Feed My Starving Children

One of Eryn's classmates had a birthday party today.  We were all invited to Feed My Starving Children to package meals.  The kids are a little slower than adults usually, but they still packaged 58 boxes, or about 12,000 individual servings, for Thailand or Haiti.  I was originally on warehouse duty, folding boxes, swapping containers of rice and vegetables and moving packed boxes around.  It was a bit overcrowded in that department, however, so I switched to putting expiration labels on food bags.  It made me have flashbacks to labeling continuing education flyers for the nurses' association bulk mailings.

The second part of labeling a little boy joined me, age 6. He was a lot of fun and did a great job and made it go much faster as he was chatty.  We talked extensively about family and friends and school and after a while got around to the fact that his scooter turned into a Transformer, but it wasn't nearly as big as his father's Transformer.  That's right...his dad has a transformer bigger than a full-sized scooter.  His dad also lost the kid's Star Wars character on the video game console and claimed those that were left as his own.  The kid stated it was very mean.  I couldn't disagree, but lamented the general fallibility of computers.  And then we got to favorite books.  He told me his favorite book was about fish and scuba diving.  I asked if he wanted to be a diver or work with fish when he was older and he assured me he liked fish, but that the important part was that the book talked about Jehovah.  Pausing in his labeling, he leaned forward across the table and earnestly asked, "Does your daughter Eryn understand about Jehovah?"

I avoided the discussion on a technicality, and assured him Eryn did understand who Jehovah was.  Then we went right back to talking video games, soccer, summer activities, websites, and first grade.

Here's Eryn with her classmates/friends discussing the setup.


Ditto.  See that dress to  the right with the British flag on it?  That's a Doctor Who themed dress.  Very cool.


Food packing has started.


Eryn was in charge of soy.


My wife was in charge of bag sealing.  You had to be 18 or older. Here's someone younger than 18 explaining to her how it works.

Kraft Paper

I understand Kraft Paper is the brown paper you wrap things in, but all I can think when I see this sign is why would I want to put that on my sandwich?  The sign was removed just 30 minutes later which makes me wonder, who is it in the sparsely trafficked basement of the building that walks past a free Kraft Paper sign at 7:00 a.m. and thinks "YES! I WANT IT ALL!"

Where to find job training at Supervalu

I seem to remember that Supervalu was offshoring a significant portion of its computer programming staff.  Perhaps that explains why their website doesn't even support some basic clicks.  Unfortunately, it looks like they can't train themselves to fix it, because the training resources are 404.

Fortunately, the benefits are commensurate with the necessary web skillz.

Drive It Down

I'm sure the point of getting a monthly report from Google about all my accounts is to encourage me to break my own records and revel in my web presence.  But my record setting has focused on how low I can take my incoming email and, in a lesser respect, my outgoing email.  I'm succeeding, but it's a slow haul, short of deleting the account.

Unsubscribe II

Think Progress has a different trick to keep me from unsubscribing.  They forget the // and create a malformed href so I can't click it.

And if you grab the URL, stuff in your own //, and drop it in the URL bar, you go here:

Adventure Cycling - Planning Your Route

I read this article on planing your route by Adventure Cycling today.  My favorite part was the map of the Adventure Cycling national routes.  The Allegheny Mountains and Utah Cliffs routes look fun and doable.  Green Mountains too. - any of those little loops.  Unlike the Transamerica Trail.  I'm pretty sure I can't do 4252 miles unless I give up my job.

I've wanted to bike in Maine.  Catch the ocean and some fresh sea food.  Maybe that's a family vacation next year with a stop for the Green Mountain loop.  Looks like fall might be optimal with the changing colors.

Surprising Statistics

This amazes me.  It's my video stats for my channel on YouTube. And I've added 180 minutes since I captured this a few weeks ago.  Apparently I was the featured video one day.  Some day in the not too distant future, I will have wasted three full days - 24 hour days, not the 8 hour work sort - of the world's time watching home made Gumby videos, Saxaboom videos, and NowThen Threshing Show videos. I have personally impacted the world's capacity to be productive.  Nothing like starting a really good meme.  But I'm doing my part.

Flat Part Trois

Stupid RunKeeper.  It doesn't keep track of calories expended riding on a squishy tire because your tube is going flat over six miles, but you're too lazy to swap for your spare and instead try to compensate for the mush and stop now and then to frantically top off the air with a hand pump before the sweat really sets in.  And you don't get any awards whatsoever for riding home Tokyo Drift style as you slide around corners.  I think Drew Carey would have given me a million calories for my panache.

More worrisome is that it's my third flat in about 300 miles.  The first one was a staple in the front tire.  The second one was glass in the front tire.  I'm not sure what caused this one.  Not just wear and tear from the first two flats as it was in the back.  I'm now convinced my tires are perhaps not as durable as I'd like.  It may be time to find two sturdier replacements before I go on RAGBRAI.  And I should do it before the weekend as Ming and I are going to try to have our rain day century.

Fortunately, Alan brought back the upright hybrid I loaned him as he bought a new bike.  It's my least favorite bike, but my pack will swap racks without any effort (not the case with my road bike, and that requires custom shoes to boot - ha), so it'll be good for a commute and running to the shop to see about replacement tires.

Unfortunately, I'll still need to spend some time patching tubes.  I'm glad I'm a little obsessive about hoarding patch kits.

 

Unsubscribe

I've been on a kick to unsubscribe myself from a lot of email lately.  One less thing to declutter and I only worry about the ones that make it into my inbox, not the spam box garbage.  This unsubscribe form was particularly enjoyable because, after clicking the submit button once, it disabled the required field for unsubscribing myself.  So either Apsalar is very clever, and they're actively working to stop me from unsubscribing while appearing compliant, or they've got an incredibly obvious bug that should have never slipped past testing.  Leading to the question, "Why would I trust any other software I might be interested in purchasing from them given such an obvious bug in such a simple web form?"  Perhaps they've rightly intuited that my unsubscribe is a tacit statement on my part that I don't intend to buy in the foreseeable future and I may be fucked with at will.

You Can't Take This Mug From Me

That's what I thought about putting on this mug.  But I went with the tried and true.  My art skills leave a bit to be desired, but you can tell it's Serenity without too much imagination.  I was helping Stephanie at work with a product issue at her machine and noticed her wallpaper was Serenity.  I also noticed that she had one of the many second-hand mugs I had distributed around the company, which was peculiar because I hadn't left her one during my primary mug-dispersal period.  I asked her about it and she didn't know where it had come from, which led me to posit that one of the other product owners had moved it to Stephanie's office during an office cleaning.  No one should have a second-hand, second-hand, second-hand, second-hand (I think there's actually one more in there) mug.  So I bought some Pebeo porcelain chalkboard black ink off Amazon, painted up a mug from a local training company, leaving enough of the lip unpainted to allow chalk-free drinking, and after 24 hours of paint drying baked her a mug at 300 degrees for 35 minutes.

Honestly, even I felt a little geeky walking around with this thing at work and riding the elevator, but in part because I wasn't going to drink out of it myself.  You have to own your geek mugs, and this one wasn't mine to own.

I gave Stephanie the warning about not using the chalk nubs I left her on the mug while it was hot, and that it could be safely wiped down, but that it tended to leave chalk on one's hands and clothes, which might not be safe for work.

There's enough paint for another mug, and Eryn is certain she gets to make the next one.

Overheard in Minneapolis

It surprises me that it's been 6 years since I posted on Overheard in Minneapolis.  Although the site has been pretty slow since 2010 or earlier.  While I was figuring out what to do with some of my feeds from Reader, I discovered I still had it tagged.  I know there were more than these, so I suspect I posted something under another alias.  Must have been a little risque'.  I do like this one, that isn't mine at all, but takes place in a familiar venue...

Coworker #2 to Coworker #1: I just want to specify that when I said I cooked her an omelet, I didn't mean that I “cooked her an omelet”.  She was hungry, I had eggs.  End of story.
Coworker #1: Dude, what else would it have meant?

Aha...I knew I had at least one other one out there:
Co-worker #2 reciprocating to Co-worker #1: Well, I had a dream last night that I stabbed you.
Overheard by Concerned Co-worker #3.

These were all mine back in 2007...
Ikea employee to another employee: He’s at least 100% potty trained.
Ikea Smaland kids’ area, Overheard by Scooter.

Middle Aged Man to Same-Aged Girlfriend after hearing on the p.a. that kids younger than 2 have to sit on a parent’s lap: I wish you were a lapkid.
Circus Juventas, Overheard by Scooter.

Woman on the 62-mile Ironman ride: Seeing people from this angle always reminds me that I want a tattoo on my calf.
Ironman Bike Ride, Overheard by Scooter.

Female Cashier handing $5 bill to younger, male cashier: It’s from a secret admirer.
Younger cashier: Well, that doesn’t rule anybody out.
Rosemount Dunn Brothers, Overheard by Scooter.

Two women on a first date: I think it must have been past life stuff. We both liked artichokes.
Roseville Dunn Brothers, Overheard by Scooter.

And it's sort of scary in a gun culture...

Why would I spend $7.99 to buy a t-shirt from Target that advertised Target?  I figured that's what the one star rating was for, but the low rating is actually because it's a men's shirt that doesn't appropriately fit women.  Go figure.  I'm not even sure I'd pay $.99.  If I'm shopping at Target, and this shirt is available to me, it should be because they're handing them out for free and hoping I wear it at Walgreens, Walmart, or CVS.  Not that I ever go to Walmart.  But at least with them I have to go to My Walmart Wear, a separate website, to get a Walmart logo-ed shirt.  And it looks like I have to be an employee.  Which is sad for its own reasons.  Uniforms should be free.  Not that I can't buy logo-ed shirts from my own company.  But lately they've been doing a good job of bestowing all manner of t-shirts and dress shirts on me as long as I volunteer for hiring fairs and charity events and embrace casual work week.

Miscellaneous Photo Montage

I have a lot of pictures left over on my camera.  This is Eryn and I at Ring Mountain enjoying ice cream and sending Wali a picture to prove we were there within moments of his visit.



Better if you go to Flickr to see it in full size.  A panoramic of Eryn at the Day By Day Cafe for breakfast.


In addition to Sign Makers, Kyle and I went to see Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan, involving a militia, a lot of guys with beards and mustaches, a very old Grizzly Adams, a violent Paul Bunyan with three times the average life span of a human, the grave of Babe the Blue Ox, and a Minnesota camp for juvenile offenders.  Worthy of Trash Film Debauchery, but put on as a private showing with the help of Twin Cities Beard and Mustache Club.


Our first round of The Farm Game, a gift from Kyle.  Our cows seemed to be committing hari kari.  Death by dog.  Death by car.  Death by lightning.  It was endless.


Allison on the Amtrak train on the way back from Grandma Madeline's funeral preparation.  We shared a sleeper car.  I bunked it.


A photo I sent my wife from Sidney, Montana, that Allison photobombed.



This was in the hotel in Sidney, Montana.  This is amazing and should be sold for $50 so everyone could make pancakes with the push of a button whenever they want.  My happiness at food in Montana was only superseded by a piece of rhubarb pie ala mode.  If there was a machine that could make instant rhubarb pie and pancakes, I'd be 80 pounds heavier again.


From Eryn's tenth birthday party!  We had a late party, post ballet season, so we could invite her friends and family to hang at grandpa's studio, drink root beer, eat fruit snacks and cake, and listen to The Sudden Lovelys, Paige and Danny.  Eryn played their song Waxwing Birds with them which made her very happy.  She dropped her pick at one point but recovered nicely.


I hope she felt hip having her party in an art studio warehouse with live music.  It was a lot of fun.  Hopefully made up for a bit of the annoyance from last year when I was laid up.

Upping the Mileage

I'm very close to a 1,000 mile goal on my bicycle.  It's the third goal I've set since I got back on the bike around the August last year, for a total of 1,800 miles in under a year.  So I'm feeling solid.  Last weekend, I did a very aggressive 64 mile ride up to Maple Grove to have breakfast at the Original Pancake House with Kyle.  I got cocky.  Stomping on the pedals up and down hills almost had me bonking with only four miles to get home.  I'm glad I wasn't further afield, or I wouldn't have made it, because I was chewing through the gears trying to find one low enough to let me spin up the final hills.  I'm supposed to do a 100 miler with Ming if it's not storming tomorrow, so I'm hoping he won't be going full tilt the whole way.

I got lost several times, including losing the trail and the road in Theodore Wirth Park.  They're serious about their trail closed signs in Theodore Wirth.  Perhaps because they found so many bodies in the woods there back in the early 2000's and late 90's.  My wife and I lived in St. Louis Park in those days which wasn't a distant ride from our apartment and I remember avoiding the park for a while before they caught this guy.
 

I had the coconut pancakes and thick bacon. I could have had a meal just eating the breakfast condiments.


This was parked in the lot.  I sent Eryn a picture on Facebook to see if she thought I should tip it over, ala Mr. Bean.


After breakfast, I hopped on my bike and discovered my second flat front tire of the year.  This time it was a piece of glass embedded in the tire.  I felt very fortunate avoiding the dog poop when I laid down my bike.  I felt less fortunate when I pinched my hand in the pump.


A picture of the Mill Museum on the way home and the Guthrie's bridge.  There were a lot of people around for the Stone Arch Festival, including a woman who was walking her bike and talking on the phone and rolled into the bikeway perpendicular to the path and stopped to talk.  I came to a halt and just kept looking at her until she finally realized she was in the way.  Which was good, because the other guy came around the blind corner from the other direction doing about 20 mph.  See all those areas where you could stand, talk on your phone, and not get killed by a head on collision with a bike?  Apparently they have bad reception.

Stone Arch

Sunday we went to the Stone Arch art festival and car show downtown.  My father in law often shows his car there, so we check out the cars, find Eryn a snack, and have a family lunch/dinner (and get my wife some jewelry, at least this year).  It's also a good chance to see a lot of coworkers, as no fewer than five of them were there.  At one point, I saw a coworker I didn't know, but recognized and asked, "Do you still work at [My Company]?"  The woman next to him in the line looked at me and said, "Why yes, I work in creative services."  That's right.  There were so many coworkers, they were standing next to each other in line amongst thousands of people and didn't even know it.

This isn't of art or cars or the Stone Arch bridge, but it's a nice photo from near the Avanti II I was looking at.  That's a weird car.  It looks like it's driving backwards.


I like this picture because the sign says not to walk on the street.  I'LL DO WHAT I WANT!


And we walked past this wall on the way to the festival, near the Metal Matic warehouse.  This wall is at the rear of where my wife and I lived on University Avenue and is famous for being the hill and wall where Dan'l tumbled down and hit his head while peeing drunk one night - while...we're pretty sure he tumbled through his own urine given his smell - and then stumbled inside to where Kyle, my wife and I were hanging out with some story about being jumped by a gang of frat boys.  I think it needs a plaque.

Chicken And Duck and Handerpants

Ming got the present I bought him.  A small laminated poster of the movie Chicken and Duck, which is a movie about a Chinese saying that people have a difficult time understanding each other.  I bought him the poster because he made a comment about how chicken and duck were a bitch, and his sister commented, "Who's the duck, who's the chicken, and who's the bitch?"  Very funny.

I'm tempted to give him these Handerpants my parents gave me as well, but they're too small even for him or Kyle, so I've moved them to the gift closet as a nice present for a niece or nephew.  Maybe Logan is looking for a new set of bicycling gloves.

Eagan TV

Eryn is at local access cable television camp this week.  Yes, that's a thing.  And it's not hosted by Viva and Jerry.  It's with Eagan TV and they spend the week writing scripts, acting, learning to use the professional cameras, and learning the tricks of good filming.  Eryn is doing something that involves a gold jelly bean, a Nerf sword, someone turning into a hotdog, and ninjas.  I think.

It's been fun having her at my workplace, as the cable tv folks operate out of donated space in our lower level.  She and I have coffee together in the morning (Snow Drift blended drink for her, white chocolate, no whip) and hang out while I work before she starts class.  When I was walking across the skyway that connects two of our buildings, they were outside practicing posing.  Eryn's in the red shirt near the tree.  Tomorrow they all get interviewed and film interviews with other classmates.  She's been having a great time.

Caching Reboot

I went out tonight to do some geoaching, bicycling to the closest three to my house.  Apparently I'm out of practice, because I had two Did Not Finds out of three attempts.  And I haven't been out in so long that I forgot that pants are mandatory in the summer.  And sort of mandatory in the winter in Minnesota, come to think of it.  This is one scratch out of several I did find along with a nice multi-spotted shin/ankle bruise that looks like it went as deep as the bone.  Obviously, I don't cache half-assed.  I won't give up.  I'd like to hit all the new ones by the house.  But I'll be throwing on my old fat guy Dockers to trudge through the scrub, regardless of how stupid I look on my bike.



I did get a nice photograph of some near-cache flowers for my troubles.  Much better than the flattened prayer penny that was available.

Geoguessr.com

All right.  That's a lot of fun and a brilliant use of the web.  I played around with Geoguessr.com after reading about it on XKCD.  It's incredibly enjoyable.  I received a bit of a gambler's high from it because I did well on my very first attempt.

But then I got worse.

 This was my best attempt:

I was very proud of how close I got with this one.  It looked like Poland to me.

I was closer with this one, but the Kremlin-like building sort of gave it away.  The Poland one was MUCH more difficult and fulfilling.

Ming Events

Ming, what are Ming events?  Why do they cast a shadow?  It sounds sort of scary. Like something out of Flash Gordon. You should use this as a profile picture - at least a cropped version of the left image part.

Sign Painters

Kyle, Matthew, and I went to the movie Sign Painters at the Trylon Microcinema tonight which was, not surprisingly, a documentary about the art of sign painting.  There are articles about it all over the web: HuffPost, NPR, Boing Boing.  It was very well done and captured how sign painting had once been a common job that, over the decades, became the domain of a few, found its renaissance, and then took a hit again when computer-generated vinyl signs became popular.

Walking to the train afterward, you could see the whole movie laid out in the Hiawatha area, from Kaufman just around the corner, to the huge painted ADM sign and beautiful stalks of wheat on the side of the grain silos, to the nasty looking faded vinyl and plastic that decorate the walls of Simply Self Storage and the other storage facilities on the street.

Two of the painters in the movie, Forrest and Phil, were at the showing to answer questions for a while after the movie.  They were interesting to listen to and talked about how the city now has rules about signage, and that it can't be more than one square foot per front display footage, unless an existing sign is in place that can be replaced foot for foot, because it allows them to sidestep some of the rules around permits and the "sphincter" of the city bureaucracy.  Phil noted that he likes to be the one to kill his old signs, either painting over them, or replacing them with new signs.

A beautiful movie about an art few people think about but encounter on a daily basis.

""The documentary accomplishes what many films that consist of mostly talking heads do not. Through the individual stories, a larger narrative surfaces about this art form and its fate over time. In many ways, it is more than that. It is a cautionary tale about the head-long rush into a technology-driven time and a meditation on what’s lost along the way. It is a reminder to look around and recognize the physical history in our presence every day." -Mary Louise Schumacher

Man of Steel

Eryn very much enjoyed the Superman (Hopeman, after all, it's a Kryptonian swoosh, not an English S) movie.  I could have done with a bit less fighting - quite a bit less - and a lot more story telling.  I'm an iconoclast, and I believe almost every movie can benefit from improved technology and the overuse of computers, but there are a number of things I preferred about the Christopher Reeve version.  Not least, that it didn't destroy some of the "rules" about Superman that have been inviolate, at least in film.  I won't put the details here for spoiler purposes for my friends.  If they really need to see what I'm talking about, they can follow this hop.

There were a number of nods to Superman lore, such as throwing in a LexCorp tanker and a Wayne Enterprises sattelite.  They weren't exciting, so much as they were distracting.  Worse than that was a whole Christ motif that included faux shirtless semi-crucifixion and explicitly stating his age upon saving the human race from Zod was 33.  And I was annoyed that Earth wasn't ready to handle the appearance of an alien - it was too easy of an explanation for too much.  Disappointing.  Read that link at nods to Superman lore for so many tropes and bits of junk that you'll be surprised even if you sat through the movie already.

In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms

Friday night we went to Theatre in the Round to see "In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms" by Ludmilla Bollow.  I'd liken it to something like The Golden Girls, but without all the obvious one-liners and a disturbing theme about getting old and not being able to let go of the past.

Myrah, Violet, and Winifred are three elderly women who meet in the department store restroom consistently, and each is facing a personal issue.  Myrah is losing her health.  Violet is losing her house (more accurately, all her money).  And Winifred is losing her mind, a slow process that started when her husband died in the war 40 years earlier.  They band together to combat Winnifred's sister Clare who wants to take Winnifred back to her dog kennel where she's good at training both dogs and humans, and she can make sure Winnfred is safe (and potentially sell Winnifred's house and leverage her war widow pension).  Clare is tenacious and accounts for much of the humor in the show. She reminded me of the paperboy in Better Off Dead with John Cusak, except her $2.00 is Winnifred.  At the end of the play (spoiler!) Clare is tied up in the bathroom with an old fur coat, still trying to get her hands on Winnifred (who has agreed to go with her, but doesn't end the play with Clare).

The actresses did a wonderful job, and Maggie Bearmon Pistner was particularly good as Myrah.

NodToNothing.com

If it's any easier, you can just go to NodToNothing.com now, although NodToNothing.blogspot.com will continue to work.  I'm just forwarding the traffic.  And I had $10 to spare.

Grandma

My grandma passed away a few weeks ago, just before she turned 98.  Her goal was to make it to 100, and we were all sad she didn't make it to a big shindig with all the family like we'd had for 95 and 90.  My cousin and aunt and mother cleaned trailer while my sister and I tagged along to the conservation office for fallowing land, the lawyer, the accountant, and the bank (and the funeral home).  And a lot of dinners.  Although if you've seen one dinner in Sidney, Montana, you've seen them all.  Not a lot of culinary diversity.  Just not a lot of diversity at all.  While I was spending the night in the trailer - a short night thanks to the roofer at the church who starting shingling at 6:00 a.m. in the rain - I took some pictures of the pictures in one of the albums.  They're not great, but I wanted to get them out here for my sister and any family that wants them.

Grandma and Aunt.


Grandma with my Aunt and Uncle


Allison with Grandma in 2002.


A card I sent my grandmother that she kept (I think she had all her cards from ever).  It's disturbing that I didn't comb my hair until I was four.  Particularly as I seldom have to comb it now until the end.


My grandpa and grandma at the Williston Amtrak station, which is how Allison and I got to Sidney and back.  On the way back, we met someone from Kenmare waiting at the station, just down the road from my other Grandpa in Donnybrook.  She didn't remember much of Donnybrook, but told me she liked small towns and the dances, like when she'd gone to the dances outside of Sidney, Montana, in the early 80s.  Which means we were likely at the same dances as it was just down the road from my grandparents' farm.





Dinner with my folks among others.


This was probably her 95th or 90th birthday party.




Excellent picture.  My cousin says this was down in Tucson.  They look pretty happy.


The picture of Don and Madeline I always think of when I picture them.