If you are living under a rock and haven’t watched this, do. It. Now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
Don’t care about the audience. Don’t care about the temporary “cynicism wiped away” from the judging panel. For every twenty thousand Hyacinth Buckets with theatrical talents, there is a Susan.
I avoid talking about/hearing too much about/giving more attention to the U.S. economy than it is worth, mostly because I have huge disagreements with financial media priorities. Although I am not always in agreement with Paul Krugman, he wrote probably the best summation/brief economic history and conclusion that I’ve seen yet (points for succinctness, too–Nouriel Roubini will drone on and on to get to an accurate point):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opinion/27krugman.html
If you are not able to access the op-ed above, please let me know and I will email the link if you are interested.
Watchmen: The only comprehensible, watchable portions were the sections where Neil Gaiman obviously supplied the storyline content to Moore (Dr. Manhattan, Rorshach), as Moore’s work reeks of “copycat”.
Mike crawled out of bed at his usual time this morning (5 a.m.), and there was virtually no snow on the ground–maybe an inch and a half, and that is a generous description. Bern went on her morning walk, and I got an automated text message to my phone from school that we weren’t opening until 11 a.m. Mike left for work at his normal time, with virtually no snow.
I crawl out of bed this morning at 7, and was also non-plussed by our overnight “snowstorm”. The snow finally picked up around 7:30 this morning, and we now have maybe 4 inches on the ground. It’s really not much, but I called Fran to see if she would be offended if I took a personal day today. And if I have to choose where I’m going to blow a day, I’d rather do it at home. Fran was absolutely OK with it, and was a bit baffled by the snow forecasting, too, since everyone was under the impression that today would be awful. She and Frank were going about thier usual routine this morning, too, when there was no snow, and suddenly very steady snow with a lot of wind.
All in all, we *might* wind up with 5 or 6 inches total, which isn’t huge. I entered an “out of office” message on my work email account, and will probably take care of emails again later this afternoon. I can tell that all the public school teachers either have the day off–or were required to report to work anyway and have abundant free time–because virtually all of my email this morning came from students in the College of Ed wanting to know about commencement, degree-conferral timelines, certification requirements, etc.
I’m going to go out on a limb and actually start blogging on MIke’s behalf in terms of his workouts, particularly since he did find work–a ton of work for his semester classes. We actually made it to chrome & fern this morning–the fourth time over the past, oh, 10 days or so. I did a very light workout on elliptical only, and Mike ran 2 miles a 6 mph, and did 20 reps w/2 30-lb dumbbells of cleans, front squats, and jerks. He actually enjoyed it. 
As usual, there are things that occur over the course of a week that both Mike and I find hilarious/worth passing on, but forget whenever we actually talk to families. Most of these items are fairly mundane and do not really require any sort of fanfare notice, but here are some from our week:
1. On Monday, Mike and I zipped out to Wegman’s to pick up some random staple that we forgot the previous Friday, and we came home to find a ripped-up, unused tampon on the floor. Bern was bored/not happy that we skipped out on her for 45 minutes, and looted the tampon from my open work bag leaning on the CD cabinet.
2. Mike is currently working on a test for a stat class, as I finished eating my lunch while watching Michelle Singletary live on the “State of the Black Union”. I really respect her (she writes for the Washington Post), and if I see a clip of her SotBU segment appear on her website or on Youtube, I’ll provide a link.
3. Last weekend, I FINALLY bought yarn to start an afghan, which I shared with our office recruiter earlier in the week when we were discussing “so what did you do this weekend?”. He then relayed a story of waiting in an airport security line in the year or so after 9/11 that is a further anecdote about the hyperactivity of security policy: the confiscation of any/all knitting needles. A woman in the line adjacent to him was using her knitting bag as a carry-on, and had a plastic knitting-in-the-round setup that thoroughly baffled the security screener. Security screener gives knitter quite a lot of guff and confiscates the entire bag, yarn included. Knitter gets extremely peeved and yells at screener, “What am I gonna do? Knit you an AFGHAN?”.
4. Mike made wontons/potstickers for the first time, and they were tasty! He used Alton Brown’s ”unauthentic” recipe, which calls for ketchup and mustard. We’re going to try again, to work with different mixes and shape, but the basic cooking method instructions AB lists are dead-on for making a thoroughly-cooked wontons.
5. The seedlings are re-potted, courtesy Mike, and we will play a new card game tonight….
JUST ADDED #6: Flurries were originally forecast for tomorrow, but we have a suddenly-issued winter storm watch for Sunday and Monday with a good likelihood of 5+ inches of snow. Actual weather, as opposed to the perceived “weather” around here. 
1. Why was our previous trip to the National Gallery so successful and we had such a good time? Answer: We didn’t spend a total of 6 hours on or waiting on mass transportation versus an hour and a half in the museum.
2. Why are some people so surprised that the Dow is now below 7500 if the past 8-10 years have been one massive economic bubble? It would stand to reason that if the past 10 years have been nothing but inflating the value of zero, that returning all indexes to the level of 10 years ago or below wouldn’t be unusual. Call me crazy, but that only makes sense to me.
3. I wish I could say we had a better day today than we had.
Here endeth the sad news of the day.
I was looking for a few songs on Youtube yesterday, and ran across a cover of Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric” for ukulele and synethesizer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAOWKs4dcPE
It’s roughly 5 minutes long, so if you find the instrumentation a bit annoying–I can understand. I know that this particular cover is probably only hilarious and at the same time one of the most brilliant covers Mike and I have heard. There’s an even better cover of the Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”, which is much shorter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNFpOh2seqo&feature=related
Yeah, it’s cheesy. But we love it.
Thanks to all the family that joined us in Minneapolis and the friends who provided guidance. We had a great time and were glad to see everyone. For Laura it was a return to a city she enjoys and for me it was a great chance to get to know a new city.
It’s hard for me to think of a lot to say since you were all there. We really did enjoy getting to know the city. We enjoyed looking homes despite being several years out from buying. It helped us see what we were going to be looking at and it gave us a lot to discuss with regard to our preferences and desires when that day comes.
I can’t imagine how the week could have been a whole lot better. The weather was perfect, we had family and friends and we had access to all the best areas. Laura and I enjoyed Lake Harriet more than any other location in town. Should Minneapolis become our home, it seems very likely that we would aim for that region.
I collated that handful of pictures I took and those taken by the Wyses and put a small collection together on Flickr. Let me know if you can’t view it.
Rehab has gone well for me and I’m doing much better. No more ibuprofen, no more ice, no more pain in general. There are a few other things around here that I have neglected while being laid up and their time for rehab has arrived. The first is the tomato plants. Laura and I still have a bet going as to which plant will yield fruit first. We treat them essentially the same and watch what happens. Both have come close but neither has given us a single tomato we could eat yet. Today we decided to help them along.
On your left you have the Better Boy, my pick. He’s in a bad way, those branches that are leaning to the right are on the verge of breaking off. The only thing keeping them from doing so is a makeshift twine sling I added a couple weeks age when I noticed it had drastically outgrown it’s support stake. The plant on your right is the Early Girl, she looked a lot better although we found out later that the only reason was that she was resting her full weight on the side of the building, she couldn’t stand up on her own.
When we planted these tomatoes in their current pots, we vowed to not get bigger pots, after all, the small pot would limit their growth, right? Wrong. These plants had clearly outgrown their pots and we could hardly keep them hydrated as a result. We went to the local garden center and got much larger pots, bags of soil, 6 foot support stakes and dollies for the pots. We figured with all the added dirt, they would be unmanageable at this size.
We potted them the same we had before. We threw down a single layer of cotton cloth on the bottom to keep the dirt from running out the openings, although it does get consumed by the dirt eventually. We laid in fresh soil, broke the plant out of it’s previous dwelling and placed it inside. Because both plants were so overgrown it was all of a two person job. One of us had to support the upper branches while the other did all the dirt maneuvering.
Each plant got new 6 foot stakes put in and got tied to those stakes, more loosely as we went up, to allow for growth. The Better Boy got bonus support near the areas where it was breaking, we’ll just see how that goes. So, I present to you the rehabbed and, hopefully, more productive, 6 foot tall, tomato plants.
As before, Better Boy on the left, Early girl on the right.
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