Not a Reading Post

Every once in a while I feel like getting back into not-reading posts.  Bare with me.  Hmm...I bet it's bear with me.  Otherwise we're going to have to shed some clothes, right?

So what did I do for my birthday this year?  Celebrated it a day early for one.  We headed up to the cabin to see my folks and took a bunch of steak, porkchops, and potatoes with us.  And some games.  My wife and kid took crokinole.  We learned to play it at a gaming day with friends last weekend and they loved it.  Then discovered that the board I'd had forever because it was the same board I'd had as a kid in the old farmstead home when I farmed in the summers, was a crokinole board on the flip side.  So there was a bunch of cribbage and crokinole pre-steak.  

You can tell we're in heavy covid concern because of the masks.  I literally used my mask between bites of dinner.  I was pretty sure we were all safe, but my kid bags groceries, and we talked to the neighbor to get Luna - the dog - watched, and the meat store in Osseo was off the hook with people.  Better safe than sick with all the hospital beds pretty much full.

I got a cool pillow case from my mother that means I'll never have to guess which pillow is mine again, and I'll know if my wife is stealing my pillow to use as a reading pillow in the living room.  Reminds me that I need to get mounting bolts for the bars to hang my cycling quilt she made me.

And I got a cycling game.  I told my wife Flamme Rouge was on my short list of potential gifts.  She got the expansion as well so I can play solo.  I'm worried that it's sort of pathetic if I sit around drinking and playing cycling games all by my lonesome, but I'm willing to deal with the shame.
I got this game

Bike Gear

I got a bunch of bicycling-related items for my birthday and for the holidays.  Kristine sent me this cool luggage tag.  I have a bottle opener, a snake sculpture, and other things made from bicycle chains.  But a luggage tag was new.



Kyle gave me a wall clock for my birthday.  I have a stand-alone gear clock at work, although it's not nearly as shiny.  I'm excited about this one.  It's going to replace the $1 plastic clock my teammates put on my wall so they could be sure our 1-1s weren't going over the 30 minute mark.  I was going to give the plastic wall clock to another manager, but my wife had a nice wall clock here she was going to give to Good Will.  So he'll get that and the plastic clock can find it's way to a manager I don't like as much.


Ming got me this cool porn camera to wear on my head.  But it didn't come with the mandatory SD chip necessary to make it work.  So I've been hanging onto it while I waited to order enough Christmas swag that I wouldn't have to pay shipping.  Now that the Christmas presents are here, I'm good to go.  I'll be streaming Ming feeds of everything I do.  It'll be creepiest when he notices I'm in his house or talking to his mother in law.


This trading card of Graham Bergh is the most confusing present I received.  Kristine sent it to me with the luggage tag.  I don't know what it is about me that makes her think I need trading cards featuring Seattle-esque entrepreneurs.  Maybe I can trade it for a Lance Armstrong card or one featuring the founder of Surly bikes.  Maybe I'll just put a 3/1 on it and pretend it's a Magic the Gathering card.


If you need your own chain luggage tag, the back of Graham's card tells you how to go about procuring one.

45

I turned 45. Not very exciting.  I confused Eryn for a moment when I told her I was halfway to 50.  She and my wife got me a very neat business card holder for my birthday with a Marvin the Martian top. I'm not sure I needed a container for business cards, but if I had to have one, that one is pretty neat.

Yesterday, while digging around on the book shelf, I pulled out my old copy of Retha Warnicke's The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. I met Retha back then when I was taking classes from Stanford Lehmberg (if anything makes me feel old, Stan dying last year does - I had some wonderful years learning history from him), and she was fun to talk to - some very interesting ideas and I think not being a crusty old prof who believed in history being a particular way and no other, but a young guy who actually seemed open to new ideas probably rubbed her the right way.

 

But the amusing part of picking up the book yesterday is that when I opened it, I found my wife's birthday card to me on my 24th birthday.  This year, instead of an "I love you" I got a card about a panda who stuck my cake up his butt and my daughter signed it to the "old man".  Times change.

Kyle's Birthday Sake Cup - 19c Ho-O Bird

We got Kyle another sake cup for his birthday.  He's up to three, so that's officially a collection.  For his records, in case he's ever looking them up.

I didn't know what a Ho-O bird was, so I looked it up.  "According to legend (mostly from China), the Hō-ō appears very rarely, and only to mark the beginning of a new era -- the birth of a virtuous ruler, for example. In other traditions, the Hō-ō appears only in peaceful and prosperous times (nesting, it is said, in paulownia trees), and hides itself when there is trouble. As the herald of a new age, the Hō-ō decends from heaven to earth to do good deeds, and then it returns to its celestial abode to await a new era. It is both a symbol of peace (when the bird appears) and a symbol of disharmony (when the bird disappears). In China, early artifacts show the Phoenix (female) as intimately associated with the Dragon (male) -- the two are portrayed either as mortal enemies or as blissful lovers. When shown together, the two symbolize both conflict and wedded bliss, and are a common design motif even today in many parts of Asia (see below).

鳳 = Fèng, Male Phoenix    凰 = Huáng, Female Phoenix"

The size of Cup: 3 7/16" Dia x 2 3/4" High. Nice Blue and White Japanese Imari Porcelain Soba Choko Cup. The cup is nicely shaped with good porcelain material and nice detail painting of two Ho-O Bird in front and back. There is also nice motif design of Yoraku design inside rim area. Inside bottom has Sho-Chiku-Bai design. Blue under glazing painting is well contrasted. The condition of Cup is excellent, no chip, no crack and no hairline. One Hittsuki (glaze stick) on the side of foot rim as last photo show, minor. Well balanced cup. Dating from early Meiji, late 19c.

Pictures!

Kyle's Next Birthday

Dude...you so need plushie Meeples. They come in so many colors. You could....could... well, you could... um.... well... ORGY!!!! Or maybe that's a little too pedobear for you? Come to think of it, a rainbow of colored men is sort of gay. And I mean that without the quotes. You might as well be painting the letters on the back of your S-A-T-U-R-N. Regardless, be prepared for a few throw pillows come next August. It'll still be less emasculating than what I get Mean Mr. Mustard.

Birthday! 7!

Eryn had her seventh birthday this weekend. For all of you that knew her when she was a glimmer in my eye and a bump in Pooteewheet's belly, yes, you're that f-ing old.

This was a better year than the previous years because Eryn decided she'd rather have a slumber party than a mass-effect, 20+ kids, in our house, birthday party. So the sum total of children in our house was three. Her best friend from Tesseract (bankrupt last week), and her best friend from Glacier Hills. They spent the evening helping to make ice cream at Ring Mountain, eating popcorn, and watching Igor.

And climbing the plastic house. Squirreliness was the rule of the evening.

Ming and Logan (and Julie), may their spiritual being of choice have mercy on their souls, got Eryn a Harry Potter Wii game for her birthday. It's definitely interfering with bicycling. The girl is a bit obsessed. I watched the whole potion-making portion. That's a game for obsessive compulsives.

41.09615

My birthday was a little over a month ago, and to celebrate I had the 40th birthday party I didn't have when I was 40. For those of you who are wondering "where the hell was my invitation?", it was a rather limited affair that was just a few people I work/worked with having fondue and ice cream cake from Ring Mountain around our new table and not bringing me presents. At least those were the instructions. I guess I could claim it was people who have worked with me since the Unity days or just after (e.g. about 10 years ago), but given how the last Unity joke I saw went over on Facebook, I'll just stay away from that as a descriptor. Even with the limited group, Pooteewheet and I ran out of nice silverware and china. We did manage to create two kinds of vegan fondue, which was something of an experiment given the rule many vegans insisted upon on the internets, "don't use vegan cheese!" We ended up using nuts for one and nutritional yeast for the other. Both were very good.

• Ming and family gave me a very cool black geocaching jacket with the official geocaching logo on it. I'll be the coolest guy covered in ticks.
• Klund and family gave me a dinosaur geobug. I believe Eli provided the dinosaur. I have yet to place it, because it's cold outside. I need to remember to take its picture and come up with some sort of goal. Perhaps I could ask each person who finds it to work toward the extinction of some species. That would be unique.
• My inlaws gave me a gift card to Best Buy. I used it to buy a replacement cord for the Wii which Luna ate shortly after we got her and which caused no end of Rock Band II and related Wii issues the night of the party. And I bought a Wii game called Mad World which is definitely something Eryn is not allowed near because there's constant swearing and smack talk, profanity laden theme music, and violent death by chainsaw, street sign, and spikes.
• My parents gave me a gift card to Surdyk's. We tried to get over there after our anniversary dinner, but failed. Soon, however, I'll have another two bottles of scotch I won't be able to drink because I'm not managing to even bike five hours, let alone any multiples of five, which is my new rule around drinking scotch. They also bought me a cool coffee table book about beer.
• Eryn and Pooteewheet bought me some Marvin the Martian collectibles, one made of porcelin and gold that someday I can sell to Cash 4 Gold if I lose my job, and one made out of metal. They're on display in the Marvin cookie jar and bank display case.
• Kyle bought me scotch. It's subject to the five hour rule, so I have yet to try it. But it's the first bottle I'll tackle once I've biked enough. Sank, who wants the game in the next bullet, is a scotch drinker, so I may have to bike five hours before I go to drop off the game.
• Mean Mr. Mustard and family gave me back the game I gave him for his birthday last year claiming it's just not his thing. Fortunately, Sank wants it and I was able to send Mr. Mustard a nice write up from BoardGameGeek where a guy mentioned his father smiled for the first time since his partner died when he got his copy of the Menorah game. I went with a completely different path for his gift this year based on that feedback, so if he doesn't like this birthday present (currently on back order) he has no one to blame but himself. Really - it's almost like I had nothing to do with it. He and his family did get me a Penzy's Hot Chocolate set as well, part of which is almost gone.
• She Says sent me a picture of her father and a friend or uncle with their bicycles. Black and white. Pooteewheet framed it for me and it's hanging from a prominent spot in our living room.

Thank you to everyone!

Archaeologist

Eryn got a T-Rex archeology kit for her birthday. Here's the young archaeologist diligently at work when I got up from bed. As they say, the early bird gets the bird-like, reptile (bones).

GOOOOAAAALLLLLL!!!!

Grandpa and Grandma (my mother and father) bought Eryn a 5' x 10' folding soccer net for her birthday. We set it up, although not without injury. I couldn't figure out how to put in the stabilizing pins at first, and managed to drop the bar on my head when I wasn't looking. Hurt like hell. I can feel the bump two days later.

Here's Eryn trying to score.


And me guarding the goal. I look like some sort of soccer hooligan (more like a football hooligan, and the kind that plays after work now and then and drinks a lot, not the kind that plays professionally and is ripped) in my bicycling t-shirt and bicycling boxers. I couldn't be troubled to put on pants. There are more and more days like that.

Happy Birthday!

Eryn turns 6 today! We celebrated with a party at the Little Gym and her first sleepover (as the invitee). Tomorrow is a family party over Italian at Macaroni Grill. We'll get to pictures later. Right now I'm tired from setting up the tent in the living room and hauling presents around.

Larry Turns 60

My father in law turned 60 last week, and during the weekend there was a party for him at his art studio. Pooteewheet made the mistake of telling my sister we might be able to babysit - LissyJo, always check with me, I maintain a calendar. I've added an online Google calendar I can share with Pooteewheet and I'll get her to sign up for the daily dump, but it'll take me a while to move all my details out there - so we ended up taking my niece with us. She had a great time, except for when she tried to stop a larger child (Eryn) from running by just standing in front of her, and except for when she tipped over the cardboard wall and grabbed my leg and bawled, concerned that the wall police were going to get her. Also, she may have been a bit dubious about the book we were reading out loud in the car that involved dead pirates in cages who had rotted away to skeletons. And she wasn't too fond of the stomach ache she got after two pieces of cake. But she was ecstatic about the three (3) cups of meltimints she ate.

Anyway...I just felt bad my sister got stuck with her youngest when she was expecting a night of freedom. We're always happy to mess up both her kids.

Here's Eryn and my niece doing some painting. That's me in the back with the Blackberry. I would have you know that most of the night I was holding a beer (some sort of Goose Island) not a PDA. That's my nephew, between Eryn and me. Shortly before this he was eating meltimints with some paint on them (I think blue and pink). I didn't stop him because he only ate two. There's not a picture of my niece on his side of the family in this post. But I got to witness her looking for some attention, realize it wasn't coming, and then stomp faster and faster until her adrenaline was high enough that the crying was for real. My sister in law asked her "did you get hurt", to which she shook her head up and down vigorously. She's going to be a brilliant actress.


Child train. Woot Woot!


This is what happens when it's your 60th birthday, if the stock market hasn't taken away your entire life savings. I don't know if that's frosting in the middle of Ame's forehead. It was there when we picked her up, so probably not. But she's not Hindu and it wasn't Ash Wednesday (and she's not Anglican), so I don't know why she was dotting her forehead. Maybe they were having toddler bingo at school?

As an aside, my father in law had some very nice paintings he'd done in his studio. His very long mural (15 feet long, 9-12 inches tall?) of ticky tacky houses is something I'd put up in my own house.


This is where I wanted to be as the evening wore down. Upper Cut, next door, was having a boxing match. There were hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, young people dressed to the nines, at least if you consider "the nines" to include dresses so short both your butt and breasts are falling out, despite your really tall boots, and gold lame' jackets. For a while the traffic was beyond the end of the block. The place was rocking so loud it was coming through the wall into the 60th birthday party. I'm not so sure I couldn't have just opened the gate from our side and walked over with a dozen bottles of beer and been the life of the party. I think boxing and drinking might have made for a perfect denouement to the evening.

Holiday Photos

The holidays were busy. I was recovering from surgery, my folks were in town, and we had family pictures, Macy's, my niece's first birthday, Colin's birthday, other birthdays, Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, Christmas afternoon, New Year's... Nonstop festivities. So here are a few photos for the family.

I wasn't at this event. I was laying at home on the couch in a percoset fugue. Adele is checking out the sword I made for her Korean toll (?) where she picks an item and it determines her future. The sword wasn't the first item picked, despite my effort to make it very shiny and attractive to babies. Apparently I should have coated it with chocolate as well, because it doesn't look like it tastes all that good. I did send along some Hostess Cupcakes in case there was a repeat of the carrot birthday cake fiasco.



I can't believe my sword tasted worse than a used toilet stopper. Nasty.


We had the family photos at the Walker Sculpture Garden. Not in front of the big cherry, but in the arboretum area with the big glass fish. The photographer wanted me to help move some planters and I had to explain that moving concrete blocks was off my list after surgery. After the pictures, we went to Macy's to see the elves living in Santa's workshop display. Eryn and Ame' wore their matching dresses. However, Eryn later took a tumble on the escalator which ensured that her holey, bloody tights in no way matched Ame's.


Ame' doesn't get a lot of candy at her house. Grandma indulged her at Macy's. She's the Charlton Heston of candy fiends. You'd have to pry those bones out of her cold dead hands if you wanted to take them away.


Eryn at the company Christmas party meeting with the Clauses.


And one reindeer.


And getting her picture taken in front of the poinsettia tree.


Christmas before Christmas Eve. We opened our presents so we didn't have to haul them north of the cities and haul them back again. A good idea as the car was full on the way home. In this photo, Eryn is confused because she's just gotten a big bag full of rocks. Several of them.


Ah...a rock polisher. A real one that's designed to run forever and ever, not a Discovery Channel piece of crap which broke after three days and which my wife has hidden somewhere in the house so I don't have to look at it so there's no possibility of a divorce over my irritation with junk in the house and her irritation that I'm obsessed with getting rid of junk in the house, even that junk which she feels might not be junk.

All of which reminds me, it's (the new one) been running downstairs for a week and it's probably time to check the rocks.


Christmas Eve. My mother learning how to play Raving Rabbits on the Wii.


Ame's most hated game on the Wii. Raving Rabbits' pull the worms out of the rabbits teeth game. Only slightly less scary than Artie's new remote controlled brontosaurus.


A tap dancing fairy princess ballerina vetinarian. At least if you asked Lemony Snickett. Adele is somewhere under that pile of Jurassic Park.


Grandpa gets a hug for electronic battleship. And yes, my brother's tree does have some sort of problem that might best be solved by dropping some viagara in the water resevoir.


Artie wants to know where my face went. I'm wearing that hoody right now. It's creepy and super comfortable. If it were managerial, it would be perfect.


Christmas morning. Eryn is excited about the second part of the Lion, The Witch and Wardrobe series she got from Santa. She'd been wanting it since long before it came out. I don't believe, 12 days later, that she's watched it end to end yet.


Christmas afternoon. Cousin Max sporting his Obama shirt and talking to Santa.

Mr. Mustard Turns 50

Last year I got Mean Mr. Mustard (pretty soon I'm going to have to just point at Facebook profiles instead of blogs) The Menorah Game for his 49th birthday. It required a lot of work, and I'm not so sure he was impressed. So this year, I went a little easier on the effort and gave him two framed photos of Alyson Hannigan in her T.V. Guide elf outfit, including green and white thigh-high stockings. He DID say at one point when I was referring to Sarah Michelle Geller that Buffy wasn't his favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer character. Willow is. I took this to mean Alyson Hannigan is hotter, not that Willow is a much cooler character, because the second option labels him as a bit of a nerdy fanboy instead of a virile young turk. I guess I should have been able to sort that one out on my own now that he's 50. Regardless, I'm sure his wife doesn't approve of the pictures of Alyson Hannigan that will eventually be in the frames secreted away behind family photos. I count that as a minor win. Happy belated 50th birthday, MMM.

Fortieth

Yesterday was my 40th birthday. I recommend to anyone who feels like they don't get enough birthday cheer that they sign up for Facebook and make sure their birthday is public knowledge. It was a good day. I skipped out of work to catch the 007 movie Quantum of Solace (I liked the last one better), eat free food, and hang with my brother and nephew who came over later in the day to drink beer and play Wii. Oliver (my nephew) bought me a special present, pictured below. A Star Wars battle droid and a card telling me happy birthday big guy. The battle droid has to sit down, because he has freakishly small feet compared to his torso. I think it's a sign that in the future it will be fashionable for the rich to own basically useless robots that mimic the Chinese practice of foot binding.



I think people feel sorry for you on your 40th, or else they're just happy you lived that long despite the stupid, life threatening details of your past, because I scored a few very nice presents. My entire family (sister's family, brother's family, in-laws, my family, and my parents) went in on buying me a complete set (everything but the two commemorative posters) of Cage Design MSP bike posters to hang on our extensive kitchen wall space. I only have the Stone Arch Bridge one at the house so far as the others are still being framed. They'll go nicely with my posters of the tour, poster from RAGBRAI, various bicycling statues, the "One Fucking Speed" triptych Pooteewheet created for me, and the wall art made out of old bike parts that a local artist is making for me.

And my parents also got me a Vista HCx handheld GPS to replace my old one. Now I can download queries of caches to install on my GPS and copy them onto the handheld with a USB cable instead of hand-entering the coordinates one at a time. It's also in color, uses many more satellites for better accuracy (and faster boot time - my old one took forever), and has road maps, so it's useful for finding your way around a big city if you're just on vacation. We tried it out on a few caches today.

Thank you to everyone for the well wishes and the gifts!

Weekend - Birthday, Geocaching, Rabid Rabbits - Picturtopia

We had a good weekend at our house. Eryn turned five, and we celebrated with a party at The Blast, Eagan's indoor play area. I bumped into one of the managers I work with there, and his wife, also a coworker, as their son was born just a few days before our daughter. It was a good place to party. Considerably cheaper than Pump It Up, and it came with a cake. The kids seemed to love it. We finished with an afterparty at the house, playing Wii sports with grandpa and grandma, and a whole evening of beer and Rabid Rabbits with Kyle. Perhaps it's not the best idea to teach your child to slap rabbits and hit them with hammers and plungers and hammer toss cows, but Eryn seems to understand that it's all in good fun. Racing warthogs can be very difficult.

We also went geocaching on Sunday, that glorious, warm, beautiful day that makes you wonder what the hell happened after about 4:00 p.m. today. Why couldn't it be all rainy and crappy and cold between 8 and 4 and sunny afterwards? We went down to Black Dog Park in Eagan, near the river, and found about six caches over several miles of walking. Exercise for the whole family.

And as part of our geocaching adventures, we rehid Eryn's cache, and it was accepted! It literally took 15 minutes from it being posted and accepted to three different cachers showing up at the site at the same time. Crazy! They have alerts set so that their cellphones/blackberrys alert them to new posts. No first to find for The Boss, although he found it today.

Someone rode out into Black Dog Park on their Suzuki and never made it home. It's all very Mad Max with Eryn starring as the little feral child.


The first time we tried to find this cache, it was incredibly wet and muddy and Eryn and I failed. Failed in many ways, because I took a tumble down a slippery hill and hurt my arm. That was the end of caching that day. I think the mud is still on that jacket. This time I walked right up to it and popped it open and found this. Apparently my brain had been mulling over what I'd missed for weeks.


Here's the fade shot with Eryn and her Webkin wondering why the cache isn't to be found where it would seem it should be.


Ah...you think you're sneaky, don't you Mr. Paklid. But we're on to you.


This is a geobug called something like Little Man, Big Head. You have to be pretty dedicated to be finding places to hide this monstrosity. It's huge, and heavy, meaning you can't crumple it up and stuff it into something smaller. We didn't take it - I just wasn't sure when we'd next be near an appropriate cache.


Eryn, strutting her stuff on Geocaching Sunday.


Eryn's a geo gopher. Seems like a not so sneaky cannibal was trying to catch a bit of lunch. Dude - deeper, more spikes.


A bit more posing.


Followed by acting like a ninja with a walking stick. I can only assume this is the fallout of Light Saber Aerobics at the school talent show.


Near where Eryn hid her first cache. That's right...where we were, the trees have names. Vulture and Kite aren't very descriptive, but they make for good clues for cachers. The official name of her cache, which included her first Tooth Fairy geobug, was "I Have a Cachity."


Here we are looking for good places to hide a cache. I did do a squirrel check with a stick before thrusting Eryn's face into the hole.


Birthday at the Blast. My niece, sporting the dinosaur babysitter shirt we got her for Christmas from Threadless and enjoying her cake and ice cream. She really covered some ground in the kid habitrail.


Eryn and her friend sharing a birthday hug.


Eryn reading Girls Can from Grandpa and Grandma.


Logan at the Blast. His mother is effectively hidden in this photo. Logan refused to crawl around the tubes without her. By the end of two hours, she was looking rather hot. In a sweaty, too much time in tubes that are too small for adults, sort of way.


Conner. He suffered the only real injury I know of. Somehow he managed to backflop off something, and there were red scrapes on his back that made him look like he was auditioning for Body Worlds.


Post caching. Eryn and the neighbor drawing chalk outlines in the driveway and playing golf. Those sticks to the right are geocaching leftovers. Pooteewheet's bumper stick proclaims her desire to have Edwards elected. I think the chalk outlines are a metaphor for her hopes.