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.

Slight Reboot for Less Bitchin'

You may have noticed a few changes in the ol blog lately. Guess word of my blog had spread a bit to people I was not comfortable having know of it, namely wife’s employer. So after some panicked deleting and whatnot, I calmed the hell down and managed to save most of it. However, I lost most of the summer’s updates, but as they were mostly about how wife’s job took a turn for crazyville, an office she shares with mice, lice and a couple bats (really, REALLY), it was hard not to let my anger about the whole situation bleed into every piece of the writing here.

The place is horrible, and worth all the anger, particularly the many ways they circumvent things like employment laws and health codes. She had a day-long meeting of the kind they do to pretend that they listen and respond to concerns, but really don’t. However, after 30 minutes of people complaining that they don’t have access to filtered water or a fridge, wife stands up and says “Filtered water would be nice, but I would really appreciate not having to work with five mice and two bats. My students have now named them. If one of them falls out of the ceiling on me, I'm gone. No notice, I'm gone. I guess it's hard to for me to care about filtered water because of that.”  That kind of shut up all the other complaints for seeming frivolous by comparison.

But, I didn’t start this whole endeavor to become a repository for gripes about my wife’s work, and I think she feels bad when it takes over my blog. So, in a way, this is a good little partial reboot.

Time to take a breath and note the things that are going right:

I’m married to the woman of my dreams.

Phone calls from creditors has gone from 12 a day to 0.

Last week, we got to do a day trip to Red Wing. This weekend, we will be going to Prairie Home Companion for the first time. Next weekend, we will go to Duluth and the North Shore for a mini vacation.

I have a great job, and it’s only a matter of time before wife does too.

I get to be creative and write for a living.

I’ve got an amazing group of coworkers.

I get to carpool with wife nearly every day.

We have enough money to cover food, gas, bills, and rent.

I can do cute jigs for the wife, and make up new lyrics for songs on the fly as I serenade her.

Octoberfest season

Things like this Cowboy Pumpkin Duck in a Hula Skirt exist.

Asshole Bosses Should Be Fair Game

As someone who has been through the long, hard slog of job hunting, I consider myself something of an expert on job advice columns. You read them, you get advice solicited and unsolicited from others. Some of it is helpful. So much of it is bullshit.

One piece of advice is helpful, but bullshit at the same time. That is the advice to never talk poorly about your former places of work.

I understand that being negative about where you worked before makes you look like a complainy pants, and that the potential employer may not want to bring such negativity into their place. That makes perfect sense.

But let’s take, say, a really bad job for shits and giggles. Say your last job was shredding documents illegally for Enron, or digging mass graves in Bosnia. What the fuck are you supposed to be positive about? “It gave me a great appreciation for proper organization!”

I think part of me just has a bad gut reaction because if you do have a legitimately bad boss, you are supposed to lie about it. And that lie props up bad bosses everywhere. It gives bad bosses free reign to be dickholes to their employees, as long as they are being assholes to white male employees anyway. If you don’t read This Article  that sparked this blog entry, and you should, at least read this excerpt:

It is nearly impossible to successfully sue your boss for being a bully. While there are decades' worth of precedents on gender and race discrimination in the workplace, just being an all-around jerk is sanctioned boardroom behavior.

"The standard for outrageous conduct is so high that people lose those lawsuits," says Dr. Gary Namie, the director of the Workplace Bullying Institute. "Nothing is considered outrageous when committed by management."

So when it becomes OK to lie about your former places of work where you were let go because your asshole boss kept asking you to work 60 hours a week and one time you needed to attend a funeral and he waited an appropriate amount of time before firing you. When it becomes OK to lie about it, all bosses everywhere are protected species. This rule works out like gangbusters for former bosses, who have no reason to be reasonable. I've known people that think Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross is the model of a motivating boss. Not the personification of human pit stain.

I’ve lucked out in the boss department, I should say here. I’ve had good and not as good, but with the not as good ones I was in a position that I didn’t really have to interact with them more than a couple times a year. But luck should not give me an edge over others because I can be honest about what management styles work well with me.

And it rankles me that there’s a management class that can be assholes, not get called on it, and can still fuck your shit up when any employer calls for references.

It warms my heart that Minnesota courts are starting to reasonably explore the issue of office bullies, at least on the legal terms of keeping people safe from violent work environments. That’s something at least, and something that might get higher ups to care about more than just numbers, but how their middle managers get those numbers. 

Fargo Vs. Cities. Pros and Cons Comparison

Staying in Fargo	Moving to Twin Cities	Winner
Still get to see the RedHawks in a pleasant park with good food and good seats	Get to go to St. Paul Saints, but it sucks	Fargo
10 minute commute. Most places in city easy to reach in under 20 minutes, and parking doesn't suck anywhere.	Going anywhere takes forever. 20 minute commute, finding parking near big events sucks	Fargo
Would have lost house by now	Household income doubles what it was in Fargo	Cities
Job leading nowhere, wife unable to land one	wife and me both employed at same time for first time in our 4.5 year relationship	Cities
Broke	Ability to start savings account	Cities
Hateful bitch of a neighbor	Hateful kids as neighbors	Draw
Favorite places keep closing (Silver Moon, Lauermans, Red Bear, Ralph's)	Favorite places are still kicking, and there's always somewhere new to try	Cities
Cost of montly mortgage cheaper than rent	Still, getting double what we earned in Fargo	Cities
Shoveling, mowing, gardening, fixing appliances	Renting, don't got to fix shit	Cities
Dealing with bank about mortgage and selling house for no gain after five years	No mortgage headaches. Rent sucks, but we have a pool	Cities
Fargo Street Fair	Art-A-Whirl	Draw
Squirrels galore	Deer, wild turkeys, geese, cardinals, bluejays	Cities
Red River Zoo	Como Zoo	Cities
Working every day	Unemployed for 8 months, but now working every day	Fargo, sort of. Complicated, but after 7 months it will be as if I never stopped working, income-wise
	When twins are doing poorly, tickets cheaper than Saints tickets	No comparison with Fargo
Got to see Patton Oswalt	Got to see Paul F. Tompkins, Neil Gaiman, and Amiee Mann at one event	Cities (sorry Patton)
Writing for Area Woman is a scam	Tons of freelancing opportunities	Cities
New Library	Tons of libraries, free museum passes inside!	Cities
Politics of a Red State	Politics of a Democratic state	Cities

Yesterday I became an accidental hero

Yesterday I was at an art exhibit to be inspired and write about it for a freelance opportunity. I looked at art for about 3 hours, and it was all wonderful. By the end, I had a strong thesis rolling around in my head and several pieces picked out to help exemplify and expound on that thesis while deepening it.

There's a lot of construction going on in Minneapolis right now, which made getting to the place something of an adventure as primary, secondary and tertiary streets were blocked off. In the end, I just had to keep the general direction of the gallery in my head while driving and just keep turning the car in that direction until construction turned me another way and I spiraled my way there.

The coolest thing, though, was while I was watching the last video installation, I could hear the weather sirens going off. I decided to head out, and by the time I got outside, the sirens were off. I walked up three flights of stairs in the parking garage (also under construction for each floor above floor three). I opened the door and about 30 feet away, a very large black bird, a raven or crow, saw me and started to take off with something in its mouth.

The raven dropped whatever it was carrying, I guess thinking I was too much of a threat to keep holding on to lunch.

The thing dropped two feet to the parking lot ground.

It got up. It was a tiny bird.

It also flew away, the other direction, while about a dozen of its friends and relatives went after the raven, shooing it away out of the parking lot.

I sort of felt like a hero. 

Open letter to the little shits upstairs

Yes, I hear you, tromping around your apartment on an urgent mission to calm down the wildebeasts that live with you. Sometimes I think your actions only urge the clomping beasts on.

You sometimes drop toys off the balcony, and trek outside to get them back. The time you went to get a ping pong ball and tried to hit it up to your balcony while I was sitting RIGHT THERE was awesome, The way the ball bounced off the window behind me.

I hate you, stupid 10 year old kid. I absolutely hate you.

Every time I go out on the balcony to have a smoke, you run to the door and yell “stupid smoke” and slam the door shut. Lean closer, I have a secret.

I only smoke for you now.

I don’t smoke unless I’m at home, on the balcony, and able to slowly give you cancer. I don’t smoke at work. I don’t smoke out and about. But first thing in the morning, and at home in the evening, I want to slowly kill you.

I could play loud music, but I’m not a fan of loud music myself, and it would hit the innocent neighbors next door. Smoke has a wonderful directional quality. I can take a deep breath and shoot it right up between the slats of your balcony.

I actually planned to quit this week now that I’m working full time and life sucks a lot less, I don’t need it to just get through the day without wanting to harm things. Funny, now instead of keeping me from hurting myself and others, I’m smoking to hurt you, you little shit.

Life was great for the three months before you moved in. With you menagerie of elephants, wildebeasts, and ponies.

Some day, I’ll come up with a machine that smokes the cigarettes for me. Just for your pleasure. Until then, please breathe deeply.

A night out at the ballpark becomes a deathtrap

We were spoiled by the RedHawks. There isn’t much more to it. But our evening trying to capture that summer joy of being at a ballgame with the St. Paul Saints quickly became a disaster, filled with danger.

Wife had bought tickets through Groupon, which meant we had to pick them up at the window on Thursday, the opening day for the Saints. This was our first game with them, the first of many we planned. The RedHawks had been a staple of our summers. We’d come to enjoy each player’s quirks, and mourned when they moved on or were traded away.

First thing is parking. For literally two miles along the road the field is on, people are parking along the street. Luckily, there are a few lots close by, and we coughed up 6 bucks to park there, in a field of grass.

We made our way to Midway Stadium, at 5:50. They don’t open the gates until an hour before first pitch, so we had some time to stand there and look around. There’s a sign that says that stadium waves are not allowed at Midway. “Do they hate fun?” I said. “Maybe” Wife said.

Finally we get through the turnstyles built for 10 year old beanpole kids, and start heading to our seats. We end up in the next to last row on the far right field side of the main bleachers. Bleachers? Yes, these seats are silver colored metal steel bleachers (with back rails at least). We’d grown used to nice, cool, plastic fold down chairs with cup holders, like adults use. I can’t imagine these seats are any sort of comfortable in the heat of mid-summer.

At this point, I was daunted a bit. I can’t say I was undaunted anymore. I'm plussed. We puffed our way to the seats. I tried to make the best of it by taking our remaining 32 bucks and get some food. I got a brat and a pulled pork sandwich and two beers for 18.50. The food was good, even better than similar fare at the RedHawks, even if the price was more. I also can’t get over the $12 per seat at this stadium for bleachers in the hot sun high above the stadium. RedHawks were $8 and you could sit right by the on-deck batter as he warmed up.

So now it’s still early. The announcer is testing his mic, and it isn’t going well for him. His station is a fold out table on top of the hometeam dugout. This mic is picking up parts of words here and there, which could be a problem when it comes time to announce a player named Hiscock. After 10 minutes of “mic check” and trying to get through his script and failing miserably, someone goes out to the stage behind the pitchers mound to grab the mic from there. This mic is the only working one in the stadium.

I decide to go get some more food with our remaining money. There are no hot peanuts, my wife’s favorite game food. But they have regular. I get myself a big pretzel, which is my favorite game food. I also try to get some soda, but can’t figure out why they don’t have anything. It’s three bucks a bottle, and all I can see is RC cola and 7up. I leave without soda.

The teams are announced, then the Governor is there, and the Mayor, and all these military people. They wait for the mic to be delivered back to the stage on the field. It’s military night at the ballpark, and they play a video that reduces wife to tears because her best friend is in Afghanistan, and she resents the team for playing so heavily on emotions. The mic is run out to the podium, where the speeches begin.

The pretzel is the worst. The absolute worst I’ve ever had. It was stale as hell, as if it had been waiting since last season. Oh my lord was it aweful. It’s hard to describe how bad it was. My unborn children’s children will carry the stain of this pretzel on their souls. And yet I ate nearly all of it because we had almost no money left and it was going to be a long game. We agreed for me to take the last 6 bucks and get to bottles of soda.

I’m done listening to speeches. It’s now 7:15 and the game isn’t even close to starting.

Turns out that RC and 7up are the major brands of pop at Midway. I get two bottles of Hawaiian Punch and head back up to the seats.

Before I get there, Wife is coming down the stairs. “Let’s go” she says, as if she can hear my battered psyche breaking its nails on the stone walls of this prison well of an experience. I love her. She’s never left a game early except for once, at the RedHawks one July 4 when it was so hot I was turning pale and vomity. Even then it took 5 innings.

This time, we weren’t even going to make it to first pitch, which was now 20 minutes behind schedule.

We walk to the car and start to drive home. “You know, when I got up to leave, the people next to me wouldn’t let me through,” wife says. “What?” “I asked to get through, and they said no.” “Seriously?” “No shitting.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Yeah. Fuck the Saints and their fans.”

Then about the time we get into Minneapolis on 94, the car sounds like something fell off the back end. What the fuck?

We pull over as soon as possible, with each bump making this horrible death rattle. I find a parking lot and get out to look under the car. Nothing is hanging on the ground, everything seems OK. I try to wiggle the muffler, but it’s steady. Now we have a car that runs, but feels like a death trap, and we are in downtown Minneapolis, ten miles from home. We get back on the road, and start driving. The gas is on the last eighth of a tank. So at least when we blow up, there won’t be a lot of fire.

Every bump on the road becomes a new reason for my heart to stop beating. The car clangs away in staccato triplets. Chung chung chung. Chung chung chung.

We make it through half way of downtown when we get to a stop light on Nicollete, and there’s a fucking race going on. A bunch of runners take off and we have to wait for the cops to let us through. Mental math on the state of the car tells me that it wouldn’t handle the cobblestone streets I would have to go on to get to 55, so I get on interstate 394. Going 40. Cars honking, piiiiiissed off, wanting us dead. I go north on 100 to get onto 55. Again, every single bump is another nail in our coffin. Wife is crying at this point. My first paycheck arrives tomorrow, and we may already lose it to the car. “Things will never be good for us.” She says. Part of me wonders if it is true.

We get home an hour after leaving the game. I’m exhausted. The sun is going down. Wife uses the last of her credit card to order pizza. She ends up spending the night throwing up in the bathroom.

Our groupon gives us two more tickets. We will give them another shot, only because the game is with the RedHawks, and they’ll need support to get through playing at this devil field.