not gonna buy any apples, though

It might be coincidental that the day Steve Jobs retires as CEO of Apple Jerry just happens to be having trouble with his iPhone.  The Verizon store couldn't help him and sent him to the Apple store, which didn't work, and now he's on the phone trying to get some unknown person on the other end of the line to help out. "Let me speak to your supervisor" might eventually have led to Steve Jobs, so it's a good time for Steve to be gone.  Believe me, you wouldn't want to tangle with Jerry when he's like this...

... and I'm patiently waiting for him to be done so we can have some dinner and I can get to the store to get some bread and milk and eggs and a few other things...

coughing his brains out

Jerry has bronchitis.  He coughs and the house rattles.  He has been coughing like this for a week or more, and the doctor tells him it could go on another couple weeks, a month, who knows?

So I'm trying to avoid catching it and it's probably good that I'm spending all this time at the office, but that ends tomorrow and I'll be back to a normal at-home schedule... I think...

... and we are hoping to take some undetermined road trip next weekend.  I need to get out of town, man, but I'm a little afraid these coughing fits of his are going to throw my little car out of alignment!

the rach 3

As a Christmas present, my son Jon gave us tickets to last night's Minnesota Orchestra concert of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. He knows that Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #3 (the "Rach 3") is a favorite of mine. Jerry asks me, "If you like this piece so much, why don't you learn to play it?" HA! The Rach 3 is one of the most demanding piano concertos in the standard classical repertoire, way beyond my talents and ambitions.

Did you see the 1996 movie Shine? It's based on the true story of pianist David Helfgott, abused as a boy by his father into a concert pianist career, and it was the Rach 3, due to his father's pressure to master it and the difficulty of the piece itself, that drove him to a mental breakdown and years in an institution. It's a good story.

Anyway -- the Minnesota Orchestra, led this time by Andrew Litton, and especially the piano soloist Jon Kimura Parker did a masterful job, with no apparent nervous breakdowns. We loved it. We also enjoyed the Shostakovich 12th Symphony (the least performed of his 15 symphonies), but on an emotional level Shostakovich, with his more calculated efficiency, can't compare with the romantic excitement of Rachmaninoff.

Thanks, Jon! Great gift!

the uninjured one buys lunch

Jerry and I picked up my son Tom at work at noon and took him for lunch at the Day by Day Cafe over there on 7th Street in St. Paul, where they spent a good part of the time comparing their recent sports injuries and their remedies and their slow recoveries.

First, Tom got knocked down during a basketball practice last Wednesday night, somehow landing on his head and his foot at the same time. You know how basketball is -- you're moving in multiple directions at once, who knows how these things happen? He limped off the court in major pain and later went to Urgent Care to have his foot x-rayed. No broken bones but a nasty sprain and a temporarily purple foot which isn't too attractive. He's still having a hard time walking, which is why we were picking him up in the first place -- so that he wouldn't have to mess with taking the bus home from work.

Then last Saturday Jerry fell while ice skating and landed just wrong, messing up his shoulder. He had taken Jose and Jose Felix ice skating over there at Rice Park in St. Paul. Jose Felix, who had never ice-skated (or seen snow) before, was a pro, apparently drawing on his roller-skating history and his relative youth. Jerry, who has ice-skated many times in his life, took the fall and as result has had pain and trouble sleeping and anxiety over the possible extent of his injury. His chiropractor says there is nothing seriously wrong, just needs a little recovery time. Let's hope she knows what she's talking about.

I had oatmeal for lunch. I know that sounds weird, but the oatmeal at the Day by Day is the best!

surfing is harder than you think

Jerry, always ready for a new adventure, had never been surfing, and surfing in Hawaii of course is a way of life, so he went, along with a new friend of ours named Steve, for a surfing lesson yesterday on the east coast of the island. They had a young, 25-ish, blond surfer for an instructor, who made it all look easy. It wasn't easy.

Jerry came back to the condo exhausted and in major distress, having used muscles he hadn't known about before. His back and neck were in major pain. He cried out for his chiropractor, who of course is thousands of miles away in Minneapolis. The new friend Steve, a 58-year-old guy visiting from Vancouver, also had some new muscles making their presence known. Apparently (for them, at least) the hardest part of surfing is lying on the surfboard, paddling out into the ocean to catch a wave. Or maybe, if you're going to be a surfer, you just need to start at a very young age.

I took Jerry on my long morning walk this morning, and that somehow seemed to help his back and shoulders sort of get back to normal. They're talking about going surfing again on Monday!

packing for a month away in a distant time zone

Hawaii is five time zones away from Minnesota. It's an eight-hour plane ride from here IF you get a non-stop flight.

... and it's Jerry's favorite place in the world.

He leaves Tuesday for a month of R & R there. I follow in a couple weeks to spend the last two weeks with him.

But planning and packing for a month away is no easy chore. Meanwhile, he's cooking an elaborate dinner for our friends Diane and Tony, who are coming over to watch the Vikings-Patriots game that starts in a few minutes, and dealing with work stuff that keeps his phone ringing even on a Sunday afternoon.

"I'm overwhelmed!" he just said.

He needs to be on that plane waiting for take-off.

ten ten ten

10/10/10. or 10.10.10. 10 October 2010 or October 10, 2010. Maybe a perfect 10 of a day? No, I guess the perfect "10" day was 10.10.1010, and I don't think that any of us remember that day, and did they even have calendars back then, and did anybody even have any idea what the date was? It was still the Dark Ages, you know.

As I was heading to the coffee shop this morning and feeling perfect temperatures and seeing fallen leaves everywhere but with a lot of colorful leaves still on the trees and as I enjoyed the autumn moment, I was thinking, Why can't we just freeze time right here and stay like this forever (Although I hesitate to use the word "freeze")?

Instead the moment passed, and now I'm in my office catching up on work (on a Sunday morning) and taking a couple minutes to blog with you fine folks.

Jerry is in San Juan, Puerto Rico for three days, for three reasons: To re-visit Puerto Rico now and then because he lived there for a year a couple decades ago and all of his memories of it aren't bad; to visit his good friend Jose; and mostly because he needed the frequent-flyer miles to keep his Delta Silver Medallion status (And fares to Puerto Rico are apparently cheap).

and uh-oh, I see on an Internet website that Brett Favre is in trouble. I need to get back to work and get the heck out of here.

a taste of san juan

Way back when, Jerry lived in Puerto Rico for a year -- a year in which he rented out roller skates and organized a failed rock concert that almost got him killed (I'll let him tell that story sometime) -- but one thing that stayed with him from that year is his Puerto Rican cookbook. Tonight, we're attending a church-group pot-luck dinner to which everyone is supposed to bring an ethnic dish (other than your own ethnicity), so Jerry is making one of his signature dishes, Puerto Rican-style rice and beans. It's always quite good. Even you might like it, Ruthie! My concern, of course, is what will the other ethnic dishes there be? If I taste even a hint of cilantro in anything, I'm outta there!

counting crows

It's eerie.

We're up here on the 26th floor looking down at Loring Park, downtown Minneapolis, and for the last few weeks, on certain nights and certain mornings, there are thousands of crows flying over the park and hovering on various apartment buildings down below us. The contrast of these black crows flying over the white snow is startling. Their shreiky cawing, thousands of them, woke Jerry up this morning.

A neighbor told us that the crows come back like this every few years.

It's like the movie The Birds. When will they attack? Or are they trying to tell us something?

*****

The mid winter sports update:
Minnesota is on a sports high this week after the Vikings beat the Dallas Cowboys in a playoff game and have advanced to either lose to the New Orleans Saints on Sunday or to go on to the Superbowl. So next week -- an even higher high or a low low as football here ends for another season as we know how close we came to the prize.

Jerry and I were at the Vikings/Cowboys game, along with 63,000 other screaming fans, one of the most fun games I've ever attended. There are all kinds of things wrong with football as a sport, but, wow, the energy generated by that many exuberant people is hard to describe. It's a shame that day to day life can't generate that kind of excitement and that kind of a rush.

ketchup, part two

It was a surprise to me when a long-time client wanted to fly me to Paris last month for a meeting with him, but -- hey -- it's Paris and it's a good client, so why not? He said that Jerry was welcome to come also (paying his own way, of course), and when has Jerry ever turned down a travel offer? So off we went, via Air France, in business class.

I had been to Paris once before, Jerry multiple times, so we had seen the basic tourist stuff: this time we could just get to know the city better. My client wined and dined us, had a driver pick us up and drop us off, and we spent some time at some very high-end places. He put us up in a very nice hotel, not far from the Champs Elysses, and we stayed a couple extra days at a hotel in the Latin Quarter. We got to know some new neighborhoods, got really good at taking the Metro, all in all a trip that was very Paris. Came back, Paris to New York, on the new Airbus 380, which was phenomonal...

Then, soon after we got back, we had a trip planned to Tucson, Arizona -- a pre-busy season, relatively warm getaway. I had never spent more than ten minutes in Arizona and had low expectations, but Tucson turned out to be a good match for us: un-pretentious, easy to navigate, plenty of access to the desert sun.

And then back to the Siberian Minnesota winter, which is where we are now... Temperatures for tonight, New Year's Eve, could hit minus 15 degrees.

And I'm done catching up. Anything from here on will be current and will hopefully not include any references to Tiger Woods or to the disintegration of the Minnesota Vikings.

Happy New Year to all! I'm hoping that 2010 will be more settled than 2009 was.

random thoughts while having a root canal

First of all, that nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is a wonderful invention.

And while a two-hour stint in the dentist's chair may have been the low point of the week, the week was balanced by good stuff too, as they all are.

You know, don't you?, that Jerry and I are buying a condo here in downtown Minneapolis? We did this temporary, in-between rental apartment in the Loring Park area, with all the amenities of downtown at our doorstep, and decided that we love living in this area (About ten blocks from my new office). So we bought a condo in the building next door. We close on the purchase later this month.

Of course, we have to have a bunch of updating and remodeling done before we move in there, then another move is on the horizon, maybe later in January. And we are getting along so well without all the massive amount of things we have in storage that we wonder if we even want it all back.. Except for my piano, of course, which I miss.

So we're going to be downtown boys permanently, or at least as permanent as anything can be with Jerry.

Other:

Heading to Paris on the 18th.

Going to see John Irving, my favorite author, Monday evening.

And baseball is over for another few months. November is too late for baseball anyway. The Phillies did us proud, though, even though they lost to the team that destroyed baseball as we knew it.

i'd rather be a hammer than a nail

OK, the intermission is done.. Let's all have our seats.

It's been four months of change -- home, business relationships, day-to-day life... But it's no time to whine about all that. It's time to celebrate choices and positive alternatives. And now heading back into a new normal, a revised but manageable routine. Sometimes ya gotta run a marathon before you get to take a nap.

The new strange normal: Sitting here watching the Phillies in an unusual role: defending World Champions in this year's baseball playoffs... So far so good... The Dodgers look pathetic.. Are the Yankees on the horizon?

Jerry and I are still sitting in this "temporary" apartment. We have been looking at houses to buy, condos to buy, townhouses to buy... Not too close to a decision -- or are we?... It's not about the home, it's about the lifestyle. We have options.

But at least the blog has limped back into existence. it will get better from here.

hangin' out with the Mormons

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah, which is actually kind of a nice city (for a couple of days, anyway)... We had some preconceived notions about this Mormon-headquartered state that have been de-bunked -- for instance, that because Mormons don't ingest caffeine that we would have problems finding coffee or Pepsi, but there are plenty of Starbucks and other coffee outlets everywhere. We have gotten a good flavor of the city and did some Mormon stuff too -- my favorite part being attending a recital on the beautiful Mormon Tabernacle pipe organ this afternoon (Remember, I'm a pipe organ freak). (click on the photo at right).

***

We're staying at a hotel across the street from the arena where the Utah Jazz NBA team plays (The "Utah Jazz" to me being the funniest name in major league sports, in this unjazziest of states). Am having a good time traveling with Jerry and Nancy and Joan.... Finding some interesting things out about these two sisters of mine -- that Nancy is sort of attracted to guys who drive Harleys (!) and that Joan is very attracted to clean-cut 20-year-old Mormon boys in their white dress shirts (Although I'm not sure she'd like to keep them all that clean-cut)... :-)

***

Heading tomorrow to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.... Staying tomorrow night in Jackson Hole...

oh, what a circus!

Much of our packing for this double-move is done, but it's hard to make that final push.

***

Three sets of movers will be arriving within the next week: first, Sunday, the guys who will be moving some of the larger stuff that we're taking to our interim (or not so interim?) apartment; then, Monday, the piano movers to gently (I hope!) move the Steinway into climate-controlled storage somewhere; and finally, next Wednesday, the company will pick up all the rest of the furniture and boxes that, at least in theory, we will not be needing for an unknown number of months.

***

Tomorrow morning, we pick up the apartment keys. Our plan is to start setting up there so that on that final moving day, next Wednesday, we can go just collapse into our new temporary home (but, really now, aren't all homes temporary?). Sometime after that, we'll house hunt. After we catch our breath.

***

We took a break from the ongoing moving stresses last weekend to take Tom to the latest visiting Cirque du Soleil-in-a-tent show, Kooza. That's me, Jerry, and Tom in the photo, in case you just happened to stumble onto this blog and are wondering, who the heck are these clowns? Jerry and Tom, Tom especially, are big Cirque fans. It was a great show and a nice diversion. Life under a tent riding a unicyle on a high wire? There are worse things.

sneaking me across the border

I spent a couple days this week at a conference in Chicago, and when I say "in Chicago", I use the term loosely. It was held at a hotel out in the suburbs by O'Hare Airport, so all I saw of Chicago was the hotel and freeways and airplanes flying overhead. Downtown was of course nowhere nearby. It was kind of good to get out of Minnesota for a couple days, but somewhere along the way in my life I became an urban guy, and, if I have to spend too long in the 'burbs, I get the shakes.

Which brings me to a situation.

Jerry and I, as you remember, are moving into a furnished apartment very temporarily (we think) while we house-hunt. We've looked at some houses and condos, mostly without specific direction but presumably (in my mind!) within the city limits of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. Jerry, though, has a certain kind of house -- a 50's-era rambler -- that he loves. The problem is that very few of those homes are located within the urban core. So he talked me into at least looking at 50's-era ramblers in Golden Valley -- a suburb. "But it's the first suburb west of Minneapolis!" he says. "Parts of Golden Valley even seem like they are part of Minneapolis!"

So I looked. And there are some cool houses. But it's still the suburbs: Chain-restaurants and a higher-than-desirable number of Republicans per capita. Get in your car to go across the street.

But we didn't find just the right house in Golden Valley. So he showed me a house just a couple blocks outside of Golden Valley, in Crystal -- two suburbs outside of Minneapolis. Do you see a pattern developing here?

So as I push for "location! location! location!" and he searches for a certain style of home, we may find ourselves staying in that downtown apartment (26th floor, not 20th) longer than we would have predicted!

meanwhile, back at the coffeeshop (again)

It's another 4th of July at the coffeeshop. The Bolshevik-looking guy is at the table by the window with the professor-looking guy, both talking nonstop while the professor's teenage daughter looks on. The cops are sitting behind me having their coffee and muffins, and other familiar faces are scattered around me. Jerry is sitting across from me reading one of the local weekly papers.

A year ago right now, I was sitting in this exact spot ruminating about whether the British were really all that bad. Compared to george w. bush, Queen Elizabeth was looking pretty good. But things change (thanks, Barack!), and it's been a whole year that quickly flew by, and Independence Day is on a Saturday and everybody seems confused about which day to celebrate. Some people were off work yesterday, some on Monday, and for some reason the grocery stores are open today, so some people didn't get off at all.

The week was wild, but the merger of my business happened painlessly on Wednesday and, on the home front, we think we have found an apartment downtown (20th floor) to live in as we house-search over the next several months. I've slept better the past couple nights. A Tylenol-PM helped.

untitled, part one

And you thought maybe I hadn't blogged lately because I had nothing to say?.. Ha!

You knew I had a merger of my business coming up July 1st, which is taking scads of my time with details and catch-up and stress. It's been a while since I've gotten a whole night's sleep. I wake up way too early magnifying some minor business tidbit in my head and can't get back to sleep. You can understand that, right?

And you also knew that Jerry and I own two townhouses, one that we live in and one that we used to live in, and that we had both of them on the market for quite a while with the intention of eventually living in the one that didn't sell, letting fate decide our future. Then fairly recently we took the house that we currently live in off the market and decided to stick it out right where we are.

Well, the house where we used to live sold a couple weeks ago, with a closing the middle of August. Good news. We didn't get as much for it as we wanted, but, hey, it's a down market. So we were happy with that.

But then, this past week, people who had looked at our current home while it was on the market came back and made us a pretty good offer, and, for some ungodly reason, we accepted it. For this, a house that we love (but which has a mortgage balance that is more than we would like to have). They want to close the deal on July 30.

So what am I saying? I'm saying that we have sold both our homes and that we suddenly have a month to find somewhere to live. A month that happens to be the first month of my new business venture, which already had me stressed.

And we are telling ourselves, as best we can, that this is a good thing, that we will be able to re-group, to maybe downsize, to make our lives somewhat simpler and less financially precarious. But these days, it is hard to wake up early and realize we have to move on to what right now is a great big unknown.

brother in a strange land

My friend Barb, the leader of my book group (that I am usually AWOL from), was surprised several months ago when I mentioned that I had a brother who lived in Shanghai. Barb, one of the select few people in the world who read my blog, said she only knew about my sister Joan, who gets a frequent mention here in these meandering lines, so Barb assumed she was my only sibling. Actually, I have five siblings, and what's amazing is how well we get along and how much we still like each other and keep in touch with each other. Joan just happens to be the only one who lives nearby.

It's my brother Davy who mostly lives in Shanghai. He teaches English there, loves China, is very fluent in Chinese. When he is back in the States between semesters, he lives in San Antonio, Texas. He's in San Antonio right now, skipped a semester to take care of some medical issues, which thankfully he came through great.

But it's funny to think of a brother in a place that is so foreign. No, not China. Texas. Yes, I know what you're saying, it's one of the 11 states I haven't been to yet, so I shouldn't judge a place by pre-conceived notions. Well, why can't I? And then last month the governor of Texas suggested that Texas should secede from the United States because it's so out of touch with what's happening in the rest of the country. I say, why the heck not?.. (although I say he should have to take all the states between him and South Carolina with him)... I really can't picture the rest of the country bothering to fight another Civil War to keep them in the Union.

So, if I don't go visit Davy sometime soon, I might be visiting him in a foreign country. Who knows which one?

And I need to get down to visit my sister Nancy in North Carolina sometime soon also. It's been a year already.

Next week, though, I'll get to see my brother Ronnie and sister Mary when Jerry and I vacation for a week in our family's home state of New Jersey, the only state that's totally in touch and of which nobody ever has pre-conceived notions.

"i hate wind", i say

"What wind?" Jerry responds.

This was after Joan and Tom and I had been complaining in unison about what an awful April it had been because of the gloom and mostly too-cool temperatures and especially the wind. The wind blew like crazy (and is still blowing, even today) even on the relatively nice days!

(I realize there is nothing more pathetic and trite than a guy in Minnesota blogging about the weather, but bear with me....)

"And how can you hate wind, anyway? Think how awful it would be to have no breeze on those warm sunny days!" he says.

But I'm not anti-breeze! I'm anti-wind! -- the kind of wind that makes it hard for me to even walk one block to work or for Joan or Tom to stand out waiting for the bus -- day after day after day. It's not much consolation that it might be hot wind instead of wind-chill wind. Let's have some calm days! What if I wanted to golf (which, thank goodness, I don't!)?

... or how do I get into that windless bubble where Jerry apparently resides?

zone flipping at 7:10

I have one of those funky non-electric satellite alarm clocks, the kind you used to buy at places like Sharper Image stores (back when there were Sharper Image stores)...

Well, I woke up one morning last week and looked at my alarm clock and it said 7:10 -- time for me to get up. So I did my usual morning stuff -- shaved, showered, had breakfast, woke up Jerry, and went to the office. I was sitting at my computer at the office when I noticed what the time was -- 7:10! huh?

So I called Jerry and told him I must have looked at the clock cross-eyed an hour ago -- it must have been 6:10 an hour ago instead of 7:10 -- and he actually had an extra hour to go back to sleep or whatever. He went over and looked at my clock, and it said 9:10! My clock was skipping from time zone to time zone. Either the world is spinning haphazardly or my satellite clock needs new batteries!

But i've been thinking how my mind has been less than focused lately, skipping all over the place, not ever sure what day or time it is! so that's enough of that. Focus. Focus. Today is the thirtieth of April 2009, tomorrow is the first of May. Okay. Okay.

And what did I miss commenting on in the meantime?:

-- The Obamas' new dog.
-- Susan Boyle.
-- Arlen Specter becoming a Democrat.
-- The swine flu (but stayed tuned)...

But here's one I can't leave commentless: the death of Bea Arthur last weekend at age 86. Jerry and Tom and Joan and I were all so sad to hear that news. I can't begin to tell you how many times over and over again we have watched all The Golden Girls shows and quoted from them to each other, and Dorothy was always my favorite character. Even though the show hasn't actually been on the air in 15 years, it always seemed fresh and familiar and welcoming in reruns and on DVD. Consider how many hours we have spent with Bea Arthur and the other Golden Girls actors and characters. It's no wonder we take it so personally.