A Nod to Nothing

Funny AND Stupid

2009-12-20T19:13:00.003-06:00

Before we went to The Enchanted Toy Shop at the St. Paul Ballet today, I was bored and looking for stupid videos. Isn't that how everyone spends part of their Sunday afternoon? I was very pleased to find Esquire.com's 23 stupidest videos.

My favorites are Jesus Loves the Little, Stereotyped, Racist Puppet Children. I think it should be offensive to pretty much everyone I know, including the white people who thought it was a good idea.

And Jesus Died for Your Donuts, which is wrong on so many levels:

Flaming Ninja Nunchucks

2009-12-19T21:22:00.003-06:00

This is for my nephew Ollie, who asked for flaming ninja nunchucks for his seventh birthday, and who got a mensa-approved board game and some Pokemon cards from me (and the rest of my family) instead. I have/had the nunchucks, I just didn't give them to you because they were so damn cool I wanted to keep them for myself.

Scarf

2009-12-19T21:14:00.002-06:00

I've had this scarf since somewhere around 1984. I refuse to part with it, despite it looking like a scarf from the '80's, because it's just so damn warm compared to the new breed of thin scarves. So I was very surprised when I walked into soccer and saw a coworker who has a kid in Eryn's soccer class wearing the exact same scarf! My first suspicion was that he had pilfered mine from the corporate lost-and-found (although they don't ever have anything I've lost. they certainly don't have my ten-year old Caribou mug with the fingerprint in it because it was hand crafted), but having cleaned out the hat/scarf/mitten box only the day before, I knew with relative certainty (e.g. I knew it's absolute position, but it could have tricked me by having an unknown velocity) where the doppleganger I owned resided. I asked Jack about it and it was like watching me speak, "It's so old and I've had it so long, but it's so warm I refuse to get rid of it." If anyone ever asks me to part with my lovely snowflake monstrosity, I now have a story I can tell them until they roll their eyes and leave me and my scarf alone.

Tongue Thrust Graduation

2009-12-19T21:08:00.004-06:00

Eryn officially graduated from tongue thrust class today. She's been attending to make sure her tongue stays in the right place so she's not worsening the gap between her two front teeth (it's probably inherited), and in the months since she's started the gap has significantly decreased. It's been incredibly difficult for her, because it involves watching her tongue placement and chewing during meals, holding little rubber bands in her mouth for up to an hour at a time (even during tubing), and all sorts of other exercises. Grandma Ellen can attest to how hard it is to stay on the schedule, as she and Eryn had a difficult time remembering during RAGBRAI. And big kudos to my wife who kept Eryn on target for so many months.

Chu Chi Face

2009-12-19T20:01:00.003-06:00

Just a reminder for anyone who hasn't seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang lately.... We were discussing Truly Scrumptious before the movie and Eryn laughed at her name. I mentioned she'd probably really enjoy James Bond movies when she got older if she thought Truly was funny. Then the opening credits reminded me that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was written by Ian Fleming. Truly Scrumptious is a cousin of Pussy Galore (they both make at least one top ten least of film characters with the most suggestive names).

Chu-Chi Face

You're My Little Chu-Chi Face
my Coo-Chi, Coo-Chi, Woo-Chi Little Chu-Chi Face
every Time I Look At You I Sigh
and You're My Little Teddy Bear
my Lovey Lovey Dovey Little Teddy Bear
you're The Apfel Strudel Of Mine Eye
your Chu-Chi Woo-Chi Nose
your Chu-Chi Woo-Chi Eyes
they Set My Heart A Flutter
your Ooo-Chi Coo-Chi Ways
your Ooo-Chi Coo-Chi Gaze
wilts Me Down Like Meltings Butter
you're My Little Chu-Chi Face And You're My Teddy Bear
together We're A Chu-Chi Woo-Chi, Ooo-Chi Coo-Chi Pair
whatever You May Ask Becomes My Happy Task
i Only Live To Serve You
i Never Will Divine What Magic Made You Mine
i Only Know I Don't Deserve You
you're My Little Chu-Chi Face
and You're My Teddy Bear
together We're A Chu-Chi Woo-Chi, Ooo-Chi Coo-Chi
chu-Chi, Woo-Chi, Ooo-Chi, Coo-Chi Pair
chu-Chi
woo-Chi
ooo-Chi
coo-Chi Pair

Heartland

2009-12-18T23:05:00.003-06:00

Pooteewheet and I went to El Burrito Mercado for lunch, and then out to dinner at Heartland for our sixteenth anniversary, followed by the 2009 British Television Advertising Awards at the Walker, courtesy of some tickets I won from work (they're sponsoring the show). They're obviously sponsoring it for the R-folks, because that was a younger, hipper, crowd than I'm used to seeing at my place of employment.

Dinner at Heartland was positively delicious. If you don't include the two beers, courtesy appetizer (duck liver I believe), fancy breads (pepper rye and some sort of darker cherry), or sweet champagne (which they gave us for asking us to move to a smaller table as a group from Coherence was showing up), I ate the following, plus bits from Pooteewheet's wild acres farm free range chicken with organic broccoli, cranberry poultry glace and parsley root fondant, Wisconsin golden potato-leek cream soup with fried leeks, and Gateau marjolaine with red currant coulis, Aquavit sabayon and black current curd):

Singerhouse Farm rabbit loin with cranberry-bacon compote, pain de mie toast and apple cider-shallot sauce
Money Creek Ranch wild boar roast with caramelized onion potato purée and tart cherry glace de viande
Autumn fruit galette with sorghum syrup gelato, a honey oat Florentine tuile and autumn fruit caramel

I think that means I ate duck, chicken, boar, rabbit and pig today. I'd be a horrible vegetarian, despite the variety of plants mixed into all of those dishes.

Happy Anniversary, Pooteewheet!

Just Desserts

2009-12-17T21:38:00.003-06:00

I have been lax in putting new bulbs in the garage door opener. It's really my job, because I'm tallest. But I've been letting everyone walk to the house door in the dark and turn the full bank of overhead lights on to see.

So two days ago I got out of my car, walked around the back, and slammed into the passenger side mirror so hard I'm surprised I didn't rip it off the car. I didn't think much of it, but yesterday I was running around the building from admin to admin trying to find an overhead projector, and my leg kept cramping up, forcing me to come to a full stop before resuming my travels. Today I realized that my leg still hurt and that it's a very deep bruise on my left thigh where I ran into the car mirror.

Then this evening both of the outside garage lights burnt out. Last time that happened I ran into my inlaws' parked car. It's probably well past time to make the rounds before something mortal happens.

Fetishicist

2009-12-16T20:11:00.002-06:00

I went to look up how to spell fetishist in Google and misspelled it. What came up was one of my own blog posts. And only one. That was the sole result of the search. I am almost responsible for a Googlewhack, although I don't think poor spelling counts if you're striving to be official. I believe the word has to be accurate.

But, if an international association of fetishcists' is ever created, or perhaps the international association of fetishists with poor spelling, I'm on the front lines, poised to make some real money.

Sci Fi - Top 20 of the Decade

2009-12-16T18:41:00.002-06:00

Fimoculous linked to this list of the top 20 sci fi books of the decade, over at io9. They're on crack. There's no Scalzi. There's no Reynolds. There's a pile of fantasy mixed into the sci fi. There's no Gaiman. And the choices below...I haven't read all of them, but most of the ones I have read I have arguments with as to their place on a list of great books between 2000 and 2010.

The Execution Channel was thoroughly unmemorable and somewhat boring. I had to go back and look, but discovered I referred to it as "so-so". Glasshouse might be good, I don't know, but nothing I've read by Stross qualifies him as a writer of the decade, so I suspect this entry is no different. I do credit him with getting me to count binary on my fingers in his sexy fembot book. Iain Banks definitely writes memorable books, but I'd argue Look to Windward isn't his best work. I didn't finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I got bored. Perdido Street Station I might agree with (I read it while at my sister's wedding in Australia), although I liked The Scar better. Vernor is a good writer, and I intend to read Rainbow's End. I don't believe the hype around The Time Traveler's Wife. Primarily because I wrote a similar story back in 2001 and if I can write it, it can't be that good. Pattern Recognition by Gibson was in no way ground breaking and common sense says there are better books. And World War Z. Really? I understand there's some sort of I want to have Brooks' zombie baby mania underway, and that he's personally responsible for the zombie renaissance, or so he'd have us believe, but there are plenty of short stories about zombies that are better written than World War Z.

• Acacia: the War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham
• Air, or Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman
• The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
• The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson
• Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer
• Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow
• The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod
• Glasshouse, by Charles Stross (Ace)
• Harry Potter Series, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
• Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
• The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller
• Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
• Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
• Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
• Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang (Orb)
• Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
• Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton
• World War Z, by Max Brooks

Scion

2009-12-16T18:20:00.002-06:00

To the owner of the Scion at work. If I don't know you, I hate you. If I do know you, I don't hate you, but I am seriously perturbed by your actions, and you owe me some serious sucking up in the form of lots of beer or scotch before I'm willing to be friends with you again. Fortunately, I don't think I know anyone with a Scion, so we can assume I hate you with a relative level of purity.

I know it's cold outside. Very cold. It's Minnesota after all. And I know that we don't have a ramp for reasons only corporate and the City of Eagan really understand. That means if you get in late, you do indeed have to walk a considerable distance in subzero temperatures, or at least wait for the moderately heated corporate bus. That in no way excuses deciding that these factors absolve you when you stuff your Scion between my car and the big pickup that came after me and didn't bother to park in line with the car opposite. It makes you an even bigger ass when you leave yourself just enough room to squeeze out of your driver side door and put your passenger side door so close to my car that it's difficult to tell where your Scion ends and my SL2 begins. My six year old daughter wouldn't have fit in the crack available to me to enter my car (and my backpack didn't), although I suspect you could have fit another POS Scion in that limited space, or at least you would have tried had you arrived after the first Scion.

Fortunately, despite my advanced age, I'm still somewhat limber, I don't have to sit down to tie my shoes yet, and the guy on the other side of me, not to mention me, weren't such a*holes as to create a situation where I was parked in on both sides. I was able to unload my bags and crawl over the stick shift into my seat without breaking any brittle pieces on my car or myself. Do you know there are people who have worked at our company as long as I've been alive? I suspect they might not be so limber. But then, you probably knew it wasn't one of them. You seem so considerate. You were probably paying so much attention, rather than being self-involved and concerned with your own need for a hot cup of coffee at Caribou as soon as humanly possible.

Dick. It's apropos your car could be construed to mean son of a bitch or a graft jutting off the main trunk of human decency. Learn how to f*ing park and, more importantly, learn to be a considerate human being.

Favorite Quote of the Day

2009-12-15T20:48:00.002-06:00

I get it, elegance. That's why people come to Yakov's Nubian Bling Explosion.

- 30 Rock, Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001

Snow Patrol

2009-12-14T20:10:00.003-06:00

I don't get it. Why is Klund so obsessed with Snow Patrol. They're not that good. They look like the developer who sits two cubes down from me.

I should point out that I'm not yet this good at either of the Snow Patrol songs I'm trying to learn, although at least I've got my guitar out and I'm strumming chords once again.

Bits and Pieces

2009-12-11T22:08:00.003-06:00

A couple of bits and pieces from my last week...

Eryn and I had breakfast at Junior's in Eagan. The waiter told Eryn she was sitting in a seat that had just been vacated by someone famous and let her think about it for a second before telling her the star in questions was...Tony Fly! Apparently he wasn't familiar with Eryn's terror of all individuals who look like Stone Cold Steve Austin (that's a blow up of Tony Fly in 2005, not Steve Austin).

A woman in my neighborhood has a vanity plate that reads "JAMGRL". That's not appropriate.

We "organizationally aligned" at work this week and my team grew about eight-fold. We're supposed to be "coding across the stack" (I think both of those phrases probably deserve quotes), and thus refer to the new groups as verticals. One of my leads decided to create a new email group in the format AT_VERTICAL_LASTNAME. He jokingly suggested I ask to have it standardized across all the managers, knowing full well that this would result in one manager having the email group AT_VERTICAL_DICK.

While I was in the coffee line this morning, I noticed a young, pneumatic, woman in a draped top waiting for her coffee at the secondary Caribou counter. While she had a few minutes, she was trying to attach her corporate badge to her top where the drape was. This was an enjoyable two minutes as she would clip it on, it would drag her top down a few inches, she'd snatch it off, adjust, try a new spot, have her top sink in a new place, repeat, repeat, repeat.

This morning, mid-shave, I went to tell Luna (the dog) "down" while she was bugging Eryn at the couch. As I stepped over the baby gate to keep her out of the computer room and cat's bathroom, I tripped and fell down. I thought Luna was rushing over to ensure I was ok, but instead she immediately started licking the shaving cream off the blade of my safety razor.

Someone at work accidentally sent an email to a group that was comprised of about 500+ coworkers. There was the usual flurry of "why am I getting this", "my email is filling up" and "don't send this to everyone!" replies to all, followed by some enjoyably snarky "I concur", "I concur too" and "I should have concurred too!" After it was over for about 30 minutes, a straggler sent yet another email complaining that people were filling up his box by replying to all. The very last email was an exact replica of that email. I think the mockery was probably lost of the second to last sender. NO MOCKIES!

I was behind two people at work, they seemed to be a couple despite a lack of rings, who spent several minutes discussing which one of them had the cutest laugh. Really? I wanted to yell, "I do!" and then laugh like an idiot, but I think I would have been violating the safe and respectful workplace rules.

Why I've Been Away for a Week

2009-12-10T19:29:00.002-06:00

I found religion. Don't believe me? See. Bet you didn't know the arms on the outside crosses, flanking the true cross, went up last. That was revealed to me in my revelation. It's how you can tell it's authentic, because that wasn't revealed to anyone else. You can start tithing immediately.

B is for Beer

2009-12-01T20:20:00.002-06:00

B is for Beer by Tom Robbins states on the cover "A Children's Book for Grown-ups" on the left and "A Grown-up Book for Children" on the right. A quick summary of this book, which takes about an hour to read, is, "Six year old girl gets drunk on a beer, throws up, and has visions of The Beer Fairy who takes her on a tour of the history of beer, the production of beer, and the esoteric, new-agish magic that is beer drinking." It was thoroughly amusing, although it needed another 120 pages to get the full Robbins feel to it and pull in a bit more humor and a bit more fact. There's plenty of beer humor out there that could stand an interpretation under Robbin's pen (see 14 fun facts about beer which includes, 'It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month", or what we know today as the "honeymoon"').

An extra tidbit, B is for Beer did provide me some fodder for an interesting discussion in my row at work today about the origins of beer being in Egypt or Iran/Mesopotamia. Robbins states beer really started in Egypt and that anything that came prior to that was really just muck, not craftsmanship.

And I can't find any online references to Vinegar Eels living in the sides of beer steins, but there is a reference to nematodes that live only in the mats upon which Germans set their beer.

The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies

2009-12-01T20:03:00.002-06:00

On the way out of the book sale at Eryn's school, after we'd allowed her to buy a few books of her choice, I grabbed this book with the stipulation that it was mine to read to her. After all, how could I possibly pass up a book with a large wiener on the cover with two peppers in its holsters. Phallic! I wasn't sure what to expect, so it was something of a treat to find dozens of, if not particularly well written, somewhat creepy for a kid horror stories. The title story, "The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies" wasn't a horror story, and Eryn was disappointed that it didn't feature giant anthropomorphic [my word, not hers] weenies, but most of the others were, if not scary, at least disturbing. I think Eryn's favorites were:

"All the Rage", about a kid who swallows his rage (ala the advice given to Lisa on The Simpsons).

"Frankendance", about a dad who makes his daughter a date.

"Just Like Me", your stock, scary doll story.

"Braces", you don't want them, they'll steal your essence.

"Reel", with Perceptovision where you feel everything that happens in a movie. We talked about what it would feel like if you were on the other end of a crucio spell from Harry Potter.

"Smart Little Suckers", e.g. Flowers for Algernon. If you read the author notes, you find out he created an Atari 2600 game without enough quality assurance called "The Challenge of Nexar." Gamespot says if I enjoy that game I might also enjoy E.T., which has been referred to on G4 before as one of the worst games ever made.

"Put on Your Happy Face". Clowns are creepy, particularly if you want to be one.

We're moving on to one of Lubar's other Weenie collections next.

Semi-random Fact I was Subjected to Today...

2009-11-29T15:47:00.001-06:00

"In string theory the number of false vacua is commonly quoted as 10⁵⁰⁰.^[1] The large number of possibilities arises from different choices of Calabi-Yau manifolds and different values of generalized magnetic fluxes over different homology cycles. If one assumes that there is no structure in the space of vacua, the problem of finding one with a sufficiently small cosmological constant is NP complete^[2], being a version of the subset sum problem."

- From Wikipedia, String Theory Landscape

2012

2009-11-27T21:50:00.002-06:00

Pooteewheet and I took Eryn to see 2012 in the theater. She'd expressed an interest back when the previews were on t.v. and after much deliberation I felt if it were anything like Independence Day, she'd be fine. We talked about how things would explode and that people would die, but for the most part they'd die from far away, falling into crevices, being crushed by buildings, and the like.

She had a great time, although it could have been about 38 minutes shorter for her tastes. 2.5 hours is a long time for a six year old to sit still. She had many questions about 2012 and why the world would be ending. I explained that they just hadn't bothered to calculate the calendar any further out than that. She asked, "because the world will end?" And I said, "No. How far out does our calendar go?"

Eryn: "100 years?"

Me: "Have you seen a calendar for next year yet?"

Eryn: "For 2010? No."

Me: "I guess the world is going to end before next year."

Eryn: "I get it."

Her favorite part was the scene from the trailer where the skyscrapers slam into each other and disintegrate as the plane flies between them, rather than over them. At the risk of spoiling it for you, it was a very uplifting movie for a net-end-of-world population of less than 500,000, or put another way, for approximately 4.4995 billion people dying.

Kyle's a Girl

2009-11-27T21:43:00.003-06:00

Kyle, I know how much you like to cook, but I quote the Target Christmas advertisement kitchen section, "What she wants: the KitchenAid kitchen. What you love: one less trip to the mall."

Apparently Target doesn't pay much attention to the chefs on the Food Channel, the Travel Channel, any channel with Andrew Zimmern, or that most of the local chefs seem to be male. Except for Chef Lenny Russo from Heartland on Facebook, he could really be anyone, male or female - so stop following him on Facebook and making suggestions about how to improve the spicy cornmeal-crusted Great Lakes walleye with braised winterbor kale and golden cauliflower sauce.

Managerial Style Advice

2009-11-18T20:13:00.002-06:00

Again, I paraphrase. But this is very close...

Brady (developer): "Were you at Target last week?"

Me (manager): "I'm not sure. Usually my wife goes to Target. But I do end up there sometimes."

Brady: "The Eagan Target?"

Me: "That's the one I go to. I live near it."

Brady: "I thought I saw you there."

Me: "It might have been me."

Brady: "No. I thought it was you. But this guy was wearing a green sort of pull over."

Me: "Like a Mexican pullover?"

Brady: "Yeah. That wouldn't have been you."

Me: "I own a green pullover. My friend bought it for me because I couldn't find one in Mexico that fit me."

Brady: Uncomfortable silence. "Oh. That was you."

Apparently I need to put on my manager clothes even when I'm shopping.

Teenage Angst

2009-11-18T20:11:00.002-06:00

Eryn: "Blah, blah, blah, blah."

Me: "Stop it. Do not be rude to your mother."

Eryn: "Hmph."

Me: "Stop it. You're being rude."

Eryn, stomping upstairs: "Fine. If you yell at me anymore, I'm going to feel like I'm going to die!"

Geocaching-mania

2009-11-16T19:21:00.005-06:00

BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST: if you intend to go geocaching in Ritter Park any time soon, you may not want to read this post. The pictures might ruin some of your fun.

To celebrate my 41st birthday, I took off Friday to go on an all day geocaching adventure with The Boss from work. Not my boss. The Boss. We planned to hit as many caches as we could in eight+ hours, without resorting to "a plan" to jigger the numbers: e.g. we went to a park and did a lot of walking, we went to some nearby fields and did a lot of walking, and we went to the Prior Lake park system and did a lot of walking. We succeeded in our goal and found 30 caches, plus a letterbox that we found completely by accident after mis-entering the coordinates for a many-stated multi-cache.

That multi was our only DNF of the day. Pain in the ***. We followed it through five stages, only to end up at an appliance dump with lots of broken glass and rusty metal. I just wasn't willing to dig down into the vorpal mess to validate whether a cache was present.

The first part of the day was at Ritter Farm Park in Lakeville. I'd been there once before with my family to find one of the Halloween Caches from last year (Think Tank), which made getting there easier than when Pooteewheet and I drove around in circles for an hour trying to find an entrance. We spent an hour searching for the above multicache which involved a lot of + this/- that coordinates. I've never seen The Boss so annoyed. The idea of spending over an hour searching for one cache when he could have found five separate caches was clearly an aggravating factor.

After we gave up on the first multicache, we focused on another that promised only two stops. It delivered, cheering both of us up. What I can't understand is why any cacher would assume that leaving a Kit Kat for the next person is a good idea. Who the hell would eat a stray Kit Kat? Nasty. And what parent would let their kid eat the stray Kit Kat? Nastier.

This was a good one. See the pine tree I'm hugging within all the other pine trees?

Surprise! An interesting way to dispose of your old faux Christmas Tree when you want to buy a new one.

Another cool one. You're not supposed to leave a golf ball here. These were collected from other caches by the person who placed it.

Instead, you sign a golf ball and drop it back into the cache.

The best cache of the day. We emptied out a huge, double barreled cache, and there were this many film canisters. Within one of them was the log we needed to sign. To make it more difficult, the white canisters had paper or paint in them to obfuscate the one container we were after. We felt like a couple of drug runners sitting under the pine trees with over 100 individual serving containers. It didn't help that at one point a German Shepherd and his doggy buddy came wandering over to see what we were so quietly up to under the canopy.

This is how far we had to go before we found the log. Stupid odds. Good thing we weren't playing Vegas (or the nearby N.A. casino).

The biggest cache in Lakeville. I've seen bigger. The Halloween cache from last year, Here Lies the Body of Geo Cache, was taller than I was. This was just a big ammo box. It was big enough that inside were peanut butter jars that looked like the remnants of other caches.

Stupid rocks were heavy. So I left more on it than I took off. My foot, size 12+-ish, for comparison.

The Back Forty. I can't tell if The Boss is a Broadhead or a Blunt Tip.

The archery range at the park. Very cool. If I ever teach Eryn archery, we'll have to go to Ritter Park.

A bald eagle nest at our last cache in the park.

Proof there are eagles there. Don't worry, the feather is not in my possession.

After Ritter Park, we went to Cleary Park, right next door, but they were having a "special hunting event" and all entrances were closed. Even had I been sporting an orange vest, the bike paths were persona non enter. After some deliberation, during which we celebrated how I had captured every active cache within 15 km of the center of Ritter Park, we tackled a variety of caches in Prior Lake, including a series behind the Police Station. But my favorite was on our way to Prior Lake, where we went searching for a small cache in the woods where, once again, appliances had been dumped. We searched high and low and I finally found a spot that seemed perfect for a cache, but it was empty. So we decoded the hint online (woo hoo, blackberry!) which indicated it should be where we were looking. After a bit more scrounging around, I found a squirrelfied camo film tin some 30 feet away. Stupid squirrels. Always First to Find.

So, thirty caches. Probably 16 miles of walking. Saturday was a difficult day for my old bones. Nothing like putting in the effort to ensure 41 feels like 41.

Something Good to Hear Right After Turning 41

2009-11-16T19:19:00.001-06:00

On the way to coffee this morning, I heard two women at work discussing a coworker. One of them suddenly opined, "He's much better looking now that he's older."

Sorry Mean Mr. Mustard, but neither of them had a Russian accent.

Nanners

2009-11-15T13:03:00.003-06:00

I paraphrase a it, but this is close...

Eryn: "Sit on the cushion. Sometimes the cushion is for anti-neeners."

Me: "You mean nanners?"

Eryn: "Yeah. What?"

Pooteewheet: "That makes a certain amount of sense."

Eryn: "What?"

Pooteewheet: "If girl parts are neeners. Then guy parts are nanners."

Eryn: "Why?"

Pooteewheet: "Well, what kind of fruit does a penis look like?"

Eryn: "A pear?"

Geocaching, St. Peter Style

2009-11-10T22:35:00.004-06:00

Apparently it takes me two days to do anything. So I'm going to mention that I went to breakfast with Erik this morning, just so I can blog about something the same day it happened. We had a good breakfast at Junior's, although they didn't open until 30 minutes after we wanted to start breakfast and it was incredibly cold in the restaurant while we were ordering. The grill provides a lot of the heat, and if you're the only two in there other than the two children of the cook, who are obviously going to have heart attacks by age 8, the grill isn't running at full capacity.

Also, my sister is pondering urban chickens. It's not often I can find something I can come down firmly against, but urban chickens appear to be one of those things. Dirty. Lots of work (she only thought a poodle was a pain in the ass). Expensive (small animal license). Dangerous (disease and 744 hits on the med site related to beak injuries). Flashbacks for my father (who grew up in an incubation room). Neighbors (who shouldn't approve and have veto rights if you're within 100'). And readily available organic eggs in about a million other locations in Minnesota. On the positive note, maybe my sometimes sensitive niece will be excited when chicken harvesting season comes around.

So, Sunday I went geocaching. All day. Ming, Kyle, Logan (1st Grade) and I traveled down to Jordan where Kyle lost his geocaching virginity at Riefsgraf Lion's Park. Here are Ming and Logan celebrating Kyle losing his virginity. It was good that Kyle found the first cache, even if it was a micro instead of something more fun, as it proved the efficacy of his new GPS. I sent him a route pocket query that I imported and exported using the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (gsak at http://www.gsak.net/). That's an excellent piece of software, and it allows me to export in a format I like, including the terrain difficulty, cache size, find difficulty and last four find status values. I think the only issue I bumped into were a few missing recent caches because the area I tagged (Eagan to Mankato) had over 500 caches, so it throw out the most recent ones. Easily remedied by using two overlapping pocket caches. Klund gave me a few of the ins and outs about using the macros, and it may be one of my better purchase decisions in quite some time.

We ate breakfast at Cindy's in Belle Plaine where we met Klund and Eli (grade 2). Apparently, the developer who sits 10' away from me - Robin - grew up in Belle Plaine and the owner of Cindy's graduated a year ahead of her. This didn't save it. Klund turned up a review that listed Cindy's as a 1. My food wasn't a 1, but a 2 might have been generous, particularly as the tables and chairs were covered with dust when we sat down (and perhaps a few bits of food) and Logan stated at one point, "This isn't a very good pancake." It's hard to f-up a pancake for a first grader - you pretty much have to try. The primary problem was the food hit the table about four minutes before it finished cooking. Bleah. Even so, it was better than Emma Krumbee's, which we hit at Belle Plaine on the way back. Wow was that bad. The service was bad, although that didn't stop the waitress from telling everyone it was because it was sooooo busy (it was busy, there were people waiting outside, but it wasn't that busy, and the real issue was that she couldn't take orders from multiple tables at once. It was a very asynchronous operation with one table getting water, then an order, then a delivery, then the rest of the delivery that was missed). The food was bad. My burger was sort of gray, overdone, and had visible bits of fat. The Canadian bacon was obviously boiled. The apple sauce was not a sauce (Logan's observation). NEVER AGAIN. Next time we'll soldier it out until we get to House of Wu up by 35W.

But on a positive note, Bob's Apple Barn was still open when we drove past, and we had assumed it would be closed. I had the weirdest barley-based root beer I've ever tasted, and Ming went wild buying candy, but no pie. Which is really strange for him as he's got a sort of piemania.

Back to Belle Plaine in the morning, after the breakfast at Cindy's. We went in search of a few caches in Belle Plaine, a surprisingly historic little town. I know it's historic because this house says so. Watch out Kyle. That looks like a Willie E. Coyote trap.

That house sported a two storey out house. Watch out below. There's one like it in Deadwood (South Dakota), but I didn't realize I didn't have to go that far. The cache is nearby, but not in the outhouse itself.

Belle Plaine also has the Church of the Transfiguration. That means they take your geocache and turn it into nothingness. Six people looking and this was our only Did Not Find of the day. Someone noted that they'd parked and walked right to it. Dicks. I had my arm up to the shoulder under the church, braving squirrels, raccoons, and spiders. Only the power of Christ compelled them not to bite me.

Neat looking roof. All those wood shingles must be a pain. One of them is probably the geocache as the hint recommended praying.

Here's the church from the front so you can read all about it if you like. Don't skip the part about the generations of angry geocachers whose prayers weren't answered.

We finished up Belle Plaine at the Veterans' Park where they have a nice virtual cache with a Huey helicopter. I'm not going to post a picture of the sign, as you might be able to get credit for the cache. But here's Huey the Helicopter. That's Kyle in the cockpit, trying to fly away from Cindy's.

Proof that geocaching can be a very communal activity. I suspect there are pictures out there by Diane Fossey that look awfully similar(sans all the GPSes).

After Belle Plaine, we hit a rest stop just a few miles south. Two of the caches were straight forward, but the third led us to a chasm and coordinates that seemed to place the cache about 68' out into the chasm. Which was strange. Because the difficulty was 1.5 (out of 5) and the terrain was 1.5 (out of 5). Nonetheless, every GPS pointed downward, so we hit the leafy hill, sliding and slipping into the ravine. The first tree Kyle grabbed, about six inches around and 20+' tall, cracked and almost fell on his head. Ming kicked loose a log as big as I was that tumbled toward me like something out of an Ewok trap. And Eli kicked loose a rock about twice the size of my head that tumbled down so fast it gave me a real-life appreciation for what an avalanche looks like and why it kills you. We looked about, struggled back to the top, and then found the cache about 10' away from where we'd left our things.

Kyle, Ming and Logan. That cache is down there further. Just a bit. It's so close...NOT.

Ming and Logan struggling to the top. I saved Logan's life shortly after this by helping him up the final few feet. If I hadn't, he'd be there still.

An idea of the slope. Picture yourself at the bottom with a head caved in by a rock and a log on your chest. Not too far away I a.) took a picture of the earth cache, despite that I despise them, and b.) picked a pod from a tree that Kyle was sure was going to get me in trouble with the guy with a sherrif's badge. But he just wanted to know if we'd found the cache.

For our last several caches we hit 7 Mile Creek in St. Peter. There are about 25 there, so it was a good spot to do some hiking. We went up, and down, some big hills. There's a geocache near this spot. It's a mint tin, and it looks like a piece of trash. Ming set it on the bridge and ignored it for a while because there was so much rusty water inside it couldn't be a cache. Nasty. And Kyle almost got bit by a squirrel, so it was a tetanus danger zone.

Horses fording the creek near where Eli tried to get us to cross.

I took a picture of Kirby Pass just to make sure if they never found our bodies, and only my camera, they'd know where we'd been. All Blair Witch like. Shortly after this pass, we hiked up a monster hill to find two of the caches. Klund and I flanked the cache while everyone else assaulted the front. Neither way was easy. At the top I tried to take a leak, but Kyle told Eli I had the GPS Eli wanted. So I ended up trying to pee away from him, explain where the GPS was, and cease my sharking of two nearby hikers. The end result is a nice picture of Eli standing next to me while I pee on Facebook.

The final cache of the day.

We finished out the day, as previously mentioned, at Emma Krummiebees, and by whispering all the way home "Shhhh, Logan's asleep" and asking "Logan, did you make a skunk in your pants?" after smelling some pigs. Logan's response was to yell at us, "I'm not asleep!" It's surprising that you can get an hour's amusement out of so little material.

Fourteen caches found, one not found! Excellent day, and thanks to everyone who went!