Managerial Style Advice

Again, I paraphrase. But this is very close...

Brady (developer): "Were you at Target last week?"

Me (manager): "I'm not sure. Usually my wife goes to Target. But I do end up there sometimes."

Brady: "The Eagan Target?"

Me: "That's the one I go to. I live near it."

Brady: "I thought I saw you there."

Me: "It might have been me."

Brady: "No. I thought it was you. But this guy was wearing a green sort of pull over."

Me: "Like a Mexican pullover?"

Brady: "Yeah. That wouldn't have been you."

Me: "I own a green pullover. My friend bought it for me because I couldn't find one in Mexico that fit me."

Brady: Uncomfortable silence. "Oh. That was you."

Apparently I need to put on my manager clothes even when I'm shopping.

Teenage Angst

Eryn: "Blah, blah, blah, blah."

Me: "Stop it. Do not be rude to your mother."

Eryn: "Hmph."

Me: "Stop it. You're being rude."

Eryn, stomping upstairs: "Fine. If you yell at me anymore, I'm going to feel like I'm going to die!"

Geocaching-mania

BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST: if you intend to go geocaching in Ritter Park any time soon, you may not want to read this post. The pictures might ruin some of your fun.

To celebrate my 41st birthday, I took off Friday to go on an all day geocaching adventure with The Boss from work. Not my boss. The Boss. We planned to hit as many caches as we could in eight+ hours, without resorting to "a plan" to jigger the numbers: e.g. we went to a park and did a lot of walking, we went to some nearby fields and did a lot of walking, and we went to the Prior Lake park system and did a lot of walking. We succeeded in our goal and found 30 caches, plus a letterbox that we found completely by accident after mis-entering the coordinates for a many-stated multi-cache.

That multi was our only DNF of the day. Pain in the ***. We followed it through five stages, only to end up at an appliance dump with lots of broken glass and rusty metal. I just wasn't willing to dig down into the vorpal mess to validate whether a cache was present.

The first part of the day was at Ritter Farm Park in Lakeville. I'd been there once before with my family to find one of the Halloween Caches from last year (Think Tank), which made getting there easier than when Pooteewheet and I drove around in circles for an hour trying to find an entrance. We spent an hour searching for the above multicache which involved a lot of + this/- that coordinates. I've never seen The Boss so annoyed. The idea of spending over an hour searching for one cache when he could have found five separate caches was clearly an aggravating factor.

After we gave up on the first multicache, we focused on another that promised only two stops. It delivered, cheering both of us up. What I can't understand is why any cacher would assume that leaving a Kit Kat for the next person is a good idea. Who the hell would eat a stray Kit Kat? Nasty. And what parent would let their kid eat the stray Kit Kat? Nastier.


This was a good one. See the pine tree I'm hugging within all the other pine trees?


Surprise! An interesting way to dispose of your old faux Christmas Tree when you want to buy a new one.


Another cool one. You're not supposed to leave a golf ball here. These were collected from other caches by the person who placed it.


Instead, you sign a golf ball and drop it back into the cache.


The best cache of the day. We emptied out a huge, double barreled cache, and there were this many film canisters. Within one of them was the log we needed to sign. To make it more difficult, the white canisters had paper or paint in them to obfuscate the one container we were after. We felt like a couple of drug runners sitting under the pine trees with over 100 individual serving containers. It didn't help that at one point a German Shepherd and his doggy buddy came wandering over to see what we were so quietly up to under the canopy.


This is how far we had to go before we found the log. Stupid odds. Good thing we weren't playing Vegas (or the nearby N.A. casino).


The biggest cache in Lakeville. I've seen bigger. The Halloween cache from last year, Here Lies the Body of Geo Cache, was taller than I was. This was just a big ammo box. It was big enough that inside were peanut butter jars that looked like the remnants of other caches.


Stupid rocks were heavy. So I left more on it than I took off. My foot, size 12+-ish, for comparison.


The Back Forty. I can't tell if The Boss is a Broadhead or a Blunt Tip.


The archery range at the park. Very cool. If I ever teach Eryn archery, we'll have to go to Ritter Park.


A bald eagle nest at our last cache in the park.


Proof there are eagles there. Don't worry, the feather is not in my possession.


After Ritter Park, we went to Cleary Park, right next door, but they were having a "special hunting event" and all entrances were closed. Even had I been sporting an orange vest, the bike paths were persona non enter. After some deliberation, during which we celebrated how I had captured every active cache within 15 km of the center of Ritter Park, we tackled a variety of caches in Prior Lake, including a series behind the Police Station. But my favorite was on our way to Prior Lake, where we went searching for a small cache in the woods where, once again, appliances had been dumped. We searched high and low and I finally found a spot that seemed perfect for a cache, but it was empty. So we decoded the hint online (woo hoo, blackberry!) which indicated it should be where we were looking. After a bit more scrounging around, I found a squirrelfied camo film tin some 30 feet away. Stupid squirrels. Always First to Find.

So, thirty caches. Probably 16 miles of walking. Saturday was a difficult day for my old bones. Nothing like putting in the effort to ensure 41 feels like 41.

Something Good to Hear Right After Turning 41

On the way to coffee this morning, I heard two women at work discussing a coworker. One of them suddenly opined, "He's much better looking now that he's older."

Sorry Mean Mr. Mustard, but neither of them had a Russian accent.

Nanners

I paraphrase a it, but this is close...

Eryn: "Sit on the cushion. Sometimes the cushion is for anti-neeners."

Me: "You mean nanners?"

Eryn: "Yeah. What?"

Pooteewheet: "That makes a certain amount of sense."

Eryn: "What?"

Pooteewheet: "If girl parts are neeners. Then guy parts are nanners."

Eryn: "Why?"

Pooteewheet: "Well, what kind of fruit does a penis look like?"

Eryn: "A pear?"

Geocaching, St. Peter Style

Apparently it takes me two days to do anything. So I'm going to mention that I went to breakfast with Erik this morning, just so I can blog about something the same day it happened. We had a good breakfast at Junior's, although they didn't open until 30 minutes after we wanted to start breakfast and it was incredibly cold in the restaurant while we were ordering. The grill provides a lot of the heat, and if you're the only two in there other than the two children of the cook, who are obviously going to have heart attacks by age 8, the grill isn't running at full capacity.

Also, my sister is pondering urban chickens. It's not often I can find something I can come down firmly against, but urban chickens appear to be one of those things. Dirty. Lots of work (she only thought a poodle was a pain in the ass). Expensive (small animal license). Dangerous (disease and 744 hits on the med site related to beak injuries). Flashbacks for my father (who grew up in an incubation room). Neighbors (who shouldn't approve and have veto rights if you're within 100'). And readily available organic eggs in about a million other locations in Minnesota. On the positive note, maybe my sometimes sensitive niece will be excited when chicken harvesting season comes around.

So, Sunday I went geocaching. All day. Ming, Kyle, Logan (1st Grade) and I traveled down to Jordan where Kyle lost his geocaching virginity at Riefsgraf Lion's Park. Here are Ming and Logan celebrating Kyle losing his virginity. It was good that Kyle found the first cache, even if it was a micro instead of something more fun, as it proved the efficacy of his new GPS. I sent him a route pocket query that I imported and exported using the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (gsak at http://www.gsak.net/). That's an excellent piece of software, and it allows me to export in a format I like, including the terrain difficulty, cache size, find difficulty and last four find status values. I think the only issue I bumped into were a few missing recent caches because the area I tagged (Eagan to Mankato) had over 500 caches, so it throw out the most recent ones. Easily remedied by using two overlapping pocket caches. Klund gave me a few of the ins and outs about using the macros, and it may be one of my better purchase decisions in quite some time.


We ate breakfast at Cindy's in Belle Plaine where we met Klund and Eli (grade 2). Apparently, the developer who sits 10' away from me - Robin - grew up in Belle Plaine and the owner of Cindy's graduated a year ahead of her. This didn't save it. Klund turned up a review that listed Cindy's as a 1. My food wasn't a 1, but a 2 might have been generous, particularly as the tables and chairs were covered with dust when we sat down (and perhaps a few bits of food) and Logan stated at one point, "This isn't a very good pancake." It's hard to f-up a pancake for a first grader - you pretty much have to try. The primary problem was the food hit the table about four minutes before it finished cooking. Bleah. Even so, it was better than Emma Krumbee's, which we hit at Belle Plaine on the way back. Wow was that bad. The service was bad, although that didn't stop the waitress from telling everyone it was because it was sooooo busy (it was busy, there were people waiting outside, but it wasn't that busy, and the real issue was that she couldn't take orders from multiple tables at once. It was a very asynchronous operation with one table getting water, then an order, then a delivery, then the rest of the delivery that was missed). The food was bad. My burger was sort of gray, overdone, and had visible bits of fat. The Canadian bacon was obviously boiled. The apple sauce was not a sauce (Logan's observation). NEVER AGAIN. Next time we'll soldier it out until we get to House of Wu up by 35W.

But on a positive note, Bob's Apple Barn was still open when we drove past, and we had assumed it would be closed. I had the weirdest barley-based root beer I've ever tasted, and Ming went wild buying candy, but no pie. Which is really strange for him as he's got a sort of piemania.

Back to Belle Plaine in the morning, after the breakfast at Cindy's. We went in search of a few caches in Belle Plaine, a surprisingly historic little town. I know it's historic because this house says so. Watch out Kyle. That looks like a Willie E. Coyote trap.


That house sported a two storey out house. Watch out below. There's one like it in Deadwood (South Dakota), but I didn't realize I didn't have to go that far. The cache is nearby, but not in the outhouse itself.


Belle Plaine also has the Church of the Transfiguration. That means they take your geocache and turn it into nothingness. Six people looking and this was our only Did Not Find of the day. Someone noted that they'd parked and walked right to it. Dicks. I had my arm up to the shoulder under the church, braving squirrels, raccoons, and spiders. Only the power of Christ compelled them not to bite me.


Neat looking roof. All those wood shingles must be a pain. One of them is probably the geocache as the hint recommended praying.


Here's the church from the front so you can read all about it if you like. Don't skip the part about the generations of angry geocachers whose prayers weren't answered.


We finished up Belle Plaine at the Veterans' Park where they have a nice virtual cache with a Huey helicopter. I'm not going to post a picture of the sign, as you might be able to get credit for the cache. But here's Huey the Helicopter. That's Kyle in the cockpit, trying to fly away from Cindy's.


Proof that geocaching can be a very communal activity. I suspect there are pictures out there by Diane Fossey that look awfully similar(sans all the GPSes).


After Belle Plaine, we hit a rest stop just a few miles south. Two of the caches were straight forward, but the third led us to a chasm and coordinates that seemed to place the cache about 68' out into the chasm. Which was strange. Because the difficulty was 1.5 (out of 5) and the terrain was 1.5 (out of 5). Nonetheless, every GPS pointed downward, so we hit the leafy hill, sliding and slipping into the ravine. The first tree Kyle grabbed, about six inches around and 20+' tall, cracked and almost fell on his head. Ming kicked loose a log as big as I was that tumbled toward me like something out of an Ewok trap. And Eli kicked loose a rock about twice the size of my head that tumbled down so fast it gave me a real-life appreciation for what an avalanche looks like and why it kills you. We looked about, struggled back to the top, and then found the cache about 10' away from where we'd left our things.

Kyle, Ming and Logan. That cache is down there further. Just a bit. It's so close...NOT.


Ming and Logan struggling to the top. I saved Logan's life shortly after this by helping him up the final few feet. If I hadn't, he'd be there still.


An idea of the slope. Picture yourself at the bottom with a head caved in by a rock and a log on your chest. Not too far away I a.) took a picture of the earth cache, despite that I despise them, and b.) picked a pod from a tree that Kyle was sure was going to get me in trouble with the guy with a sherrif's badge. But he just wanted to know if we'd found the cache.


For our last several caches we hit 7 Mile Creek in St. Peter. There are about 25 there, so it was a good spot to do some hiking. We went up, and down, some big hills. There's a geocache near this spot. It's a mint tin, and it looks like a piece of trash. Ming set it on the bridge and ignored it for a while because there was so much rusty water inside it couldn't be a cache. Nasty. And Kyle almost got bit by a squirrel, so it was a tetanus danger zone.


Horses fording the creek near where Eli tried to get us to cross.


I took a picture of Kirby Pass just to make sure if they never found our bodies, and only my camera, they'd know where we'd been. All Blair Witch like. Shortly after this pass, we hiked up a monster hill to find two of the caches. Klund and I flanked the cache while everyone else assaulted the front. Neither way was easy. At the top I tried to take a leak, but Kyle told Eli I had the GPS Eli wanted. So I ended up trying to pee away from him, explain where the GPS was, and cease my sharking of two nearby hikers. The end result is a nice picture of Eli standing next to me while I pee on Facebook.


The final cache of the day.


We finished out the day, as previously mentioned, at Emma Krummiebees, and by whispering all the way home "Shhhh, Logan's asleep" and asking "Logan, did you make a skunk in your pants?" after smelling some pigs. Logan's response was to yell at us, "I'm not asleep!" It's surprising that you can get an hour's amusement out of so little material.

Fourteen caches found, one not found! Excellent day, and thanks to everyone who went!

Haircuts

What is with the sort of frill up the center of men's heads at the moment? I think I heard someone call it a faux hawk. I would have thought it was a joke, like a mullet, but I've seen so many of them lately that it seems to be a serious trend, particularly among the borderline young - e.g. 26-32. Is the advantage that it covers up the formation of a bald spot? I'm going to get a triple faux hawk. One ridge on top, and symmetrical ridges on the left and right. I'd put one on the back, but then it would be more of a halo than a hawk and I'd have to give it a new name.

Ditto for women with that What About Mary wave from the front over the top, like some sort of strange comb over. Why? You don't have bald spots. So that can't be the reason. And it makes you look simple. I'm not saying you should have a traditional hair cut and be just like mom. I'm stating that one is dumb and you should put it in the do not use bin, along with overalls, leg warmers, oversized shoulder pads, pink sweats, and Winnie the Pooh anything if you're over age eight.

Is the idea that front hair combup/overs and faux hawks will find each other hip and mate? What does that look like on their children? Do girls have combups and boys have faux hawks, or is it some sort of evolutionary haircut, like a faux hawk with an ocean wave motif, cresting every few inches? Shudder.

Danimals Crush Cups

The new Danimals Crush Cups commercials sort of make my stomach churn. To boot, the whole process looks sort of obscene. No. Not sort of. It's obscene.

http://www.danimals.com/crushcup/index.html

Arts and Crafts II

Today, after a short happy hour with the other managers that ended up in having most of a Stella Artois spilled on my shoes (not my own), I stopped by Michael's to find felt for my next art project with the elementary school kids. I have an idea about how to work with the Gauguin and one other Institute of Art item in order to discuss perspective and relief. While I was there I picked up glycerin soap and a tube of sharks so Eryn and I can have some fun making treasure soap for my nieces.

I thought it would be nice to post a picture or two of what we did for the rock gardens in a bowl that were meant to show a little bit about the T'ai-hu.

These are the bags full of rock garden materials. This was the light part. The 24 bowls with sand were the heavy lifting.

And this is a sample garden Eryn made. Her garden from class was much less busy. She took advantage of all the leftover materials I had at home. The school version was separated sticks that she and her partner claimed were for jumping from one to the next. Another pair of girls had a copse of trees. And a third set had a long rock in the middle that was a "log" to sit on. Eryn claims the real rocks in this one are a cave to sit in.

Sock Hop

Pooteewheet went to play poker tonight and Eryn and I went to the elementary sock hop. My wife was bemoaning the fact she was missing something so fun, but Eryn only wanted to stay for about 45 minutes and then she was all done. I don't think she related well to the children who were pretending to jam on the plastic guitars and saxaphones they bought, or the ones (e.g. almost every little girl there) who knew all the words to the Taylor Swift songs. Instead she wanted to get home and check out her new Mac Book Pro. Obviously we've brought her up wrong. I can only hope she grows up to be the big sister who shows, sister in tow, wearing white short shorts and enough makeup for half a dozen women.

But she did get excited about dressing up and wearing my wife's pearls. She's looking a little sleepy here before we even got started. As a point of interest, she did try to dance with a boy, but he kept running away and hiding.

They're not Weeds, They're Plants!

I taught two 25 minute classes in art appreciation at a local elementary school today. In order to teach the kids about the T'ai Hu room exhibit (officially, The Studio of Gratifying Discourse) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I brought a number of plastic bowls full of sand so the kids could make mini rock gardens with rocks, sticks, evergreens, and multi-colored sponge pieces. While talking about how the T'ai rocks inspired the contemplation of nature within where one lived by serving as reminders of natural shapes like animals or people, inanimate objects like mountains and caves, and more, I asked the kids, "Is there anything we do now that's sort of the same? Do we bring nature into our homes in any way?"

One kid replied, "We have plants in the house!"

I agreed and asked, "And does everyone like the same plants? Do you have the same plants in your house as your friends do?"

Kid one, "No, my Dad has lots of flowers in all different colors. Red. Orange. Yellow."

Kid two, "It could be a cactus. Some people like to have a cactus.

Kid three, "We have lots of plants of all kinds."

Kid four, "My Dad dries plants in the basement."

Probably for scrapbooking.

Centennial Gala

Pooteewheet and I went to the University of Minnesota School of Nursing Centennial Gala at the Minneapolis Convention Center tonight. A number of nurses were being honored as distinguished alumni, and my mother was among them for her work with at risk populations (in particular, the homeless). A big honor, and the whole family turned out (sans kids) to watch her get the award.

I was surprised how many of the nurses being recognized were names I remembered from my days as an Administrative Assistant for Third District Minnesota Nurses Association. Almost the first person we bumped into as we entered the convention center was a former president of Sigma Theta Tau for whom I used to write newsletters and who once told me what an excellent movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was. And when they mentioned Katharine Densford several times I leaned over to my mother and asked, "Is that the Katharine Densford who became Katharine Densford-Dreves?" I remember that fact, because it was something of a surprise to a number of the nurses that she had married so late. And if you look at her biography on line, "As Katharine stepped down as Director of the school in 1959, she surprised everyone by announcing she was getting married..." She died almost 20 years later, and it was still a surprise to some nurses, because they were discussing it around the 10 year old at the nurses' association offices.

Congratulations, Mom!

Recent Caches

Eryn and I found this cache during a day that was rainy enough we went caching with umbrellas. After the local Halloween cacher quit because the Dakota County cops were giving him such a hard time, we thought we'd find one of the previous year's Halloween caches. This one was called Preying to the Aliens. We didn't get it. We poked the bunny to see if there was an alien in his chest, but no such luck. Just weird.

Probably a Lot Wrong with this Halloween Conversation...

Me: "See. We're getting teenagers now."

Pooteewheet: "We were getting teenagers before."

Me: "These were chesty teenagers. They're older."

Pooteewheet: "We were getting chesty teenagers before. They were Asian. But they were chesty for Asian teenagers."

On Australians and Mermaids

• Murray: You know, guys, in the old days the sailors used to fall for them. Yeah? They hadn't seen a woman for weeks and the Australians would lure them to the bottom of the sea and they'd DROWN.
• Bret: Oh..that's mermaids!
• Jermaine: That's mermaids you're thinking of.
• Murray: Is it?
• Bret: It's not Australians.
• Murray: Yeah...well, the Australian ones were the worst.
• -From 'Flight of the Conchords,' season 2, episode 5 "Unnatural Love"

Linux

I am horrible at Linux. I believe this makes me a n00b. I'm disturbed that I know enough to be proud I can self identify as a n00b. Today, I typed in some sudo thing that I wasn't 100% certain what it does, but it was the end of a chain that involved installing unixODBC, which required qt, which required an appropriate compiled (gcc-g++), which required yast, which then reported an error that required said sudo-ing. After trying a password (despite having root access) my VM told me, "******* is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."

Ooooooooo....who are they going to report me to for fuddling with the SLES VM? Maybe they'll send a VP down to yell at me.

Addicting Substances

I had a headache today. I think I finally traced a bit of it back to not having any caffeine. I've been downgrading my consumption for over a week, mixing a little bit of caffeinated into a bunch of decaf in the morning. It's both good for my health and my pocketbook, as I prefer Caribou to the corporate coffee, although I'm still getting Caribou on Monday and Friday when it's between $0.55 and $1.

And I bought the most expensive bottle of Scotch I've ever purchased today. A $70 bottle of Lagavulin, recommended by Chris from work on Facebook when I mentioned Dan, also from work, had put me on to Laphroig. I had a very small drink of it, and it is delicious. Maybe if I give up my Caribou coffee habit I can afford a bottle now and then. In order to make it last, I've given myself a rule that it's a reward for every five hours on the bicycling trainer. Couple your bad habits to fulfilling your good ones, right?

Geeking Out

I think it says something about me that I'm excited this evening because I get to do the initial parts of a unixODBC install on a SUSE VM, and because the new Harvard Business Review that arrived in the mail has the title "The Drucker Centennial: What Would Peter Do?"

Parkour

Eryn watched a few parkour videos on YouTube. This is the result.

Popsicle

I was worried I had spelled Popsicle wrong on each of my photos. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. My Dad brought down the industrial, steel, popsicle maker that my parents used to make us popsicles when my brother and I were kids. I'm not sure how they ever managed to make this thing work effectively. We used some packaged fruit punch to make the popsicles, and I almost couldn't get the top off the popsicle maker. And my ability to control the depth of the sticks was circumspect at best. Nonetheless, Eryn was very excited.


Here's a better picture of my haphazard stick placement. And I filled it a bit full. You really need to make sure you don't overfill it, or the top sticks. Note the hairdryer. It worked well to blow it through the metal so the popsicles would loosen up. Still, we only managed to reclaim about 2/3 of the popsicles in their entirety. Another 1/3 turned into half popsicles. Eryn appreciated the remnants.


An example of one that turned out correct. Hey! There's Pooteewheet's cold medicine. She got sick right after I did last week and then turned the flu into viral pneumonia of both lungs. Lucky her. She wanted to know how we were going to get the popsicles out if we had to refreeze the popsicle maker each time. I pointed her at the ice cream bucket in the fridge full of individual treats. Sometimes I think she suspects I couldn't manage my way out of a box.

Each of these was made with nutritious, vitamin C fortified, juice. So I'm excited that popsicle time has turned into semi-healthy treat time. Next I'll make some out of Clamato.