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It would be a lie for me to imply that I’m somehow ready for Memorial Day weekend. It seems just a short while ago that I was preparing for the first weekend in May, not the last.May started out on a bit of a down note as Sarah’s grandmother died after a tough battle with cancer. We got the news on a Monday and by Thursday were on a flight bound for Baltimore. Once in Baltimore, we picked up a rental car and drove on to Chambersburg, PA for the funeral.

We got back to Madison on Saturday and found my sister’s dog, Olive, waiting at our house. Amy, my sister, had to visit Iceland for a week as part of her job, so we were thrust into the role of dog sitters.

Olive is a handful at times, though mostly because she hasn’t quite figured out what bad dogs do and good dogs don’t. Our biggest complaint with her is that she is incapable of sleeping past 06:00 in the morning. Some mornings, she’s up well before that. However, we all muddled through that together, and when my sister returned on Thursday evening, we sent Olive back to her own home and she was probably glad to go. At her home, Olive is the queen; at our house, she is on the lowest rung of the ladder. She answers to Sarah, myself, and Dalla. Perhaps the only family member below her is Ira, and that’s only because he doesn’t recognize any sort of family hierarchy at all.

The second weekend in May, Sarah and I met my sister, my parents, some of my high school friends and their families, and some other folks in Minneapolis. Every year we get together with my parents for a Twins game, and this year we decided to broaden the group significantly. We started with a potluck picnic at a Minneapolis park. In the grand Midwestern tradition, there was a mountain of food and nobody went hungry. After the picnic, fourteen of us went to a Twins game at the Metrodome. Unfortunately, the Twins lost that day, so while we all had fun seeing each other again, the game was something of a bummer.

When we visit the Cities for a Twins game, we always like to stay at a hotel downtown to minimize our driving and to grease the skids for a trip to Hell’s Kitchen the following morning. This year, we chose to stay at the Radisson Plaza, which is just a half-block off the Nicollet Mall. Our room was clean, comfortable, attractive, and afforably priced. We were pleased…until we got back to the room late on Saturday night. From the room next door, we heard screeching, giggling, and the other noises that girls make when you cram fifty of them together into a tiny hotel room. We thought that perhaps a group of prom goers had rented the room next to ours, but since we weren’t real sleepy, it didn’t really bother us. Then, about 23:00 or so, the room got quiet, and shortly thereafter, we went to sleep.

About 03:00, the room next to us exploded into screeching, giggling, and those crazy girl noises again. I was fairly groggy (I’d been single-handedly doing my best to ensure that there were no stale kegs of beer at several establishments) so the noise didn’t bother me too much (which is a clear indication of how much I’d had to drink; normally I’m an extremely light sleeper). Sarah, however, was bothered by the noise, so she called the front desk and they sent up a security guard. Also, she kicked me out of bed to find the earplugs that always accompany me when I travel. I found the ear plugs, gave her a set, stuck a pair in my ears, and went to sleep.

In the morning, we got up relatively early, showered, got dressed, and headed out for another remarkable breakfast at Hells Kitchen. The picture above documents what was waiting for us in the hallway: a trash bin overflowing with bananas, shot glasses, red frat-party beer cups, and hotdogs with string tied to them. Clearly, our neighbors had something to screech about and I’m guessing that it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s stance on states’ rights.

Even though we were tired we headed back to Madison, we still thought the trip to the Twin Cities was a success.

Last week, I was in training class all week learning how to subsume a nearly uncontrollable desire to fall asleep in the face of mind-numbing boredom. Though I failed in my endeavors, the class was ostensibly a course in managing Cisco firewall devices and I grok that so it wasn’t a big deal.

Dalla pulled through a tough spell last week. She developed wicked diarrhea and eventually became dehydrated. We had to have fluids administered intravenously at the vet’s office and she was placed on a special prescription diet for a few days. Part of that diet was a liberal dispensation of broth into her dish. She lapped that down and was soon back on her feet. She probably still wishes that she was getting broth routinely.

I surreptitiously bought a batch of rhubarb at the Farmer’s Market last weekend. When Sarah saw it in my backpack, she said, “Did you buy that so you could scatter it around the yard before you mow?” For those who don’t know, I used to always threaten my mother’s rhubard with the mower because I didn’t much like it. In fact, I have memories of simply mowing it down one year without first getting the OK. At the time, I probably felt like I was showing initiative. Regardless, I decided to give rhubarb another shot since my palate seems to have changed as I’ve gotten older. It’s still not my favorite (fruit? vegetable? alien life form?), but it does make a passable ingredient in an apple-crisp style desert.

Say “So long” to the Maneater. The Brill Luxus reel mower that we bought four or five years is no longer ours. We sold it to another person here in town who has a much smaller yard than ours. It was a decent mower, but on our yard, and with my level of non-compulsive yard maintenance, it just wasn’t a good fit for us.

Once I got rid of the reel mower, I had to work on the rotary mower so that I could mow the lawn. That meant a trip to the hardware store for tools that I could use to sharpen the mower blade; some time spent changing the mower oil and cleaning the air filter; and a trip to the gas station for some fresh gas. I made the trip to the gas station on my bike with the gas can in one of my wire panniers. It feels very weird to pull up next to a gas pump on a bicycle and doing so generated no small number of unusual glaces. Once I had the mower gassed and lubriated and the blade sharpened (I may have to take another stab at time; I’m not convinced I did a great job), I was back in the business of doing a job I don’t necessary like.

It’s time for Brat Fest this weekend. In a radical move, the price of one brat has gone from $1 to $1.50 and a hotdog has gone from $0.50 to $1.00 this year. That’s something of a bummer, but I’m sure that we’ll enjoy ourselves anyway.

For the past year or so, one of my daily pleasures was reading BatGirl’s blog. Her motto was “Less stats, more sass” and she routinely delivered. Her writing was always clever and insightful. While some manage insightful, and even fewer manage clever, only an elite minority master both. BatGirl, (a.k.a. Anne Ursu) was one of those talented few.

Her writings opened up new ways for me to view the game of baseball, and the players on the Minnesota Twins. While I may never use the nicknames she created for some of the players, (Justin “The Island of Dr.” Morneau, “Chairman” Mauer, Johan “El Presidente” Santana, Carlos “The Jackal” Silva, and many others), it is almost impossible for me to think about those players without those names creeping into my internal dialogue.

Today, she announced that she was hanging up her keyboard to concentrate on her family. As surely as the sun rises in the East, the Internet is a bit colder and darker knowing that she won’t be writing her Twins-oriented stories any longer.

Now I find myself hoping that she takes a page from Michael Jordan’s book of retirement and that the urge to spill some digital ink will soon overwhelm her common sense. If she decides to make a return, BatGirl will no doubt find a large and eager audience awaiting her arrival.

The United States Postal Service is determined to enter a profound and probably fatal spiral towards obsolescence. With its latest rate hike, Americans can now pay more for the same wildly uneven service.Most Americans don’t write many letters any more and sending a handful of birthday and thank-you cards every year isn’t exactly going to keep the Postal Service coffers full. That leaves monthly bill payments as perhaps the last regular first-class mail generating routine in the average American home.

Being the Postal Service, however, they are trying hard to shut themselves out of that market, as well. Now when you mail a twenty dollar check to someone, you have to slap a forty-one cent stamp on the envelope, a 2% surcharge. Sure, forty-one cents doesn’t sound like much, but if you start thinking of it as a 2% increase on a twenty dollar item, you might sit up and pay attention when your bank or credit union talks about paying your bills online.

What will we get for our forty-one cent stamp? The same wildly uneven Postal Service delivery and mail handling. For instance, the Postal Service regularly delivers Newsweek to our home on Tuesdays. It does that with a fairly high rate of predictability.

The delivery of Sports Illustrated, another weekly magazine, is highly unpredictable. The magazine should arrive in my mailbox on Thursdays and just less than half the time, it does so. The remainder of the time, it arrives on either Friday, Saturday, or Monday, depending on lunar cycles, the direction of the prevailing winds, and whether or 15 across in the local paper’s crossword puzzle begins with a consonant.

I can live with Friday deliveries; Saturday deliveries are less-than-ideal. There is no excuse for Monday deliveries. That leaves me with just two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) before the next issue is supposed to land in my mailbox. In addition, the magazine often covers events due to occur over the weekend. There isn’t much point reading about what might happen when the event has already come and gone.

I’ve been after the Postal Service on multiple levels to find out what’s going on. Clearly, they are able to deliver magazines with some predictability and regularity if Newsweek is any guide and that’s all I’m really asking for. However, no one at the Postal Service can explain their wildly uneven delivery record. In fact, I’ve started closely tracking the delivery of magazines so that when I next speak to the local Postal Service gurus, I’ll have hard data about actual delivery times to present.

If the Postal Service is going to charge us more, it seems only fair that we hold them up to a reasonable standard for delivery service.