Wife and I ROCK the North Shore

The best advice I have if you are planning a trip to the north shore is to bring my wife. It will increase your enjoyment of nature's beauty to the point where you will start to question existence in a my-wifeless universe.

First some pics I couldn't fit elsewhere in this blog: 

Yup, north shore baby.

  

 On the north shore, people fuckin skip rocks. It really is this idyllic. I know!

 The Angry Trout Cafe deserves every bit of praise it ever gets. Oh My God they are good. DO NOT SKIMP HERE. Order what your heart wants and skip a meal later, you will not regret it.

We got there just past color peak season, but it still frakin rocked.

 

For one, wife is a whiz at packing. After all the time she spent living out of a suitcase shuttling between her shit life in Grand Forks and her weekends with me in Fargo, she became very good at it. As Malcolm Gladwell would point out, she put in her 10,000 hours of packing.

Problem is this last week she was off her game. She had an interview scheduled for Thursday night, which after working until 6 p.m. didn't leave any time for packing once we got home. However, she got it done and we got out on Friday by 8 a.m. Wife don't pity no fools when it comes to packing.

For two, you are likely to hear the best combinations of the English language ever spoken when you are traveling with my wife. Here are a few excerpts:

"I just want to see a goddamn tugboat and a goddamn lighthouse in this goddamn town, then I want some pie."

"I need some coffee before I kill an orphan."

Deer in the North Shore just stand there and pose for pictures

Dogs in the North Shore drive, but they are crap at parallel parking

For three, if you've played your cards right, if you've been a good boy for four to five years, doing dishes, laundry, driving, shopping, cooking, you get rewarded. We drove up to the Lutsen ski resort, where the gondolas were still moving up to a distant mountain (Minnesota Mountain). The scene was breathtaking. 

Then wife, who has a deadly fear of heights, says

"I'll do it. I'll go up with you. I owe you for so much, so this makes us even."

And it does. Her fear of heights is like anyone's worst fear. I doubt I would be able to hold live snakes for wife, or scuba dive in an eel tank with waterproof spiders. This was her equivalent. So we took the eight minute gondola ride up, and up, then up some more. Then we got to this chalet thing, Lake Superior off in the distance, trees with most leaves down, but still smatterings of mustard yellow and fire orange smeared on the hillsides. The floor of the balcony at this chalet was a wire mesh that wife didn't realize was 30 feet from solid ground until after we were nearly done and I asked for the camera to do a foot picture.

That’s what wife does for me.

She also knows how to splurge. We're still paying for the weekend festivities, but oh how we ate like kings. Poutine slathered in rainbow juice, Herring that sprang from Lake Superior onto our plates with a final look as if to say, "It is my time, please enjoy me." Smoked trout that stank up my hands for hours after. And the Pie. It was this fruit crumble thing from Betty's Pies outside of Two Harbors, and each bite was like tasting little balls of sunshine that burst forth and still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it five days later.

Last slice of heaven

Then on Sunday, we made our way from Lutsen Resort, Stopped at the Split Rock Light House for a spell, ate awesome burritos at Burrito Union in Duluth, a city I think must be the Portlandia of the Midwest because oh my god the hippies/hipsters/lefties.

We got back on Sunday.

And oh, I forgot to say, the Thursday before we left, my boss emails me and asks if my wife is still looking for a new job. Out of the blue because my boss and everyone I work with is awesomesauce personified and I can't believe it. It's a temp job that may last two weeks to two months, and it gets wife out of the miserable mess that HTC has become and into something that begins to approximate a wage that she is worth. It's not what she plans to do with her life, but it gets her out of the hellhole and into a head space that is healthy and human.

Wife was still not sure about leaving her job, since it's a steady thing and she loves to help students despite all the bullshit that they throw at her every week. Then she got an email from her new, and third, boss in a year that questioned her integrity on her time sheet. So wife let off a stern email, I went to the school the next day to get all her shit, and she emailed the HR people to tell them she was done. Simple, clean. And they haven't talked to her since.

Next blog, her exit interview. It's a thing of beauty.

The Lexington Makes Wife Forget Her Shitty Job for A Magical Night

It's hard to shake off a horrible week at work sometimes, and Saturday was no different for the wife. She spent the morning in a familiar pit of "When the fuck will one of my resumes hit and get me out of this horrible job?" Her pit has the added benefit of mice and bats. She used a microphone at a meeting to tell the entire staff and administration about the mice and bats that live with her. The next day, there was a box of mouse traps in her office.

It's hard not to think it was a prank, rather than a really lazy custodian's way of dealing with the issue.

But we had plans, and I was able to talk her out of the pit to take a short nap before one of the best nights out we've had since moving here.

First, we drove over to St. Paul to the block where they filmed Grumpy Old Men. The three houses were nestled into a block with beautiful trees. The colors in Plymouth are absolutely the best I've seen anywhere in years. Seems that fall is always a bunch of yellow trees that lose their leaves with the first stiff wind. This year, with the drought, the leaves are all sorts of reds and oranges and yellows. Everywhere you look, it's like the label on an Oktoberfest bottle.

Our next stop, Fitzgerald Theatre for the Prairie Home Companion. Wife has always wanted to go to this. We had tickets for the top corner of the top balcony, which is vertigo inducing. After I walked back down to get a couple drinks, whiskey for me for some reason, and rum and diet for the wife, I walked the five million steps back to the top. The last few steps before I got to my row, I seriously wondered if my legs would give way while trying to tip toe down the row to my seat. I made it though.

The Minnesota Opera opened the show, and got us both misty eyed even though we had no idea what they were singing. It was a wonderful evening of music and drama, but the thing that oddly enough got to me the most was the program notes about the show.

After the show, we went to The Lexington, where we had our groom's dinner last December but hadn't been since. That was a serious mistake, because their food was amazing. We started the dinner with some Old Fashioneds, which were whiskey central and took one sip for the wife to get a bit loopy.

I'm good at making steaks. They look weird, but they taste better than anything I have had in a restaurant, so I don't get steaks. I got the seafood linguine, which was excellent, particularly the whitefish part of it. Wife kept reading about their steaks though, and took her chances on a steak, medium rare.

I swear, they must age their meat in a room filled with shamans and Buddhist monks who do nothing but put out positive energy, then douse the steaks in angel tears and Care Bear blood because holy Jebus Wife's steak was incredible. Absolutely incredible.

We then got this Wellington thing for desert on the house brought out by our awesome goddess of a waitress. It was a pastry wrapped around a brownie, marshmallow and melted chocolate and even though I don't care for chocolate I would sacrifice my future children for this desert maker to live with us and make us deliciousness every day. We topped it all off with some Irish coffees and called it a night.

Week one of the corpratization of Fargo Jones

Transitioning from near-joblessness to full time work is a wonderful kind of crazy. I don’t know how to organize this hodgepodge of a post with any sort of throughline other than that. This is going to be random.

So this week I started the new job, picked out a 401k, insurances, other things. I got to carpool with wife since she works not too far from me. We even had lunch together for two days. That sort of thing has been very helpful in the transition. It’s hard to go from being available for her 24/7 and able to drop what I’m working on to help her, to having to limit our contact to a text or two, a brief phone call, maybe a short email, during the day. Maybe we were co-dependent, but it was a good kind of co-dependent. We work well together.

The new job is my first time writing for the corporate world. I’ve worked retail before, but my writing background is steeped in newspapers and academia. I’m learning new aspects of marketing, like eblasts, and writing press releases like a fiend. I’m watching training videos and learning all the different products the company makes, starting to pick up the business-speak shorthand like EOD. I filled out a personality survey that everyone is doing to figure out how to work with each other as a team. I got perfectionist, which is better than finding out you’re an asshole I guess. Maybe they’re the same thing.

The people I work with are great. The office is a supportive environment. Everyone gets along. My last job I found out on day one that there were definitely lines of tension to avoid between certain people. I haven’t gotten that this time. That’s why they said they were very careful during the hiring process. They were looking for even-tempered, no-drama people. Depite what is posted here, that’s me in work life. And everyone seems to be glad to have me on board, which is just awesome. Validation is a nice thing.

The eco-friendly office is also very nicely settled in between some major roads, yet also buffered by a forresty area. Every day we see turkeys, deer and other wildlife out the windows. One day there was a coyote rambling around out there to remind me that working late and alone at night will not be an option.

This week, for the first time in my life, I’ve been waking up between 6 and 6:30 without an alarm and feeling fully rested and ready for the day. I’ve become an annoying morning person, which is like Captain America suddenly deciding that communists aren’t so bad. I crash at 9 at night. I’m hoping this changes and I go back to being human soon.

And in the middle of all this, wife decided to take control of the family situation and email my parents a detailed account of why we haven’t spoken to them since Christmas, and what needs to be done to figure out a way to coexist in the future, a path to healing the wounds. Apparently we can't exist for a week without five life stressors on the burner. That was two days ago, and nothing back yet.

Last night, we went to WITS, with Paul F. Tompkins and Aimee Mann and hosted by the charming John Moe. We bought the tickets months ago, and it turned out to be my new job celebration event. It would have been a different evening altogether if I was still looking. Wife was not up so much on either entertainer, but I’m hugely into Tompkins, and Aimee Mann as a kicker on that just blew my fucking mind. Once we settled in and the show started, wife began to enjoy things as well, and she could see why I was psyched to go. Then out of nowhere, Neil fucking Gaiman walks out and reads some lines for several skits. What the hell! Wife asked what my favorite part was during the drive home. I said, “Every part. Every single thing was awesome.”  And Aimee Mann is surprisingly very funny!

We're driving out of the parking garage next to the Fitzgerald theater and waiting to turn onto the road, when Neil Fucking Gaiman drives up next to us on the right, also waiting to turn onto the road. Wife freaks out, for some reason surprised that he drives rather than takes some sort of portal he makes with his mind. He turns and drives off into the night. We do the same.

So now we’re going to see Paul F Tompkins tonight for his standup act, something I wouldn’t have done without a job. We’ve been waiting in the wings of the Twin Cities for so long, going to the occassional free thing, but passing up on opportunities to see great entertainers because of the whole broke thing. Now we’ll get to catch our heroes when they come through town on tour. We’ll get to see plays, and check out the best places to get (fill in food item here). I’m looking forward to it. 

Enjoy some Aimee Mann!

and go here for a wonderful video clip of Tompkins talking about being broke, which seems appropriate for this blog. 

http://comedians.jokes.com/paul-f--tompkins/videos/paul-f--tompkins---creme-of-bitterness

My weekend started with my fiance punching me in the face

It drew tears, but no blood. We were both in bed on Saturday, she got up, grabbed a shirt from where I had left it on the bed, and handed it to me without looking just as I was sitting up. I immediately fell back to the bed. If life was going to give me such a strong signal, I wasn’t going to ignore it. Nor could I ignore the sharp pain as I checked my nose for breakage. My glasses were flattened, but I bent them back into shape.

Although the bed and life wanted me to keep sleeping, we had to get ready to go to the cities once again. This time, it was for an eco-triathalon. Her brother was competing.

An eco-triathalon consists of 4.5 miles of kayaking, 7 miles of mountain biking, and 3 miles of trail running. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the hills near Rochester are brutally unforgiving. We stayed in the cities with friends overnight, and woke at 4:30 a.m. Sunday to make the drive. We were volunteering. Well, Fiance was volunteering, and I was voluntold. I’m used to that.

We drove through about 90 minutes of thick fog, wondering if Vikings were lurking in the mist and ready to attack. I stretched Scooby Doo jokes and impressions to the breaking point and beyond.

We got to the camp where the race was held and pulled in at the first tent we saw, not knowing what we were supposed to do. We got out and walked over to the tent. The person there took one look at us, half a look, and said, “Volunteers, go see Stacy at the other tent, down the road and to the right.”

On the way back to the car, Fiance looked at me. “How did she know we were volunteers?”

Me, grabbing my man boobs: “I have no idea.”

We drove over to the other tent, where Stacy called out our names before we could even say anything. Fiance had joked by email when she volunteered that xl shirts would do, “as long as they fit over my boobs.” I guess that was a giveaway. Being the most out of shape people at an event for athletes makes one stand out.

Also not being able to talk about some obstacle course marathon that several people took part in this summer.

But we were there to support Fiance’s brother. We were set at a watering station for the bikers to help direct them down one path or another depending on what lap they were on. We saw people carrying their bikes, one guy’s pedal fell off early in the second lap and he used his bike as a scooter to keep going. A woman’s blood-crusted hand grabbed a cup of water as she pedaled by, looking as if to say “Why the hell am I doing this to myself.” The racers were a good mix of all sorts of people, evident in the 90 minute difference between first and last place. But everyone finished, including Fiance’s brother, and I’m proud of him for that.

The only other noteworthy piece of this day was the one port-a-potty they had for the event, which smelled worse than any I’ve been in, ever. Apparently, Fiance noted, there is no corn left in southeastern Minnesota, because it all ended up in that thing.

All in all, it was an enjoyable time, minus the fact we stood out like kids at a NAMBLA convention. I’ve never been terribly athletic. I used to run 5 miles during the summers of undergraduate school, more for lack of anything else to do in my small hometown than anything. As the years progressed, I have put on weight, exercising from time to time for a few months, but always losing interest/time/money. We’ve decided instead to focus on eating lots of vegetables, fruits and home-cooked meals. It’s been working so far for mild weight loss/stabilization, which is fine with me. With a wedding, moving, job changes, unemployment, and selling a house all going on at the same time, I’d rather not add another obligation to the mix of insanity. I’d have to punch myself in the face. 

Open letter to the F**ktard who cruised by the cabin on Saturday

Dear FT,

As Fiance and I were sitting outside enjoying the weather on Saturday at my family’s cabin, you cruised by in a pontoon with what I assume was your wife. You were assessing properties, and said to your companion that our cabin was “a waste of a good lot.” I’m not sure if you meant for us to hear that, but we did.

The cabin has been in the family for 80 to 100 years. There is no running water and we use an outhouse. No one in the family wishes to use the cabin in the winter, and it is too far away to become a commute possibility for anyone, so there is little point in updating it.

Beyond that, I have concern for your assessment of what makes a good cabin. There are all kinds of people in lake country. Most of them are rich and build some rather lavish monstrosities. That’s fine for them, and I appreciate different ways of living. We happen to appreciate a simpler lifestyle at the lake. No cable, no plumbing, curtains instead of doors for the bedrooms. We get a lot of reading done and board games played. It may not be the prettiest old building around, but it serves its purpose and we like it.

I know if my dad and uncle sold the property, the new owner would quickly demolish the building to build something new. That would be a shame.

I’m glad that there are some people that appreciate older houses. Our country doesn’t have a lot of history to begin with. I enjoy the character I get from living in a house made in 1929 and am glad that the owners before me kept those older attributes when possible.

Take a trip to Europe – any city will do. Walk around and marvel that many of the buildings around you were built before the pilgrims landed in America. For some reason, Europeans don’t think of old buildings as wastes of space, but something worth preserving. Just walking through a city, you can appreciate the long and wonderful history of space, something that’s difficult to get here in the Midwest, although there are some great places on the East Coast that also have a sense of history.

When we visit the lake for a couple weekends a year, it’s nice to look at the cupboards and know that they have been used by my great grandmother, the water pump that my siblings and I would take turns using to fill the drinking bucket, the outhouse filled with spiders that caused childhood nightmares. Memories and place connect with unseen and imagined history in older places in ways that are fascinating to some people, but not you.

Before you condemn a place because it isn’t made to your modern sensibilities, just take a moment to keep your spew-trap buttoned, bend over, and screw yourself.

Sincerely,

Fargo Jones

My racist, sadistic neighbor

For the past few weeks, my sadistic neighbor has been taping sheets of newspaper to her front window. I imagine the intent is to help the neighborhood birds build nests.

Instead, I’ve been listening to a robin try to fly through the non-papered part of her window for days. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Bird poo now stains her front porch. I think the bird must have brain damage by now.

I say sadistic, and should probably elaborate. My neighbor is the personification of the Hallmark Shoebox lady, complete with cataract glasses and froofy dog. I had a feeling she would be interesting when my first conversation with her involved her telling me about the occasional black people that come through the neighborhood and how she called the police.

Racist elderly people. There’s not much that you can do but plaster on a fake smile and look for the nearest exit.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

This neighbor accused me of trying to kill her dog one winter. I had salted my icy sidewalks (mostly for fear of her falling and getting hurt). She said if I used salt again, she would call the police.

This neighbor said the trees in my yard were blocking the sun from her tree. When the time of year allowed for it, I had the tree trimmed by a guy who shimmies up trees with just some climbing equipment. She spent the afternoon yelling at the guy while he was dangling 30-40 feet from the ground with a chainsaw.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

When this woman speaks to you and she’s angry, she starts at 10, no build up. You open the door (the first mistake) and find her already mid-sentence yelling. Your day is ruined thereafter. You can't shake the conversation. It's like a verbal concussion - you are disoriented and confused. When she did it to Fiancé, I wrote the neighbor a letter letting her know that if she had any further concerns, to put it in writing and to deal with me and that I no longer wished to speak to her.

She said the letter gave her a good laugh.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

In the tree out front, there are four baby squirrels learning how to climb and jump. A rabbit has taken up residence in our front yard. Our yard is a sanctuary. Her yard is a study in inducing brain-injured birds.

Fiancé and I are trying to find the open window to a new life since none of the doors seem to be opening. We keep banging our heads against the window. Over and over again. Hoping for this next job to call, for the next application to be the last one needed. Every day we feel a bit stupider for believing things could maybe work out. That she could find a position that covers healthcare. That we could escape Fargo.

Fiancé nailed an interview with a non-profit company. Absolutely perfect for the job. She even sent a hand-written thank you note. She was passed over and given no reason for it.

I tried calling for some counseling to help navigate the stress of a wedding, unemployment, finances, unsupportive parents (Fiancé’s mother was thrilled she didn’t get the job) and trying to move. They scheduled me for six weeks from now. Six weeks.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

But then you wonder what might be beyond the window. If we did get through, things might be just as miserable.

The bird needs to figure out that what he needs is right there, that the newspaper will work wonders in building a nest if only he would grab it and go. Forget about what is beyond the window.

I don’t know what that means for us, what we are missing in our quest for a better life. Often these things are only known in hindsight. For instance, my brother-in-law lost his job after 7 loyal and wonderful years with the company. He searched for six months to find a position somewhere. Because of that, he was able to be home to support their newborn baby that had a lot of birth complications. He got hired soon after at a place just across the street from their home. The universe knew he needed to be home for the baby until it was better. But it sucked horribly for him for the months trying to find work while the due date loomed.

I hope we figure it out soon. My head is getting very sore.