July Generalities

Things I like:
-Finding a suitable place to live

Things I dislike:
-MOVING

Like:
-Living closer to work and boat club

Dislike:
-I'm losing my old roommate...but since she's throwing me over for a husband, I suppose I can live with that (plus, he's a good, long-time friend, so we're all good); and now I'll have a new roommate, whose name also conveniently starts with the letter K, so I won't even have to adjust my blogging much

Like:
-Parking in a garage (yes! no more scraping my car in the winter, or questionable sappy residue in the summer)

Dislike:
-Mysterious deciduous tree sap on my car from parking it on the street (no matter which type of tree I park under or where on the street I park it), requiring many, many more car washings than I am accustomed to

Like:
-Season tix to the Guthrie, with a great lineup scheduled (seriously?! Dowling is acting this season, not just artistically directing?! MacBeth? Streetcar? M. Butterfly? She Stoops to Conquer? should be good)

Dislike:
-Realizing summer is half over and it's already time to start thinking about season tix for the fall and getting emails about orchestra starting back up

2009 Duluth Regatta

Lane 1 finishes first, naturally

Rowing on Lake Superior, eating cinnabears and wearing strange hats

Tired, happy

Post-regatta party

More medals for the collection in the closet
Duluth International Regatta, 7.11.2009

The Niece Turned 1

The Niece's 1st Birthday Party

I have too many balls in the air right now. And they are going to crash down on me, soon.

If you're one of the many people who have called me to leave me a vm in the last week, and I have not yet responded to you, my apologies. (Although whoever you were leaving me a vm at 11pm last night, waking me up, wondering where I was and why I was not out partying with you and all of our (apparently) mutual friends? Yeah, you. I'm going to ignore you.) Ditto for email. I'll get back to normal soon, and then hope to catch up.

Shopping for a place to live marches on, although the search has been narrowed down, and I doubt new roomie K & I will be slogging through 100-degree apartments too much longer, viewing potential locales and comparing amenities.

While talking to a fellow teammate this morning at practice, I realized that one of the reasons I like rowing is because it's a sport that you use a lot of energy doing and you get a great workout, but you get to sit down while you do it. See? It appeals to the lazy person inside me. (Thanks, Abby, for that insight into my strange mind.)

Assorted Thoughts

Things that I like:
-Lunch on the patio at W.A. Frost (this was last week, when it wasn't quite so hot)
-60-minute facials (so relaxing!)
-Air conditioning (but not so cold that I need to wear a jacket...like I'm doing right now at work)
-Changeling
-My niece - who will be 1 tomorrow!

Things I'm not so into:
-Moving (including the stage where I'm at now: finding the new place that's just right)
-Humidity (pretty much all of it is awful)
-Ripping off a callous during rowing practice (and thereafter bleeding all over the oar, the boat and the river - it's hard to get a good grip when it's so humid out...)

Critter Wars, or Things to Entertain You in Your Retirement

The mental image given to me by my father this afternoon will have me entertained for days, I believe. He said that a woodchuck has returned to their neighborhood, and my dad caught sight of the critter dragging around a Cub Foods plastic grocery bag in the back yard. The mental image I have is of a woodchuck dragging a half-full bag of perishables across my parents' lawn, no doubt pinched from some poor neighbor who turned his back on the groceries as he was moving them from car to house.

I believe my father is planning a war against the woodchuck. What a life retirement can be.

My next mental picture is this:

And that is why I'll be amused for a while yet to come.

It's June, you say?

Coulda fooled me. It's cold out. Like 50-degrees-during-the-day cold. I could do with about 20 more degrees each afternoon...but the rain was good this weekend. Not for wandering around or rowing in, but good for the greening effect.

Places to take cousins in town for the weekend: Tum Rup Thai and Muffuletta. I must be in a rut - I just keep going back to the same restaurants. But they're so good! Although now that I've run into this man at Muffuletta (happened last night), maybe my quiet little neighborhood dining spot isn't so quiet if random quasi-famous people are showing up there...I thought he'd left and gone to live in NY permanently now, but apparently not. Bother. A person good at storytelling does not necessarily a nice person make...

Is it just me, or are the vast majority of movies made these days 1) psycho-slasher-insane-horror flicks, 2) abhorently depressing films, or 3) so brainless as to be trite images pasted together without any decent storyline? I tried renting a movie with my cousin on Friday, and she and I agreed: most everything available and relatively new sounded awful.

A random collection of today's likes and dislikes.

Like:
T-Paw (and will miss him as gov)
Dislike:
A few random policies of his

Like:
Eating Lunch at 9a, right after breakfast
Dislike:
Wondering what I'm going to eat when it's actually lunchtime

Like:
Savoy Pizza and Chipotle
Dislike:
Red apples that are pretty and shiny but taste disgusting

Like:
Sleeping in
Dislike:
Erg Tests (especially when they're to be taken before the sun rises)

Like:
Seeing cousins from out of town
Dislike:
Cramming too many things into one weekend

It's June? What happened to the last two weeks?

Oh, right. I was sleeping.

Things I like:
Sleep
Things I dislike:
Birds chirping at 4:30 in the morning, waking me up

Like:
Rowing
Dislike:
WIND!

Like:
Rowing my single
Dislike:
Ejecting myself from it while doing drills

Like:
Hot showers
Dislike:
Mississippi River water

Like:
Homemade rhubarb crisp, strawberry rhubarb pie
Dislike:
The nauseated feeling I get when I eat three servings of dessert at once

Like:
Watching Soderling beat Nadal in the French Open
Dislike:
Realizing I just spent three hours of a Sunday afternoon watching TV

Like:
Working four-day work weeks
Dislike:
There's nothing to dislike about three-day weekends

It is finished: the 2009 Session is over.

And I couldn't be happier about that. Over the last eight days of session - Monday to Monday - I averaged 15 hours a day at work. I maxed out all available comp time, and now I'm looking forward to using every single hour of it this summer, in addition to a bunch of vacation time during the next 8 1/2 months until the 2010 session starts...

Now. Time for some sleep, family, friends, rowing. All the good stuff. (I'd say eating, too, but that part I've managed just fine throughout the last months.)

Quote of the Moment: Politics as Art

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies." -Groucho Marx

Confusing the Senses.

Sometimes I like things that confuse a person's senses. For instance, I love how peach candles smell like they taste good - the candles should be candy and you should be able to eat them.

But some things that confound a person's senses I'm still unsure of. I mean, do we go too far? I recently purchased some lotion with cocoa and shea butter in it; it smells like hot chocolate, and I'm not altogether sure that's a good thing - especially when confronted with the mental image of licking your own forearm after application to see if it tastes like it smells...

And then there's the whole fusion/postmodern cuisine/molecular gastronomy thing in eating. You take all sorts of food elements, completely change those elements up [and sadly, the only word I can think of besides "change it up" here is "recodify," which just goes to show I'm far too long at work these days..."Why, yes. You must recodify that food element in Minnesota Statute..."], infuse it with some other stuff, and then bake it or shape it into something else, so that looking at it and tasting it are completely different experiences: your eye "deceives" you, and the taste is not what you'd expect. I am not sure if I like this whole concept At All. I believe I will have to eat my way through a lot more of the cuisine form to determine my opinion of it, but at first glance: it's weird.