.”

Thanks, Pop.

I recently saw this post on the Newscut Blog by Bob Collins.  It got me to thinking.  I have seen pictures of my dad when he was younger than I am now.  In fact, I once made a lamp for him and my mother made from slides from when they were first married.  It didn’t occur to me then, but now I am a couple years older than he was in those old photos.  I’ve heard stories from when he was younger than me.  The only problem with this is, the things people tell stories about are the exceptional things:  great accomplishments, life-altering journeys, epiphanies, and the like.  I don’t feel my personal story-worthy life events even compare with what I knew about my dad when I turned 19 and moved into my first apartment.  He was an Infallible Elder to me then.   All of the wonderful, relatable things I know about him, the things that have made us peers, I’ve learned since then.  I’ve learned that we’re a lot more alike than I ever assumed growing up.  I remember going to a Twins game with him and my friend Jill at the HHH Metrodome and having Jill tell me afterwards how weird it was to see the two of us sitting together, both leaning forward, arms on our knees, fingers interlocked, our weight on the balls of our feet, in the exact same pose as one another without intending it.  It was made more noticeable by the fact that white guys with beards tend to look alike, but at age 23 I was already becoming my father.

You think by the time you move out of your parents’ house that you know everything there is to know about these people who raised you.  I know I did.  After all, I’d spent every day of my life either with them or in relation to them.  What I hadn’t considered was that they hadn’t spent their every day in relation to me.  They had a whole life together before I came along.  A life when they made some of the same choices and mistakes that I have since made, because there are certain lessons that cannot be taught, but must be learned.

When I was 20 I moved to California, and my dad helped me get there.  When you spend two and a half days in a truck cab with someone, sleeping in rest stops with all your possessions just behind the back wall, there’s no way to not learn a few new things about them.  On that trip I learned about Dad's college weekend road trips, but also that he had a lot more wisdom to impart than just how to use a band saw (although this has proven helpful too).  That trip is also why, when Mom tells me that Dad is driving solo from my sister’s house in Seattle to my parents’ home in Tucson, I don’t worry.  I still want my mother to check in when I know she’s on the road.  Dad I know I don’t need to worry about on crazy feats of endurance travel.  I’ve seen the man do it.

After I bought a house back in Mpls, Dad came north to help me paint it.  I recall coming home one day to find he had climbed up the ladder to the porch roof with the six-foot A-frame ladder over his shoulder.  He had then propped the A-frame against the side of the house on the pitched roof to hang onto my louvered attic vent with one hand and use the other hand to paint the peak of the gable of my house (I assume he did this while I was at work because he knew I’d talk him out of it if I were home).  That is something I would never do.  Not for anyone.  I don’t necessarily have a fear of heights, I just don’t trust my own sense of balance that much.  If he ever asked, though, I’d do it for Dad.  Because I know he’d do the same for me, and has.  I won’t go into specifics, because I don’t want to give him ideas, but there are countless things that I’d never dream of doing ordinarily that I wouldn’t hesitate to do for my father.  When someone has your back like that, you have to reciprocate.  The man taught me how to be me, for god’s sake.  You can’t ever hope to repay that – all you can do is pay it forward.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  Happy Father’s Day.

Stormy Weather

On Sunday, May 22nd, I was at home watching a thunderstorm roll in from the southwest. I had all the windows open to air out the house (our house has deep eaves, so I wasn’t worried about the rain). When the power went off I started closing windows for the oncoming storm. Then the sirens started. I went out the (open) back door to the deck into a noise unlike anything I have heard in my yard before. When I looked eastward, toward the front yard, I could see a cloud of debris beyond the neighbor’s houses moving from south to north, brown and chunky in the yellow-green light of the afternoon. They have said that by the time the warning was issued and the sirens went off the funnel cloud was already on the ground. I went back inside, and downstairs.
Over the last three and a half weeks I have seen things in my neighborhood that I haven’t seen in six years of living in my home. I have seen people who may have lived next to one another for years without exchanging hellos, but now are out working together getting a limb off of a porch, or clearing shingles out of a driveway so the construction crew can get through, or nailing a tarp over a gaping hole in a roof.
It’s almost a cliché to point out the Coming Together and Neighbors Helping Neighbors aspect of it all, but it truly is something of a surprise. The day of the storm my favorite neighborhood liquor store was hit pretty hard. The conventional thought is “liquor store – can’t be a good thing for the neighborhood,” but this place really was an asset. They had wine tastings, they were always out front putting annuals in the giant flower pots on the sidewalk, they almost never had panhandlers around; they were just a locally run small business with a fifty-plus year history on West Broadway – a fixture of the north side. The storm came on a Sunday, when liquor stores aren’t open. No one was there when the windows blew out. They were looted. That is sadly what I expected to hear more of, but as far as I’ve heard it was an isolated incident. I’ve heard stories about renters caught up in bureaucratic snafus with the city inspections division, which do not surprise me in the least (don’t get me started on the city of Minneapolis inspections division – if you’re interested, see the comment from Kevin Moberg after the Newscut link below). But I am embarrassed to admit that, even after six years of saying hi to my neighbors and lending them yard tools and such (even the one or two whom I didn’t care for), it surprised me to see the level of cooperation this neighborhood has risen to.
In the day or two directly after the storm, there were people who just sat in their vans in vacant parking lots on corners, waiting for someone to need a ride somewhere. There was one guy who got kicked out by the city for his volunteer efforts. There were shops that, as soon as they had plywood over the still-exposed broken glass in their windows, immediately spray-painted “We’re open!” all over the outside of said plywood and threw their doors open to the people of the neighborhood. Monday morning Lisa and I went to the Lowry Café for some breakfast, and our waitress said they were the only building on that corner with electricity. People were coming in all morning to charge cell phones and blackberries, without being made to purchase anything. Now that’s neighborhood.
I grew up in an insular suburban community. We all would have pooled our resources to help Mrs. Pearson, or the Sawyers, if they needed it, so I’m familiar with neighborly bonds. What is weird is that in that community we all already knew each other. In north Minneapolis, some dude could walk up from the alley and tell me he’s lived here for ages, and needs some help getting debris out of the way down the block, and I’d grab a saw. I wouldn’t ask who he is. I wouldn’t question his motives. Because I’ve been on the receiving end of this Good Samaritanism, and I am more than happy to pay it forward.
I have nothing against suburbs - I loved growing up in them. And I love visiting my friends on the south side of town, or across the river, or outstate. I love living in a state where everyone is happy to help one another no matter where they come from or what their background may be, but I will say that I really love my neighborhood, and my neighbors. We on the North Side are a resilient people, more resilient than may be obvious to most of the Metro Populace, and I am proud of my neighborhood for having set a high bar as the standard for communities working together in the Twin Cities. God bless, and god speed your recovery, friends.

Abraham, Martin, and John.

Right now in Minneapolis there is a controversy raging. A racially sensitive controversy. The kind of controversy that tears communities apart. It’s about an off-leash dog area in a park. I will repeat that. In Minneapolis right now, respected elders of the civil rights movement are arguing to prevent an off leash dog park from being opened between a soccer field and a freeway because the larger park is named for Martin Luther King Jr.
I admit, as a white guy raised in one of the whitest suburbs of one of the whitest cities in America, I maybe don’t have the kind of historical or cultural perspective to comment on such a controversy. However, I have owned a home in the poorest and highest-crime area of this city for the last six years, which in this town tends to mean it is populated mainly by people of color. Not that this issue is more economic than racial – it would appear from reports of the park board meetings that it is divided exactly along lines of race.
Here’s why I think that’s unfortunate: It should be about socio-economics. Dr. King’s namesake park in Minneapolis is on the more affluent south side, but it is still wedged between a freeway sound wall and a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It is a memorial park, yes, but it is not solely a memorial. Here’s its park board website. You will see, I believe, numerous sports facilities, youth recreation areas, public art installations, and if you GoogleMap "4055 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, MN," some quality wooded knolls in the corners. Dogs are (& I can’t believe I have to say this) allowed on leashes in public parks in Minneapolis. The only controversy about the proposal is the idea that the city would allow a small parcel of these (approximately) 20 acres to be fenced in and free for unleashed dogs.
As someone who lives in an area of the city where people of all ethnicities try to kill each other every day (and we’ve lost a few in the surrounding blocks over the last twelve months), this offends me. How can someone spend their energy fighting a dog park (F.Y.I. the nearest dog park is over two miles away) on racial grounds, while in my neighborhood poor black people are killing other poor black people because they associate with the wrong crowd? How is a dog shitting in the woods more offensive to the memory of Dr. King than a hoodlum catching a baby girl in the crossfire of some stupid turf war that adds another tally to the homicide rate of an ordinarily peaceful city?
Let’s build a city where people in any geographical space have a chance to create something good and profitable for everyone. Let’s dwell not on past superficial slights, but on future opportunities for the common good.
If the opponents to the dog park really care about creating a place for the majority of minority constituents in the city of Minneapolis to raise children free of violence, they should embrace my neighborhood too, and they should try to keep guns off of our streets, on the north and south sides, but they should also allow dogs to shit in the grass next to I-35W, because that has nothing to do with race or economics, but everything to do with the responsibility of cleaning up after oneself, a healthy dose of which I think could benefit anyone in any neighborhood in this city.

Blessing Count 2010

Lisa and I worked both days this blizzarific weekend at The Hotel in Downtown Minneapolis. Saturday morning we got up and I had to give myself a little extra time to clear off the car before we left. We decided to park in the heated garage under The Hotel to avoid what we’d already heard would be a snowstorm of biblical proportions. It was crazy downtown. Everything was closed. The people in The Hotel had nowhere else to eat. We were busier than we’ve been on a weekend in months. By 2:00 P.M. when we were done with work, the airport had closed. The people who were supposed to check out ended up having to stay another night before flying home, so there were no extra rooms for employees. We thought about leaving the car in the garage (since we don’t have one at the house) and busing home and back downtown the next morning, but by that point the buses had stopped running. We didn’t have a choice. We had to drive home.
Everything went well at first. The thoroughfares were passable. Not clear, but flat-ish, and about ten feet wide between canyon walls of plow deposits. The problem came when we turned off of Penn Avenue to travel the one block to our house. The snow was just a bit higher than the undercarriage of my Geo Prism, and we couldn’t go. A car was trying to pass around the protruding rear end of the Geo, so I had to run a half-block to the house and grab two shovels. When I returned they tried to help me dig out of the bank, but the car wasn’t going anywhere. Out of sheer luck a guy drove up with a plow on his pickup truck. He opened his window and hung his stubbled face out, cigarette hanging unattended from his mouth, and asked if we could roll back far enough for him to clear us a parking space on the curb of 34th. Seriously, if he hadn’t come along at that moment we would likely have been digging out for hours into the night. He looked a little like a young Billy Joel, if Billy Joel drove a plow for a living. That was the first Christmas miracle.
The next morning we came out to the car to drive back to the hotel for day two of Blizzaricious. We turned around without incident (since Billy had cleared the whole intersection the day before), and got up to the light to turn back onto Penn. The problem was this: Penn Ave is a snow emergency route – it’s the first to be plowed. 34th is not – it’s low priority. So turning from 34th to Penn involves barreling through the plow contrail left the night before and ice-hardened into a car stopping rampart. We hadn’t had the foresight to stow shovels in the car before we left, so we sat, hung halfway between the street we lived on and the street that would take us to work, while I poked at the snowpack under the car with my windshield scraper and cursed. Our neighbor, a man we had met on the street but not really exchanged more than a moment’s pleasantries with, happened to be waiting at the corner for a bus that I assume was never coming. He came over and helped us push off of the plowridge, to universal delight. We weren’t sure if buses had been reinstated at that point, but offered him a ride downtown anyway. He doesn’t speak English super fluently, but we shared some laughs on the drive nonetheless. That was the second Christmas miracle.
By the time we were done with work at 1:00 on Sunday life was almost back to normal. The snow was manageable, the streets were clear, and the populace was self-absorbed again. People had dealt with the adversity and moved on and were either gearing up for the workweek or heading home to finally relax, but I won't forget that twice over the stormy days we were rescued by an unlikely Samaritan. To mystery plow man, thank you, and you may in fact be right – I may be crazy. To our neighbor, come up the block, friend, and we shall feed you. I’d love to hear more about where you have come from, and how much we have in common, while we share some dinner together. Skol.

Do Not Disturb

There’s snow here now, and there has been for about a month. It was weird: unseasonably warm autumn with low squinty sun but comfortable afternoons on the porch, and 48 hours later there were nine inches of snow on the ground. Later this weekend we’re supposed to pick up another six inches or so. I think that’s cool. Last fall I was a little miffed – we’d had an anemic summer without any real heat and the snow came early. I felt cheated out of a season. This year, our last snow fell in late February. We had an almost unprecedented snowless March. I had our garden entirely planted by the first of May. Then September was dry, and October was warm enough to give us a second crop of heirloom tomatoes. This might be the longest I’ve gone (except when I lived in Eureka CA for a year) without trudging through snow. I can honestly say I’ve missed it.
I was prepared. I raked the yard, I drained the hose and shut off the spigot, I cleared out the garden. I was just waiting for mother nature to tell me I didn’t have any work to do outside for the next few months. The window boxes were all blank, and ready for a covering of reflective white insulation. In short, it was time to hibernate. This summer was awesome, it was long, it was hot, it was glorious, but now I had a new winter coat from Old Navy and a pantry full of canned vegetables and jams, and I was fully prepared to make the shift from grilling green and red things in a citrus marinade over flames to frying orange and brown things in animal fat over cast-iron.
Plastic went up on windows, salt went out on sidewalks, and Kev went into a warm bath. Seriously, if it’s going to get dark this early in the afternoon I’m going to put on pajamas and check out before dinner. And thank god I live in a place where such is possible. All summer I keep sandals on and stand in front of the grill until 9 P.M., but come November I can step into slippers and sink down into the LaZBoy at 5 when it gets dark and watch the news, or a movie, or all six seasons of The Sopranos (over the span of several weeks, of course).
Since buying a house I’ve come to realize that this is an important time of year. And perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself with it, as well, for first must come the holidays. There’s shopping to be done, and family parties to attend, brittle and bark to be made, gifts to be wrapped, et al. There is really no relaxing, in the true hibernatory sense, until after the first of the year. However, the winding down of the outdoor activities and the battening down of the homestead for the impending winter is an essential first step.
The Earth itself will actually cocoon us into idleness if we let it, and after New Year’s Day I fully intend to let it. It’s one of the glories of this landscape: In the summer our workshop is the whole of the world (or the whole of our world, anyway), an immense expanse waiting to be subjugated and controlled by us in the form of lawns, gardens, parks, etc. In the winter our purview moves indoors to a smaller, more controlled, and more insular kingdom. My basement is finally going to be tamed, if only because it is my only habitable frontier for the foreseeable future. In the mean time, the raspberry sticks in the side yard will have free reign over the sidewalk because it’s cold and no one else would want to walk on it. I’m inside with a book, or a pie recipe, or a band saw and a blueprint. Eventually though, this house will bore me to tears. I love my house, but it is small, and doesn’t offer the kind of creative challenges I would enjoy. I will organize my basement, and repaint the bedroom, and want another canvas on which to work. With any luck, by then most of the snow will be gone and I will be able to move my operations back outdoors to rebuild the herb beds, expand the lettuce garden, shape the hedge just so, or adjust the boulevard garden for larger and more extravagantly humble stock. Anything to keep me busy and out of the house until I need to hibernate once more.

Maybe this means I'm all growed up...

I distinctly remember the early summer days in my youth when my parents (or my friend's parents, or my school, or whomever) would take me and a couple dozen of my closest friends down to Valleyfair in Shakopee, MN. I'd have trouble sleeping the night before in anticipation of the fun to be had. When we got there, and had traversed the asphalt desert of parking lot to the gates, it was like a cornucopia of options for how to spend the day. The pirate ship, the olde-timey photos, the water park, the arcade... the possibilities went on and on. By the end of the day, after the dusk laser show, I was never quite ready to leave. I was sure just one more ride on the Enterprise, the Corkscrew, or the Scrambler was all I needed. I'd spend the evening lying in bed, unable to fall asleep as I (my inner ear, perhaps?) could still recall the sensory memories of being flung in all different directions and eating the cotton candy and funnel cake.
I had a similar experience this morning. I had to get to the Farmers' Market before they closed at 1 P.M. I got there and parked, and the Christmas tree vendors were already setting up for this weekend. There was still, however, a single lane of produce stands lined up for the taking. I worked my way down the line - Sweet potatoes, check. Parsnips, check. The Savoy cabbage vendor also sold the cauliflower I needed, score! I got the spaghetti squash I needed and still had enough money left over for a treat: homemade soap from the lady who gives out free samples with every purchase. I was there for all of fifteen minutes, and only got half way down the aisle. As I was leaving, I felt a little guilty to be making such haste back home. I was sure there were some persimmons that I hadn't found yet - or some turnips. Maybe if I wandered further I'd find the honey guy or the meat vendor, but I had exhausted my twenty dollars, and had almost forty pounds of produce to show for it. I won't say I lay awake in anticipation, or in reminiscence, but all the same my feelings during the event were largely similar to how I felt all those years ago at the amusement park.
The farmers' market is a pleasure that is all too rare in my life - considering the fact that it's only available half the year in my town, I'd like to go at least once a week from May through November. All told, however, I only get down there with about half that frequency. So on this, what is likely to be my last visit before the snow melts in spring, I felt cheated that I couldn't linger longer, savoring the warm autumn afternoon and the fresh produce. Goodnight, farmers' market, and I look forward to seeing you again when the coming snow finally melts.

Coming back into neighborliness.

Finally having next-door neighbors after two plus years of vacancy on my south flank should be good news, right? Then why do I strangely feel like my privacy is being invaded? I've gotten so used to no one ever being on the neighbor's deck when I go out back - now that there is occasionally someone else out there who says, "Hey, smokin' buddy!" when I go out for an evening stogie, or always someone in the living room over there watching TV (and they refuse to put curtains up), I'm a little taken aback.
I hoped for two freaking years that someone would move in over there. That the guy who flipped the foreclosed house would sell to a nice young couple. That's exactly what happened, and now I'm constantly catching myself thinking, "don't you people have to work or something? Go away!" It's not that I don't like them, by any means - in fact, from what I can tell they are the ideal neighbors. I should be ecstatic that they actually bought into my neighborhood. And yet, I feel like Grizzly Adams over here - I've been accustomed to the solitary life without neighbors around, and now society is moving back into the neighborhood after being driven out for years by foreclosures.
Maybe it's because they have their T.V. right in front of the back window, so whenever I'm outside and they're home it looks like they're staring out the window at me. Maybe it's because they remind me of people I used to work with. Maybe it's just because our decks are both above our privacy fences, so there's really no way I'm going to not see them when I'm outside. I think it's just going to take some getting used to. At least the house on the north side is still vacant for the time being, or I might start to get agoraphobic.
If my new neighbors happen across this blog, welcome! And I do mean it. I'm super glad to have you next door, and I'll bring some home-canned jam or salsa over soon to welcome you to the neighborhood. If you need to borrow anything for your yard, you're welcome to it. I don't mean you any offense with this post - I'm just a little weirded out interacting with people again. I'm sure it'll come back to me, just like riding a bike.

Time flies when you're not really changing at all.

Just a heads up: this post might embody the "meandering" part of the subhead of my blog (which to my Facebook friends is available here - it's always bugged me that Facebook links to the note within its own confines, but not to the actual blog), than the "rants" portion.
I've spent the last couple days going through the magazine museum in my living room. As mentioned in my previous post, Lisa has a bunch of 1970s Better Homes and Gardens that she just got, and she also has a few issues from much longer ago in her stockpile. In addition she has received through some consumer website or another a free subscription to BHG this past spring. So I got to thinking, and just sat all afternoon going through the October 1949 issue, then flashing forward 25 years to October 1974, then another 35 year jump to the October 2009 one that just came this week. I have to say it's been fascinating.
First of all, let's review the context in which each of these issues came out:
1949 - We had just recently emerged from a victorious and clear-cut, good v. evil struggle in Europe and the Pacific that had lifted us out of the depression, and with Truman in the white house we were rushing headlong into the post-war prosperity the 1950s would become so known for. NATO had been formed and formalized in the spring of that year, and the seeds of the cold war had been sown, swinging the pendulum from the social state of the new deal to the red scare that would soon follow.
1974 - We were in the process of dialing down a long divisive war fought for dubious reasons in Southeast Asia. Nixon had just resigned for something decidedly unbecoming of his office, and the future of civility and order in our nation itself seemed to be at stake. No one seemed to want to deal with life here in the U.S. Pendulum: somewhere between authoritarian eavesdropping state and libertarian uprising against a tyrannical federal power.
2009 - We are currently fighting a war which I will not politicize here (if you've read any of my previous posts you can probably guess where I come down on it anyway). In addition, the pendulum is in virtual fibrillation, we're in the middle of an economic hemorrhage unlike anything anyone under seventy years old can remember, and we're being told the way to pull out of it is spending. On anything whatsoever.
With that in mind, the most striking difference is the ads in these magazines. In 1949 the majority of the ads were for home improvement items - washers (and a lovely article on how to save time using an automatic washer), vacuums, water heaters, etc. The magazine itself was more geared toward both making a home, but also building and maintaining it. The ads and articles contained just as many men as women. In 1974, the ads were mainly for life improvement items - travel packages to Hawaii and the like (this was two years after the Brady Bunch discovered their cursed Tiki there, so I'm sure the Pacific Islands were all the rage, vacation-wise), but also liberally peppered with pet foods and detergents. This year, what the overwhelming majority of advertisements in BHG are about is self improvement items - they're selling cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, pharmaceuticals, and sleep aids & mattresses (and the overwhelming majority of people in these ads are female). With all the time savers of 1949, all the vacation packages of 1974, and all the drugs and makeup of 2009, would anyone care to venture a guess as to which generation is sleeping better at night?
Also worth noting is the gender targeting of the different incarnations of the magazine. In both 1949 and 1974 the issues were geared toward both women and men, whereas in 2009 the demographers have clearly decided for us that it is the woman in the family who is in charge of the daily comings, goings, and upkeep of the house - even though now it's more common than in the previous years that she works outside the home as well. Indeed, the article in the 1949 issue titled "How-To for the Handy Man" or the ones detailing how to get better mileage out of a car or create 3 styles of bookshelves "designed for men" would look out of place next to the CoverGirl spreads and Curel ads in today's edition. But perhaps that is more a function of magazines having to cater to more highly specified audiences and fewer of them being aimed at the entire household unit.
To be sure, the older issues definitely had a gender skew as far as roles within the household were concerned, but I almost think it is less offensive than today's demographic skewing. Yes, in 1949, and even 1974, it editorially assumed the father was concerned with the structural and mechanical workings of the household, while the mother (yes, always one father and one mother) was more concerned with the nurturing and aesthetic aspects, but at least it was honest about that. In 2009 however, it does not even pretend to care what a man does in the home, and as such it has all but abandoned the building and maintenance in favor of design and furnishing (showing, perhaps, that it cares a great deal what a woman does in the home).
In the aforementioned "How-To" article in 1949 they had three pages of illustrations with little captions telling one how to coat one's own nails, prevent rust on tools, evenly sand a curved surface, etc. In 2009 they had an article with really intriguing photos about how a couple remodeled their old outdated basement into a finished family room area. It did not, however, say how they did it. It was half a page of text talking about aesthetics, the apex of which was mentioning that darker colors help the giant plasma T.V. blend with the room. The feeling I got from it was along the lines of "you're female and home all day, so here's what you should buy," even though it never has to come out and say it (though I must admit I am charmed that in every one of these issues they have recipes for Halloween cookies, and that they all still have a recipe contest as well, even if today's prizes are considerably larger).
Overall though, the greater editorial arc of Better Homes and Gardens has been one away from actually making a home and toward filling one. "Here are the techniques you can use to be domestically competent" has skewed to "Here are the things you should buy to make your home comfortable." Perhaps that's a product of us collectively trading in "Building Things" for "Expensive Numbers on Paper Being Pushed Back and Forth," or perhaps it is just laziness on our part ("if someone else will put a window in for me, I'll have time to pick out expensive drapes."), but it makes me want to finally finish my basement with some nice built-in "Man's" bookshelves - just as a tribute to those ridiculous but competent people who made homes before me.

I'm well, thanks.

I got called off of work today, and was a little bitter about it. Lisa came home and I walked up to the market for milk. There was, as always, some idiot in front of me buying seven thousand candy bars with her EBT food-stamp card. I was in a foul mood standing there with my purchase, waiting to set down my two freaking dollars and go home, and the woman behind me said, "How you doin' today?" I assumed she was talking to someone else in the store until she came around my left side and repeated herself with eye contact, verbatim, with the exact same cadence: "How you doin' today?" I was a little taken aback, and then answered, "Very well, you?" She said she was well too. So all is well.
What she probably doesn't know, though, is that this turned my whole day around. when I left for the store I was a much maligned proletariat denied a day's work and forced to spend more on milk. I had to put up with the riff-raff of the neighborhood in front of me in line and was feeling surly about everything. As soon as this woman asked me how I was, though, I thought for half a second and said "very well, you?" I guess I hadn't thought about it, but in the grand scheme my life is pretty decent, and I'm lucky that the worst thing I can complain about is some trashy shit in front of me buying junk food using state funds. That's really not that bad. That's just living in this neighborhood. So when she asked that innocent question (twice), she brought to my attention the fact that I really am, in fact, quite well. I could gripe, but overall things are pretty okay. I assume that's what she meant when she replied with the same answer - she's probably got a mortgage or rent payment she's worried about, and maybe the house next door is vacant and haven to unsavories, but damnit, she lives here and cares about who else does. She genuinely wanted to know if I was doing alright, and genuinely wanted me to know that she was too.
So thank you, Quick Stop lady, for some much needed perspective on my day. I am very well, thank you, and I hope you can say the same. Let's do this again sometime soon.

Foreclosure Blues

Well, the house next door to me has been condemned. On the south side of my house, there was a foreclosure about two years ago. It finally sold last month, and the guy is treating it as a flip-job. I hope he does good work on it and sells it to a nice young family, but who knows? On the north side there was a rental that was owned by a man who also owned half a dozen or so other properties in the neighborhood, and rented them all. Apparently (according to officer Jackson of the distressed properties division of the MPD) he lost all of his rentals to foreclosure. This particular one was peopled with a large family of many children who would spend afternoons out playing in the back yard. I once fell off a ladder saving their cat, who'd gotten stuck on the roof above their porch in the January chill. They seemed like decent people.
The big orange placard on the plywood over the front door says the reason for condemnation was "lack of required utility water." So from what I can gather, the renters (the decent people) must have left on the first of the month, when I was out of town and Lisa was at work all day. Since that day, we've seen people in the yard poking around the house on several occasions. We assumed they were employed by the owner to fix it up for the next renters. However, they were apparently looting the house for its copper pipes coming in from the street.
Such is life in 2009 on the North Side of Minneapolis. Yesterday there was a garbage truck that came down the alley and idled for a while. Its occupants spent the better part of an hour collecting the detritus from a family hastily vacated and carting it all off to a dump in some unknown and distant suburb. I can only hope the bulldozers are not close behind.
Over the past year or so I've watched as at least twelve homes in my neighborhood have been quickly leveled after default. Perfectly good, sturdy homes that have stood for decades erased from the landscape because the owners couldn't make the payments and the banks that owned the mortgages didn't want them. As nice as it would be to buy the vacated lot and plant my neighbor's yard into a giant vegetable garden, I really hope someone steps up to restore this house. When I drive down West Broadway I see homes that are surrounded by six, sometimes ten vacant lots, and all I can think is that it looks a lot like the farm houses you see in rural Minnesota. Enveloped by naked ground, these homes don't belong in the city. We live in a community that is defined by density. If we can't pack people into a city block, we don't deserve to be classified as an Urban Area. The answer to this housing crisis is not to push more people into the few apartment buildings on Penn Ave, but to allow a giant family of many children and an errant cat to inhabit a perfectly good house a block off the main drag that is solid and unwanted, except by said family. Good luck to whomever owns it now, in getting the copper replaced, and in selling it I hope to a couple of people who will love it for what it is: the beginning of a spectacular life. We don't need more flat vacant ground on the North Side.

File Under: Infernal Racket

I'm just going to pretend that I didn't just take a two-year hiatus from writing a blog.


For the last thirty-four hours or so the SUV parked in front of my next door neighbor's house has been beeping every two seconds or so. Every time I walk outside to take out garbage, or grill, or clean the garage, or whatever, it's there. *beep* A creepy soundtrack *beep* to all my outdoor *beep* activities. *beep* Last time I was out there I made believe I was under the North Sea tracking Russian subs.
I can only assume that, barring some weird homemade Sputnik behind the third row seats, this is their car alarm sending a distress signal that it is slowly dying. What I don't get is how it has been going on all afternoon, all night, all morning, all afternoon, and all evening again without anyone doing anything about it. My neighbors are a bit of a mystery to me. They are around a lot, and there are a lot of them. They have at least four cars, one of which is an all but abandoned El Dorado with a shattered windshield that was almost towed during the last snow emergency, and another of which is this insane beeping SUV. But then, sometimes I don't see them for days on end. Of course this is one of those times.
I'm not going to pretend that cops on the north side of MPLS don't have more important things to concentrate on than a nuisance elderly car alarm, but isn't there something that can be done about this? If the alarm were actually going off, they'd have been here within the first - I dunno - four or so hours. But instead I'm being subjected to the soundtrack of history's longest game of Pong. What if the neighbors don't come home for a week? The SUV is the only one of their cars that is out there now. What if they took the others on some extended caravan road trip?
What really scares me about this prospect is that every so often the wind will pick up or a car will drive by and I miss a beep. And I am actually confused. I stop whatever I'm doing, my ears perk up, and I think, 'Is it gone? I don't think I'm prepared for silence! What will I do?!' I really hope they get back and turn it off soon, because - like those first cigarettes outside the lunchroom in highschool - I fear this is one of those things that will get harder and harder to part with as I become more and more acclimated to it.