Hot Dog

The hot dog costume, while dubious, is ok in theory. It's whatever the hell is hanging between the legs that makes it non door-to-door appropriate.

KKK

In Frontierville, in Facebook, I can dress up my whole family for Halloween. I think our homestead is somewhere in Indiana.

Kismet

This morning, I was crossing from the far lot to the near lot at work. I slowed my pace so a few cars could get by, then paused, and stepped into the crosswalk. I took a few steps and the red car that had been behind those that had paused revved it's motor and drove through, despite me being in the crosswalk. I recognized the driver as a VP I'm familiar with.

Cut to six hours later, and I'm meeting my new group. His wife is now a report. That's the whole reason for the golden rule. Treat the world like you want it to treat you.

If he had just hit me, I guess I could have cut the whole management thing short anyway. I realized today that I'm sad whenever I switch groups. I'm disappointed to lose the leads and the team that I've had a relationship with for the last six to twenty-four months (depends on who you are), even though it's exciting to have a new team. I'm going to miss Jeanne and Jon and Soon and everyone that worked with us. In a company as big as ours, it's difficult to maintain a daily relationship if you're not in proximity. And Ming is leaving. Which sucks. I've had a lot of good friends at work, but if I had to be honest, I've had two best friends, and now they're both going to be working elsewhere. That makes the day-to-day much harder. If you don't have a best friend at work, it's not a place you tend to look forward to every morning. I'm going to have to start stalking.

Links and Things - Bicycling, Netflix, Christine O'Donnell

I hadn't noticed, but John pointed out that you no longer need the disk for Netflix!

Secrets of the City/MNSpeak links to the Minnesota Daily article about Minnesota bike laws. I didn't know about the lights law. I thought as long as you had a reflector on back and a light on the front you were fine. And the news about Phyllis Kahn pushing for yield rules with stop signs for bicyclists was news to me.

And Christine O'Donnell's ignorance of the first amendment (among others), despite being a candidate for a party that claims to be more in touch with the Constitution, while probably overplayed, is still worth repeating. She should have an iPhone or an Android (developed by the mother of one of Eryn's classmates) so she could grab a Constitution application to read between questions. Or is that not allowed?

Rockits

Last night we went to see the Rockits at the Minnesota Rollergirls event in St. Paul. We hadn't been before, but Eryn's teacher from Tesseract (one of them) is now a roller girl. She goes by the name Salvadore Brawlie (guess what kind of teacher she was/is) and rolls for the Rockits. Four teams play, alternating 20 minute halves. It's very different as far as sports go, which you can gather by watching this video of the intermission.

Yep. Everyone is ON the rink, singing along while a polka band sings Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. We also got Ring of Fire (the second reference to that song this weekend), Zicke Zacke, and the bird dance.


Here's Eryn with Salvadore.


And the live action. You can see her by looking for the black and white checkered stockings. They won their first match, although a teammate broke a leg. So it's as potentially violent as it looks.

New Prague Geocaching

I took the day off to go geocaching with Klund and two of his children in New Prague. I thought I was being clever by taking Pooteewheet's Android so I could use c:Geo and just log my finds directly from the phone, but what I hadn't planned for was that Klund's cell phone number was in my phone, which I'd left with Pooteewheet, and she wasn't picking up. Eventually, I figured out I could call Mrs. Klund at work and forward my number to Klund via the receptionist. One problem solved. But then Klund asked me to meet him at a breakfast place that didn't show up on Pooteewheet's GPS. He texted me an address, but not before I stopped at the gas station to employ the non-technological method of just asking a human being.

We found 21 caches today. When I left New Prague, we thought it was 20, but there was an extra in the mix when I counted, and Klund and I had matching numbers. At least until he snagged a few more just to one up me.

This is where we had breakfast, The Landmark Cafe. They opened in May, which explains why they weren't in the GPS. My breakfast was good, but the notable thing about the cafe was that they have a huge concertina collection. That alone would be strange, but the people coming to the cafe carrying concertina boxes was even stranger.

A cache stuck to a piece of bark to make it easier to camouflage.

Yeah...you're reading this one right. The Erection Foreman on this watertower project was none other than John Cash. I want to put Erection Foreman on my resume.

FAKE!

Why do New Prague lions have two tails? And why are they playing trumpets? And are they any good? These are all questions I asked Eli. I believe his answer to the two tails question had something to do with the lion getting a divorce and having an extra tail as a reminder. So....the lion got divorce, and got some extra tail. Nice.

Wikipedia actually references the "split tail" and states, "in the arms of the kingdom of Bohemia, the forked tail originally was an artist's flourish, but later became a distinctive and essential detail of the coat of arms." Interesting. A fuller version can be found here and notes, "Someplace along the way Bruncvík sliced his pal's tail in half (the most painful, hard way, lengthwise, of course). However, thanks to mythical gods, it healed as two separate parts, thus making the Lion symbolic of Bohemia."

Many, many, many of the caches today were hidden in the lids that went on things. For instance...

In its camo state.

This was an exception. The children went up the tree for us, because those branches were very small. A note in the logs for this cache said, paraphrased, "We got the cache but dropped the pen. Didn't put the pen back because it was too difficult to get to the cache in the first place." The second note then said, "Found the pen, which pointed us to the cache." Still, better than the cache I was reading about that required surgical gloves to handle the bundle of maggots. I'd pass on that one.

See...it was up there a ways.

This perfect man was in the cache. If you pressed his belly he said things like, "I'll stop and ask for directions." Which I did earlier in the day, so I'm the perfect man, although no women were along to appreciate it, only the teenage store clerk, and she looked at me like I was an idiot for not knowing the cafe was "just down the street".

Eli picked this one up a few times and didn't see the cache. Those lids are tricky. At the next cache he didn't even look inside, he just flipped the lid off to look there.

One last lid example at the baseball field. If that thing ever falls off, I suspect you'd never get it back from the tube.

All in all, a great day. It was absolutely beautiful out, and I even got a bit of sunburn while eating my inferno burger at Fishtales bar and grill. A nice story, as we were paying our lunch bill, Milena crawled up on a stool at the bar and said, "Daddy, can I have a beer?" Kevin responded, "This isn't home, honey." The owner or general manager had a good laugh.

High Water

Before Chilifest, we went down to the Minnesota River (what the hell...I went on RAGBRAI and to Elroy Sparta last year? I was a bigger slacker this year than I imagined) to check out the high water. Either Pooteewheet or I cross it on 77 every day, so it was obvious it was running high as it was touching the bottom of the old train/bicycling bridge. We went down to the frontage road near Eryn's old school (now bankrupt) and ran into this sign. The water was higher than I thought.

The model boat club is serious about their boating area. The water starts before you even enter.

Remember to turn right. Turn left, and you'll end up in the river.

Eryn. Where the sidewalk ends. Or the road.

A bird house suitable for ducks. Or fish.

Grover

This is incredibly funny. Thank you, Chris.


The original. For comparison purposes.

Chili Fest

We made it to Tall Brad's Chili fest this year. But I don't want to talk about it because we didn't even make the top three. I don't care. Our chili was plenty good. I've resigned myself to the fact that we don't generally compete with anything Minnesotans consider chili. They get all wigged out over a bit of andouille. I should have brought the other batch that's in the freezer. It was much hotter. Here's our recipe, the M3 chili, although this time we called it 3M.

The kids were excited about the leaves. They went next door and picked them out of the gutters and brought them over to Brad's house to leave in the yard.

And in Mean Mr. Mustard's hoodie. YOU DAMN KIDS!!! I KNOW WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE!!! DON'T THINK I WON'T TELL THEM WHAT YOU DID ON MY YARD....CHAIR...HOODIE!!!! Although I think I was the crabby one once they declared some sort of stuff-the-leaves-in-the-adults-clothes-rather-violently game.

Lisa and daughter. Brad didn't manage to get a picture of them, so I took one so I could send it to her.

Ballerina

Eryn has been practicing her form. Here she is outside of Ring Mountain. She looks very sleepy. I think three days a week of ballet and the new gifted school are putting a strain on her, in a good way. And I apologize for those of you who are subjected to my wife stealing my photos and posting them on Facebook. That's simply out of my control.

A Few Good Links

Tea & Crackers by Matt Taibbi, about the Tea Party (via Taylor)

Jesus is not here to be satirized for the amusement of heathens (via Pharyngula)

The Guild (webcast, and well worth watching) doing Do You Want to Date My Avatar. I don't know how I missed this despite watching The Guild and that it has over 12 millions hits.


From Greg, MondoDB is Web Scale. I'm not sure if this is funny unless you're a geek. But if you're a geek, it's very funny.

Autumn Leaves

The church on the way to work has this sign up:

Autumn leaves – Jesus doesn’t!

Thank you for your food donation.

I originally missed the ! and was VERY confused. Seemed sort of mean-spirited of the dude.

iPad

No time to blog, the new iPad is here. Although currently it's not in my hands because it's being used for Carcasonne by Eryn, Pooteewheet, and Kit, the new American Girl doll.

Scavenger Hunt

We went to Schultz Lake at Lebanon Hills tonight to enjoy a park scavenger hunt. Erik and Morgan invited us. It started at 7:00 p.m., so it was already getting a bit dark by the time we started. Most of our hunt for clues was done by iPhone light.

The event was fun, and included smores, a game of Camp, and a nice walk around half the lake and back.

Here's the visitor center. Sean of Uninspired & Unoriginal, and Steve Eck's friend, recognized me and said "hey". He was at the Paul Bunyan trail the same day I was up there, and I just played games with Steve the other day (I think Steve was on board for Manila and Agricola). I told Pooteewheet she should be impressed I was recognized from my blog. Sean was definitely recognizable, although I hadn't seen much of him until he accosted me, although it's difficult to picture someone as different from how you first saw them on their blog, and Sean's constant running (he's doing the Twin Cities Marathon) has left him a lean, mean, running machine. Makes me think I should definitely be doing more bicycling.

Eryn, on our way up to the visitor center after the scavenger hunt. All we had left to find was a milkweed plant.

Scaring the Coworkers

I asked the individuals in my group and the other group that engages in the same work to send me the song, soundtrack, book on tape, band, etc, to which they were currently listening. Today I was in a car with four of them, headed toward a group lunch, and one person asked, "So why do you want to know what music we're listening to?"

I responded, "It's for a fun event. I've finally found a place to rent a karaoke machine."

The looks of panic were priceless. But it's just going to be for a match the coworker to the music contest. Nothing that requires vocal skills. Although I did learn one of my leads plays guitar and his wife sings and he lives very close. I'm going to have to keep pushing him to play at Ring Mountain.

Charity

The annual charity drive is underway at work. I've always tried to participate in work events, even before I was a manager, but now I feel I need to put in extra effort to make sure I'm setting a good example. Yet I feel I should make sure whatever I'm doing reflects a bit of my personality.

So here's an example of me engaging in a bit of characteristic asshatery as regards the charity drive. There's a competition to decorate a balloon. Coworkers then vote on the balloons by donating a dollar. Presumably, the balloons should float. I took a different tack. This is the gold balloon.

And this is the silver balloon. Eryn helped me and giggled the whole time about how funny it was that they weren't going to float. Her sense of humor is definitely environmental.