Blog - Minneapolis

Mrs. (or was it Miss??) Sherman was our 5th grade music teacher and in between teaching us how to sing:

(I want everyone to feel like they are in the room with me… Reminder, this is how I looked on my best day:)

she would punish a chatty male student by coming up behind him and bonking him on the head with a stack of books OR hitting him on the head with xylophone mallets. Ahh! Those were the days!! AMIRITE?? 

Speaking of punishment… I made a card!:

I was listening to a podcast…

Don’t judge me. I SAID DON’T JUDGE ME. The book of Genesis is chock full of names I can’t pronounce, BUT I can pronounce Jacob and Esau and that reminded me of a teacher we had at Incarnation when I was 9 years old named MR. JACOB ESAU. He was our science teacher (was he, though?? He had an apple-cider jug full of apple-cider that had a baseball-sized mold glob floating in it and was obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe.) To get into the character of Science Teacher he would recite The Tell-Tale Heart.

Soooo…

I thought about that and then I made this:

In the 1970s my Mom used to drag us in our little red wagon to the library.

Up Vincent Avenue where I would later trudge to school and never had Mountain Dew poured on my head by Eric Swanson and Tom Remier after they ALLEGEDLY smashed my diorama to smithereens.

But NOW there’s no reason to have your Mom drag you up to the library in your little red wagon BECAUSE you can just LISTEN to Audiobooks on an app!

WHAT A RELIEF/BORE!

Dan the Man (number one) knocked on my door and brought me a heaping pile of curried potatoes on a paper plate, introduced me to the music of Tori Amos, and listened to our kitchen-conversations because our windows were so close. (HOW COULD HE NOT?!)

Dan the Man (number one) also played classical guitar, had a big belly, long curly hair, and wore red suspenders. With OR WITHOUT a stained white t-shirt.

I used to babysit for my baby cousin when Dylan was also a baby (Note: I knew he ate the cat food over there because his poopy-diaper smelled like a litter box). We were picked up in a taxicab three mornings per week

by a hippie named Dan the Man (number two),

and while we buckled up in the backseat (carseats were for suburbanites), he would tell me all about the best items to eat at the Old Country Buffet. Thanks Dan the Man, that IS useful information!

Oh, I carpe diemed like crazy in those days.

Before Cape Cod (could that be the most irritating thing I’ve ever written?? MAYBE), summer days were spent “building” backyard forts, floating to the middle of Lake Calhoun in an orange rubber raft (sans life jackets), stubbing big toes while walking to the beach, and selling Kool-Aid in front of our neighbor’s house to thirsty-passersby.

I don’t remember seeing a nickel of the profit, but I didn’t even care because I didn’t even know what money was for anyway and I looked like this:

Fast-forward 40 years to these kids selling LEMONADE across the street from our house and I’m pretty sure their parents were a part of the whole thing. I mean, look at that professional signage.

I bet none of these girls even wears a neighbor’s hand-me-down unitard for a swimsuit! I’m going to give this birthday card to one of them so they really understand life before it’s too late.

I’m sure their parents will thank me.

If only someone would spray paint a clown riding a unicycle on the Washburn Water Tower. 

Wait, someone did that in 1989 and I spied it on my bicycle while I wasn’t procrastinating writing a paper on the Shroud of Turin!

Here is an an artist’s rendering (mine) because I didn’t have my fanny-pak (Franny-pak) filled with an iPhone/camera and, sadly, only had the image seared into my brain via synaptic plasticity:

The only difference between the artist-rendering and the real graffiti is that the clown’s legs didn’t end with feet and were just magically stuffed into the wheel-hub. Did this give me nightmares??  Why would it??

I haven’t even thought of it for the past 30 years.

Something happened last weekend

and I’m pretty sure it involved the best cake and the best catering in Minneapolis! (Thanks Zeichen Press!)

*Hint: She consented.

The festivities inspired so many things! One of them was this card:

Now I’m busy watching Leaving Neverland because I need to balance all of the goodness of last weekend with something creepy! (Thanks pop-culture!)

Hide-n-seek is the best game! One time I hid in my bedroom closet for hours – my siblings said they tried super hard to find me and finally started watching tv hoping I’d come out, and of course didn’t forget about me. 

Tib also loves to play hide-n-seek! She puts her head down and counts (in her head) while I hide. I ALWAYS WIN! See?? I’m really good. Between games, I make cards for RSVP (because they pay us The Big Bucks to license the Art) and squeeze in designing a few cards for our own line, THAT DEFY ANY CATEGORY.

Jen’s son, Will, was confirmed last week and my daughter, Lucy, was (OBVIOUSLY) his sponsor.

Becoming a soldier of Christ involves wooden pews and a fancy church and cannot happen on a gold-colored couch. (Sorry, Wonder Years cast.)

But it took this sacred event to bring Will’s doppelgänger to my attention:

Whaat?? Will is a dead-ringer for Jason Hervey! I never would have put that together without this sacrament! PHEW.

Is it wrong that I was more concerned about getting a good photograph of today’s event than of my house being engulfed in flames?

And why was the fireman so happy?

I guess he just loves the outdoors as much as I do! -12° makes me smile and laugh, too — and I’m not even a sociopath!

After the smoke cleared (LITERALLY), I made a Valentine’s Day card and called 911 to give it to him:

FINGERS CROSSED.