In the Bickyard

Tessa, 

The dog is on his back, attacking the sky.  Yesterday was 100 degrees and last night a storm ripped through with 50 mph gusts of wind, but today is bright and clear.  You are walking the length of the garden with your arms crossed, saying "Hmm" to the plants, the way a teacher walks the rows of a classroom.  I am sitting in an Adirondack, sipping tea and moving left every four minutes to stay in the shade.

I found this photo of the yard when we got here:

The dead grass is accented by the pile of I-don't-even-know-what.  Things look better this morning.

The Rug Really Ties the Yard Together

Some Kind of Lily

Magnus, Forever Thirsty

Here's the garden we just put in on the right side of that top shot.  Having a garden makes you feel productive, long, long after you've stopped production.  All you did was put plants in the ground; sun and soil took care of the rest.  But you get the notion that you're coaxing life of the earth, even if you're just sitting there, drinking tea and typing.

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Cabbage

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The heat is starting again.  6 months of winter makes you promise yourself that you'll never leave the  yard, just as soon as it thaws and we can all feel our fingers again.  Then the first 90 degree day makes a liar out of you.

Baby's First Lunch

Tessa, 

A picture is worth a thousand words.  In high school I always dreamed of turning in a paper with two pictures printed on it.  "David, what am I looking at?"

"You wanted 1,500 words on the Spanish-American War.  You're looking at a photo of the Battleship Maine, and another of William McKinley.  May they both rest in peace.  That's 2,000 words, granted, but I can crop one of those down if you think my paper's too long.

I got off topic.  Pictures is why we're all here.  Behold, the embodiment of adorable:

One for the books: sun, food, family, baby.  Like a Rockwell painting, or a Gwen Steffani album.  Magnus doesn't seem to fit in, but he was there, quietly awaiting scraps underneath the table.  Good dog.  Someday we'll look back in amazement that she was ever so small, so dependent.  She will walk up and ask for the car keys and Tom will fish them out of his pocket and say "Seat belts; I mean it." as he hands them to her.  She will walk away, and we'll bring up that time we sat outside and passed her around, taking pictures.  Seems impossible, but nothing, I suppose, stops the onward march of time.

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Tessa, 

You are gone.  You went to Chicago to see the baby, and left me and Magnus with a freezer full of microwaveable casseroles.  I thought I'd write to you, since I can't talk to you (and because the next thing on my To Do list is boring).

Started typing in "heytessa" and google is frantically trying to guess what I'm looking for.  H gets you hulu.com.  He gets you Hertze Rent-A-Car.  Hey gets you the lyrics to "Hey Soul Sister".  You get the idea.  Googling Heytessa brought up a blog titled HeyTessa.  But not this blog!  That's right, there's another heytessa blog!  I know, right?!

And she is the Anti-Tess.  It's like when Spider-Man meets himself from other dimensions, and they're all these alternate versions of himself.  Him, but not.  The other Tessa has pink hearts on everything, and inspirational quotes ripped from the inside of a middle-schooler's Trapper Keeper.  And background music from taken from a Mandy Moore movie.  It looks like all the Disney princesses got together to blog.

Moving on.  Ain't no sunshine when she gone.  Seriously.  There's clouds when she gone.  And severe weather warnings.  But no sunshine.  Four straight days of rain, but no sunshine.  I've been pretty productive in the garage, but the kitchen is suffering.  And to do more in the garage, I think I need to buy a belt sander.  Trying to use a palm sander in a huge, two-piece hutch is extra stupid.

LATER THAT DAY.

Okay, went to Home Depot and bought a belt sander (Now with a MicroFilter!  Cleaning the air for fewer inhaled carcinogens!).  I was right, the belt sander is the tool I needed.  I've also been looking into what I need to put together a kitchen table our of that wood from the farm up north.  (Incidently, I realized the table will be way cooler if we call it Reclaimed Native Black Ash instead of Wood From the Farm.)  I had figured on a longer table, something simple but stretching like 6 or 7 feet.  However, ain't no 7-foot table fitting in our current dinning room.  There are some nice ideas here, but the one I really dig is this one.  Yeah, I know, it's a chick blog by some silk-curtain debutante who wants tons of stuff and has her husband make it for her.  But the table is great.   I just need a pro to tell me how to do it.  All the stuff I've read so far has everyone assembling a simple table, and then freaking out over exactly how to treat the barnwood.  Oil stain or water based?  Poly?  Lacquer?   Tung oil?  SHOULD I USE TUNG OIL, AHHH!  Funny imagining carpenters, in plaid shirts, on the internet, freaking out about tung oil.  But there's pages of it, though I can't prove they're wearing plain.

Okay, off to the dog washing party.  He's been chewing a bone.  Outside. In the rain. For two hours.  The beast is disgusting, and if he ever wants to come inside again he must first agree to a bath.  Also, here's two sentences from an email I sent to John and Jon earlier today.  Its not important, but I liked it once I was done.

Coming down Friday, leaving Monday.  (Run-on Sentence Alert) That leaves us 3 nights and 2 days to find a time when we can all get together and party in such a way as to cause onlookers to turn deeply introspective, asking themselves just how well they are really using their time on this planet, and why, why is their own life a flickering candle at the foot of the Shrine to Boredom, whilst yonder revelers (us) drink deeply from the streams of epicurean blitheness (beer), shaking the tree of life and eating whatever falls from its heavy branches with the kind of hearty unrestraint usually reserved for children and looters.  

Hope to see you soon.  All my best to the Chicago contingency.  

Auntie Tessa, Unkie Dave

Tessa, 

It seemed worth noting that, on the morning of June 2nd, 2011, Evelyn April Nelson graced the world with her presence.  Behold:

Adorable.  She's got her mother's something and her father's other thing.  It's hard to tell from this angle which traits came from where, but she's definitely an Evelyn.  First female President of the United Sates, probably.  First human to walk on Mars.  Discoverer of a cure for cancer.  Inventor of a machine that shortens lines at the DMV.  Only good can come from this.

Oedipus Burgers

Tessa, 

Last night I was grilling, but the coals just wouldn't stay lit.  I slid the burgers over and doused the stubborn little carbon lumps with more lighter fluid.  No help, so I repeated the process until I ran out of fluid.

I waited.  Still no heat.  Fine, then, I'm going to the gas station to get some more lighter fluid and when I get back you briquettes are going to be reduced to burning rubble because the not-burning rubble you are right now is never gonna cook these burgers.

Hopped in the car, backed out of the driveway at a brisk, yet responsible, pace.  Down the street, turn the corner.  Flashing lights behind me.  I'm being pulled over.

The worst part of being pulled over is the waiting.  Usually you know exactly how fast you were going, the cop knows how fast you were going, but we're all going to sit in our cars and think about what we've done wrong.  So I sit.

Speeding?  No.  Seat belt; haven't you seen all the PSAs lately?  We made a special commercial to warn you, but in your infinite wisdom you used that commercial break to get more guacamole.  Idiot.  $105 spent, and I haven't even gotten to the gas station.  $4 more for the lighter fluid, back in the car, buckling up this time so The Man can't keep me down, drive back home.

Hop out of the car, run over to the grill, open it up.  Yup.  The coals warmed up without me, then they used their keen sense of irony turn the burgers into charcoal briquettes.  Like a Greek tragedy, my efforts to save dinner were the very thing that killed it.  Oedipus burgers.  If this square looks familiar, its because it's Square One, and we were here about 30 minutes ago.

Alien Archaeologist's Cheat Sheet

Tessa, 

I just wrote roughly 3 pages of stuff here and then erased it.  It was a list of things that people either love or hate; things that extricate applause or groans, but rarely silence.  Birthday cake, talk radio, Republicans.  Stuff like that.  1,300 words in I realized it was a) not really all that thought provoking, b) not really all that true, and c) kind of a stupid thing to spend 1,300 words on.

Not that this particular corner of the web is reserved for things most people consider worthwhile.  It's definitely not.  (A brief skimming of the "Shark Bites" entry will confirm as much.)  But we have to have standards, because someday all of this will be read by alien archeologists trying to figure out what the heck happened here.  

So my second list of the day will be "Things I Want to Say to the Alien Archeologists Currently Excavating the Remains of Our Long-Dead Planet."  

1. While it doubtlessly hastened our total destruction, MTV is not a fair sampling of the human condition.  Especially The Jersey Shore.  In fact -- except for Ken Burns documentaries and the Food Network -- cable television as a whole will likely be a waste of your time. It was certainly a waste of ours.
2. While we're all quite pleased with ourselves for creating the Internet, none of us are particularly proud of what you're going to find there.  If the Internet were an actual place, it would've been shut down long ago.  No city would keep a business open that made getting your mail easier, while simultaneously luring people into dens of gambling, pornography, and Justin Bieber videos.  
3. The best chefs were French, the best engineers were German, the best poets were English or Italian, and the best vodka is Polish.  The Russians will dispute all of this, and if the Irish hadn't invented whiskey this list may have been very different.
4. If you aliens possess the technology to go back in time and warn us about Celine Dion, please do it.  We had no idea.
5. You might think them geniuses, far ahead of their times.  However, the people who talked the most about aliens coming to Earth were considered by the rest of us humans to be dorks who lived in their parents' basements and never actually had girlfriends.  The fact that they were right about you guys is a total fluke.
6. A careful study of 21st Century architecture will give you the impression that we worshiped shopping and football.  100 years ago this would have been untrue; now it sort of depends on what you mean by "worship."

There.  That should point them in the right direction.  This wasn't a waste of my time at all.

Covenant Pococurante

Tessa, 

I'm writing a country song.  It's called, "I need to buy a home, my wife needs a contract, our dog only has one testicle, and the Twins have the worst record in baseball."  It's about the plight of the modern working man; very Woody Guthrie.  What's a man gotta do these days to get a home, and a job, and an extra puppy nugget, and a couple of Joe Mauer home runs?

We spent all weekend at Covenant Pines with a dozen junior high students.  That's actually going to be the title of my song.  That does a better job at striking at the heart of my malaise.  Wait, looking up "malaise".  No, that isn't right.  Pococurante.  That's what I'm feeling.  I'd like to thank Thesaurus.com for diagnosing today's affect.

Something about those kids last weekend just sucked the life out of me.  While I was being lanced by hay, riding in a trailer down a bumpy road, in the cold, in the dark, while listening to a 13-year-old complain for the trillionth time, I had this revelation.  An anti-revelation, really.  It was this moment of faux-clarity, when I saw -- very clearly -- Youth Ministry as nothing more than this elaborate scam.  It was a tapestry of lies, weaving religion and culture with camping and hayrides, all knit together to trick guys like me into watching other people's teenagers for the weekend.  Cynical, I know, but hard to ignore when you're in the middle of a cold, dark, complaint-riddled hayride.

It's not that I'm pretty sure I was ineffective as a speaker, or ignored as a teacher, or mocked as a leprechaun who is likely to ingest his own fecal matter.  That stuff is par for the Modern Teenager Course.  I think it's that there was so little silver lining.  The kids who did open up, share, learn, they opened up about big problems, tough issues.  There was no, "Oh, now I understand Jesus in a more real and personal way" moment.  The real and personal moments were about the deaths of loved ones, the drug use of a parent, the thoughts of suicide, the doubting of their faith in the face of a world that seems upside down.

And how do you respond to to that, when you're pretty sure that what they're describing isn't some rough patch, but actually a pretty apt representation of life on this planet?  How do you describe GOD to someone when you're pretty sure they know you have no way of describing such a thing?  That the faith of a child gets soured and stretched into the apathetic doubt of a teenager, from whence it grows and matures into the befuddled doctrine of a twenty-something?

It just feels like a lot.

I Heart You.

Perfect Passive Participles

Tessa, 


HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  I know it was like 5 days ago, but we were in Chicago with your family, and I forgot my computer.  Also, we still need to celebrate with my side of the family, so I figure it's still Birthday Season.  Your 27th year was a bit chaotic, most of that was my fault, but your 28th year is sure to be full of laughter and meaning.  I have the fortune cookie to prove it.  Also, your lucky numbers are 6, 13, 38 and 72, and the Chinese word for goat is "ya-gi".

Favorite sentence I've read all day: "The perfect passive participle is the past participle expressed in the passive voice."  I've read this three times and still have no idea what it means.  I Wiki'd some grammar terms because grammar is a serious gap in my knowledge net.  I don't know what a reflexive pronoun is, or what it actually means to use the passive voice or why you shouldn't use the passive voice.  Nope, the English language is a strange mistress to me.  And it will remain such, mostly because the people who elect to write about proper grammar always wind up inking something that can only be understood by people who know all about proper grammar. 


Moving on.

It's a map from the mid 1800's.  Minnesota, all broken down into new counties and towns.  Ordered, settled.  Another proud star for the Field of Blue.  Next door: Blob Dakota, a land our forefathers found so boring, that we hadn't even bothered stealing it yet.   Note that just to the west of Dakota is Nebraska.  Originally, Corn-huskers could traipse all the way to the Canadian border without leaving the Nebraska.  Then legislatures remembered Nebraska is the Sioux word for "yawn" and they reduced the place down the the least exciting swatch of prairie they could find.


I joined Twitter today.  I didn't intend on it, but John Potter joined and I wanted to follow his witticisms.  So I'm on, but I have nothing to tweet.  Seems like it should be something mildly worth saying, but as you can see from the last few paragraphs, "Mildly Worth Saying" isn't a star I really shoot for.  Wait, Charlie Sheen just tweeted the recipe for bourbon ("...just add bourbon").  I guess I can say whatever I want.  

I Heart You.

Magnus Knuffel Johnson

Tessa, 

Magnus & Sophie

Having a puppy is awesome.  You just can't do anything.  You can't leave the room or he barks and whines.  You can't leave the house because he waters the floor like its on fire or something.  You can't leave him outside because he will drop a two-sie in one neighbor's yard, then run to the other neighbor's garden and eat their bushes. Note the data from a recent survey Magnus filled out:

You can't leave socks on the floor.  He hunts down dirty underwear like a Level 3 Sex Offender.  He chewed the cover off our only copy of "Idiots Guide to Puppies", without the slightest pause to ponder the irony.  He will, without fail, sleep all afternoon and then erupt into a roiling cauldron of kinetic energy two minutes before you're going to bed.

Did I mention the growth rate?  It makes a bamboo forest look like a house plant with a thyroid condition by comparison.  19 lbs when we got him.  31 lbs after the first week.  43 lbs ten days after that.  This cannot be sustainable.  I don't know about his carbon footprint, but his actual footprint could be filled with water and converted into a wildlife preserve.  Deer would look about cautiously before bending to take a cool drink from Lake Frontleftpaw.  Here's Mags, to weeks apart.

In that first shot, he could fit snuggly inside Paris Hilton's purse.  Two weeks later I can barely cram him into a duffel bag.  By early May, he'll be swatting at planes from atop the Empire State Building.  Good thing he eats rocks.  Rocks are largely free.

I Heart You.

Other People's Kids

Tessa, 

A migraine is mixing with caffeine and my Super Bright, High Contrast, Back-lit Hi-Def computer screen to form the perfect headache.  The caffeine should help, but all it does is remind me that there's no way to pass out, because you had seven mug-fulls of Irish Breakfast.  Sigh.

Junior High youth group tonight.  I'm not sure what to expect.  Last week we had a lock-in, which is, without a doubt, the single worst idea I've ever come up with.  That includes my "Who Can Eat This Pile of Habaneros?" idea and my "Missions Trip to War-Torn Mexican Border Towns" idea.  I was expecting 8, then 11 RSVP'd the day of.  That night, 25 kids showed up; a dozen of them showed up 2 hours early, only 9 of these kids went to our church.  Half of them had no intentions of listening to me, none of them had any intentions of sleeping.

I learned some things that night.  I learned that 14-year-old girls think my brother is "super cute."  I learned that anything beyond 15 kids just blends into a blurry, screaming, mass of Bieber hair.  I learned that I do not bounce back for a 36-hour sugar bender like I used to.  Most importantly, I learned that when given the choice between listening to a 7th grader's iPod and being water-boarded, I will fill up that bucket of water myself.  I'll even hang myself upside down, just please, I'm begging you, no more Katy Perry.

People like a good turnout though.  And I got a lot of attaboys on Sunday.  I forget sometimes that I should happy about the flood of children, because that's kind of the point of this job.  It is a good thing, but its also the kind of thing that makes you wish Nerf made tranquilizer darts.

I Heart You 

The Pup-osal

Tessa, 

Gaze upon him.  Stare into his big glassy eyes.  He is half Goldendoodle, and half St. Bernard.  He's a St. Berdoodle, or a Goldentard.  I really don't know.  No matter, he's 100% yours.  He's 13 hours away, but he's flying out to see you in a couple days.  He will then commence to dance about our home in that robotic puppy-like way, that joyful I-just-learned-to walk manner, and we will all be happier.

Then he will pee in the corner and we will be slightly less happy.

But we will clean that up, and the happiness will return in full.  Life will very closely resemble a scene from a French film, where a young couple strolls along the Riviera, staring deeply into each others' eyes, getting to know the person they already love intently.  Except, it won't be the Riviera, it'll be a city street in St. Paul, and the young couple is staring at a puppy.

I can't wait.  Who doesn't want to be loved unconditionally by 130-pounds worth of man's best friend?  so Tessa: will you take this puppy, have and to hold, to walk and to feed, in he-ate-a-thesaurus and in health, till death do you part?  I know I do.

I Heart You

p.s. - go here: WhatShouldWeNameHim.blogspot.com

Inamorata, Volume One: Mischke

Tessa, 

On the way back from Chicago, I struck upon a good idea.  Leave me alone for 7 hours in the boring wastelands of the Badger State and I will produce exactly one idea worth expanding upon.  The idea was this: list off my favorite things, one entry at a time.

The list excludes the Big Ones.  You, The Good Lord, the 1st Amendment, Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwich -- these are everyone's favorites, they go without saying.  Plus, there's already a whole slew of internet chatter on the Spicy Chicken Sandwich.  I'm not gonna say anything that hasn't already been covered.  So here goes...

Volume One: Tommy Mischke

I got a Sony Walkman for Christmas in 1993.  I was eleven yeas old.  It was late at night, and I was laying in bed, wearing my Batman underwear, trying slow my brain down long enough to fall asleep.  This was my least favorite part of the day.  I put my headphones on, flipped the switch to my shiny black Walkman, and thumbed the dial across the FM landscape.  I only listened to Oldies, which meant that a) I wasn't interested in 95% of the available channels, and b) I was guaranteed to not hear anything new.

I flipped to AM.  I didn't listen to AM radio, and wasn't really sure why it was even there.  It was like FM, but without all of the things that made people want to listen to FM.  A guy talking, some music in Spanish, someone reading the news.  And then there was someone else.  This guy didn't sound like a talk radio host; he sounded like someone who had about 30 seconds before the real host came back from the bathroom and called security.  He was talking about the solar system, about how a group of European scientists wanted to drop Pluto as an official planet.  This grabbed my attention.  I'd just finished my science project on Pluto.  If they yanked it's Official Planet status, I'd have to start over.  I sat up.  The man continued.  Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American, the Europeans can't take Pluto from us.  "If you absolutely must yank one of them," he begged, "please, yank Uranus."

11-year-old-Me exploded into laughter.  I covered my face with my pillow and laughed harder as the man went on and on.  My parents knocked on the door and told me I was supposed to be sleeping, that I'd better be in bed mister.  I listened till midnight, and the show was over, but I was hooked.

Tommy Mischke could turn a newspaper article about some drunken nun in Germany who crashed her riding lawn mower into a telephone pole into 30 minutes of quality material.  This was better than anything on TV.  Mischke took calls cold, meaning people calling the station expected to get a call screener, but got Mischke instead.  By the time they realized who they were talking to, they'd already been on live radio for 12 minutes.  Mischke once took a call from a guy named Al, who called in to ask about a weather update.  Tommy told the guy he was the station meteorologist, Blow Zephyr, and kept the guy on the phone for over 4 hours.  When the guy turned on his radio and heard his own voice, Mischke convinced him it was atmospheric interference.  I know about this stuff, after all, I'm the station weatherman, Blow Zephyr.  They talked another 90 minutes.

This one time, he called the operator with a caller on the line, and...well, here: you listen.  You'll see.

See!  It's chaotic and weirdly troubling, and it's broadcast on 50,000 watts to...er, dozens of people.  Most importantly, in a sea populated by ten thousand cookie-cutter sports/politics junkies, Mischke stands alone.  He's the only radio host to go for an entire 2 hour show without uttering a word.  2 hours of dead air.  Complete radio silence, interrupted every so often by commercials.  Anyone else behind that mic would've been out of a job; Tommy was awarded Best Twin Cities Radio Personality that year.

So there it is, my favorite person to listen to.  I don't know what it says about me, but If I ever go crazy, start hearing voices, I hope they're old Mischke reruns.  Here's one more for the road.

I Heart You.

Sweet Former-Home Chicago

Tessa, 

I'm all growed up.  I know this because I was sent to a conference, with business cards.  I think the idea is that I'm to hand them out to other grown ups.  The thing is, it's the Covenant Church; having business cards at that convention was like having oars in desert.  It's cool you've got them, but you certainly don't need them.  Everyone's related, or you graduated with them, or their parents went to North Park and made a sacred pact to get pregnant at the same time and then send their children to North Park, where they would fall in love and continue the cycle.  Business cards?  Please.  

 The staircase at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Marble mosaics on everything.  It's easy to see why they don't make 'em like this anymore, but I kind of wonder how they made them like this in the first place.  I remember coming to this place on our class trip in the eighth grade.  A trillion chips of stone and tile, spelling out all the great authors and thinkers.  I recognized some of them.  Defoe, he wrote Robinson Crusoe.  Kipling wrote the Jungle Book, which was remarkably free of talking animals.  Disney lied to me.  But maybe that's why Kipling was up there and Walt Disney wasn't. 

It always impressed me that even the places people couldn't see with the naked eye were gilded little masterpieces.  Pretty sure this place predates the zoom lens, so why go out of the way to make the mural reach to the ceiling?  Must have been an excess of Tiffany's glass laying around.  "Might as well use it all, Lou."

Ah, the hotdish-laden feast of Sällskapet.  Everyone said "Hi."  You were missed.  All the kids are so big.  It's only been six months, but they keep growing like we can just move the ceiling or something.  Jackie hugged me, Christopher punched me.  People were glad to hear we're doing well, which is what I told them. I suppose we'll have to make sure and do well now, or I'll be a liar.  I don't think doing well is out of the realm of possibility.  Doing adequately makes me happy enough most days, but adequate never changed the world.  

Harriette sends her greetings.  She hasn't grown at all since we left; still the same canon-ball-with-legs.  Our friends are great.  Some of them fed me, others let me sleep on their floor.  It was good to see them all, but it made me realize how great it was to have all of us in the same place for those years.  It was a hard stretch; everyone poor, carving next month's rent out of bad jobs.  But we won't look back on it like that.  We'll look back at all of us, younger and healthy and able to stay up till all hours of the night eating and drinking wine and cracking jokes.  No mortgage or kids or out-of-town conferences.  Just a bright flash of unburdened revelry that came before all of the things that will come after this. 

I Heart You.

An Argument in Favor of Health Insurance

Tessa, 

Do they give out Oscars for videos that are only 43 seconds long?  They will this year.  My back still hurts from this, which shouldn't surprise you, since I haven't stopped whining about it since I finished skidding. I'm definitely getting older.  I don't have the whole "wisdom" thing that's supposed to come with that, but I do have the aches and pains bit.  

Hung out with Peter last night.  He's still fighting the reality of his newly-acquired singleness, and its tough to watch him feel so beat up.  He wants so badly to take care of someone who doesn't want the help, and that's a biting feeling.  Everyone goes through it; its a right of passage.  But you still want to wrap the people you love in bubble wrap some days.  

Other days, you want to move all your earthly possessions into a new home.  Maybe "want" is not what I meant.  Maybe "have to because your landlord hasn't paid his mortgage since Reagan was in office" was what I meant to say.  Sure, we're bracing for a new opportunity: somewhere out there is an empty house that's going to be our first home.  But it sort of feels like we're always bracing for something, and I am growing weary of setting up camp again, only to find out train tracks have been laid straight through the middle of the tent.

An upside is inevitable, for Peter and for new home buyers, but there is work to be done in reaching it.  Thanks for sticking it out with me.  Ahead lies an era of quietude, when we'll sit on a porch swing and ask ourselves whether we put the hostas in the right place.  I'm looking forward to that.

I Heart You.