Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,985

After waffling most of the summer, I finally committed to going back for my high school reunion in Minnesota, crossing a pair of time zones and spending too much time in airports (Phoenix, really??) to get there — but that was the price of delaying, which is my own fault. And while there, why not go see a Twins game at new Target Field? So I made arrangements with a friend, N, to go see a game,  and hoped to be able to buy tickets online but simply mail them to her home in a suburb of Minneapolis.

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Just a Notion, for Two Oceans

 

There’s a vast continent-sized island of plastic debris floating in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the polar bears are drowning in the Arctic for lack of ice floes. I suppose it would be prohibitively expensive, but what if we could fuse a lot of that Pacific debris into plastic floes cast adrift in the Arctic for the desperate bears to clamber up on and catch their breath?

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The War for Couth Continues

So I mentioned the ferret-faced woman in my last post, and how a month or so went by until I saw her again.

When I got on at Civic Center this time, someone was in the window seat next to the chair I usually go for, so I sat an aisle back. The train got crowded quickly after that, and I noticed an elderly couple  looking for seats together; they might have been Indian immigrants. They hesitated by that open aisle seat before passing me by. Just then I saw ferret-face get on the train, looking for her best opportunity.

Behind me I heard a woman offer a seat to someone, and then an Indian-accented voice politely decline. Ferret-face passed me by, then began demanding someone move.

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Dreaming of Floridian Woodpeckers

The missus and I are going to Florida again. She’s very excited about the trip. Last night she dreamt the two of us were in Florida and had spotted a beautiful woodpecker in a tree, and that we were watching the woodpecker circling the tree, hammering away at it, extracting amazing bugs from under the bark. Then she woke up.

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Bumperstickers

I don’t see as many bumperstickers as I did years ago. I suppose they do look ratty after a while, but some were pretty funny. I saw a car with two pretty good bumperstickers the other day, neither of which I had seen before.

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Indecent Exposure

 It was the early 90s and I was a victim of the economic downturn. The partnership that had employed me went through three rounds of layoffs and I got the heave-ho in the second, which in retrospect was among the greatest annoyances.

It’s bad enough to get picked for jury duty while still getting paid. I was on jury duty while on unemployment. Further, a couple weeks earlier I had been mugged. Mid-afternoon, what I thought was a jogger approaching from behind, a stiletto in the back of my left thigh and shoved headfirst into a car hard enough to scrape paint from the car onto a lens of my glasses. I blacked out, and came to as my back pocket was being shredded for the $40 – 45 in my wallet. 

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Rekindling Imagination

Haven’t had a lot to say lately – rather low energy. My bloggerly imagination seems to have gone into hibernation. Until I got this email from someone who recently bought a Kindle, and was punning around in his message about it.

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Friends old and new

One of the unexpected pleasures of this trip to Minnesota was connecting with people I hadn’t seen for years. While that connecting was a catalyst for the trip, it also involved a friend I’ll never see again.

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Forehead Slap: Whups!

My friend and former roommate John emailed me in July. He’s now a professor at the University of Chicago, and was coming to the Bay Area for a conference. Did I have time to get together? Sure! We made arrangements for me to pick him up at the airport and for him to stay with us that Friday night, and we both went on with our lives. 

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My #$%& Corolla

I can’t believe it. I took some time off to run some errands, including getting our old Corolla serviced. Have you ever had a medical symptom and gone to the doctor and when you got to his office the symptom went away? That’s my old Corolla.

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