New bike, bummer HI news

It has been too long since I wrote. Last week I went to Lakeville to buy a circa 1987 turquioise Schwinn Traveller from a young gent who apparently lives to fix up old, small 1980's road bikes. His unassuming garage was crammed full with bikes hanging from the ceiling. At 48cm it is about 2 cms too big for me. A coworker suggested that when I save up and get a properly fitted road bike that is about 46cm I could turn this one into my winter "fixie". He convinced me that it wasn't just a 1990's mountain bike like fad, rather that it is extremely practical to ride one of these in the frigid winters of Minnesota because there is nothing to freeze up or get icy. That seems nice. Plus I admire that fact that fixie riders can stand on their bikes at an intersection like they are on a unicycle. Super cool.

Speaking of super cool there was a couple of kids on the greenway this evening. They were 2 boys who looked to be in middle school. They had a homemade pedicab and their innovation included a really low seat for the passenger, almost like the passenger part of some shopping carts. (as a school girl my parents allowed me to ride in the area underneath in the shopping cart reserved for 64 cases of soda pop). I'm talking about the kind of shopping cart that used to be at Super Valu with the rectangular cargo area and the trailer hitch. I think that Lund's has that kind of cart too but I have never seen the oity-toity kids ride in it.

As I passed these kids I yelled "on your left!" and upon seeing their amazing contraption I yelled, "That is Super Cool!" The kid pushing the thing had the presence of mind to thank me and I motored away. If I see it again I may take a closer look at it.

The sad news this time is that Garrison Keillor cancelled on the Hostelling International National Meeting that is going to held the weekend before Thanksgiving this year at the Hilton. He will unexpectedly be out of town taping "A Prairie Home Companion". If anyone can think of some who loves to travel, likes people and is relatively famous, please leave a comment!

Home brew bottled

I just bottled my distressingly light colored Irish stout last night. I think that it darkened up quite a bit after I left it in my secondary fermenter for almost 3 weeks. Mostly through evaporation, I'm sure. Starting Specific Gravity: 1.050 Ending SG: 1.015

Here is a list of beers that I want to make at some point in my life:
Cream Stout
Chocolate Stout
Hefeweizen
Scotch Ale
Oatmeal Stout
Ginger Beer (gingery like Reed's)
Dortmunder
Java Stout
Dunkelweizen
Honey Brown Ale
Bitter (Red Dwarfish)
IPA
Cream Ale

I want to try to make Landesbier, this stuff that comes in a Red Stripe-like bottle that I had at a Klassentreff when I was living in Germany in my youth. It was sweet and refreshing. I'm sure it must have been an ale. It sounds easy to make.

I think that I will do a Cream Stout next so that I can make a black, dark as night beer.

Orthographic style sheet

Dene Sułine in northern Saskatchewan suffers from a violent sound shift from t -> k. For that reason they have had a hard time developing a usable orthography. In this computer age, they could develop a style sheet system that simulates what goes on in a Dene reader's head when reading text from that other dialect. Replace the t's with k's and account for acceptions.

I'm not sure if this is actually genius or not. I thought of it on the pot.

bike/grad school update

I finally got my 3-speed into a shop to have the internal hub overhauled. I also managed to have my work pay for it because of some pitch-hitting that I did over the weekend.

I won an ebay auction for a shimano rear derailleur for the mtn bike. The seller hasn't told me how much the shipping is yet.

I got an email from Saarland. I do not have the "pertinent prerequisites". Being ever tenacious I emailed them back to make sure. The coordinator told me in February that they would not make a decision about me until May.

A part of me is relieved. I don't really want to leave the comfyness of the Twin Cities.

Impatient for a bike

This might seem really lame but I have spent the last 4 months trying to rehabilitate 2 different bikes in a weird space race to see which one will be rideable first with the goal to maybe ride in the MN Ironman in the end of April.

pink 3-speed Hawthorne that I bought on a whim: Its attaction is the motorcyclesque gear shift (which, although super cool, is not that practical). Up until about 2 weeks ago, its main problem was the fact that I needed to take off the chain to replace the back inner tube. Now that I've finally got that problem fixed, thanks to a panicked call to my roommate's father, I can't seem to figure out how to hook up the internal hub gear system. To get the wheel off I simply unscrewed it. Now it refuses to screw on properly.

dark metallic blue 21-speed Bridgestone mountain bike that Dad bought for me in the early 1990's when I got sick of my Huffy "road" bike: In 2001 the back wheel was stolen. Solveig helped me purchase the new back wheel this Christmas. But I have resigned to the fact that my rear derailleur needs to be replaced. It is out of alignment and missing pieces. Plus my derailleur tubing is like paper mache

I think that what I would really want is a touring bike that is all put together now. Something that I can load up to commute or ride faster down the river roads.

Perhaps after I find out what will be happening to me in the next few years I can make these decisions.

Read to your children on the bus

I was on the bus yesterday and first of all I believe that the Transit Librarian drove me down Nicollet on the 18.

Anyway, once at 4th and Nicollet there was a family with a small boy, about the age of Josua in Life is Beautiful. The reason why I thought of the little boy from that film is because he had the same intonation and voice. They were speaking a Slavic language that I couldn't pin down exactly. Anyway, we all got on the 16 going east and the family had a huge selection of seats to choose from because it was noonish on a Saturday. They sat all together in 2 seats with the boy in between on their laps. They were sitting behind me so I sort of zoned out and watched the landscape flip past until at Cedar I realized that the couple had whipped out a book and was reading to the child. I was curious about the content and the father was reading it rather quickly. At Cedar he said, "Ama, Ama, Ama" and continued as if to say, "said the blah blah blah blah blah".

Needless to say, it was very comforting and the mother laughed everysooften as well.

When I got up I ruled out a Slavic language that uses Cyrillic because I peeked over their shoulder and saw the Roman alphabet. Polish?

Knitting Needles inventory

Knitting needles
Metric	2	2.25	2.75	3	3.25	3.5	4	4.5	5	5.5	6	6.5	7	8	9	10
US	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	10.5	10.75	11	13	15
Straight	0	0	0	0	M	x	XM	X	X	X	M	0	0	0	M	X
Double	0	0	0	0	0	0	X	X	X	0	0	0	X	0	X	0
Circular	0	X	X	X	0	0	0	0	X	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

I'm posting this so that I can keep track of the needles that I need

Key:

X=Have (wooden)

M=Have (metal)

0=Need (preferably wooden)

Spring Break in Toronto!!

Me boyfriend and I are planning a road trip to Toronto since maps.google and Mapquest routed us through Chicago AND said that it was only 14 hours. The plan is to sleep over at my friend's condo in downtown Chicago and then spend 4-5 days in Toronto and then return the following weekend. This is a wee bit last minute. We found out that our friend is redoing her kitchen and she is taking care of another huge German Shepard named Arthur. She already has a G.S. (not a Girl Scout) named Max and a cat. But she is welcoming us and I haven't seen her for a while. Maybe we can help them with something.

I have narrowed down our accommodations in Toronto to this two locales:
College Hostel: This one is a hostel near the University of Toronto.
Hostez.com | Hostel world
Pros: free garage parking, private room with 2 double beds for $60 a night, communal areas that look like friendly
Cons: on www.hostelz.com it received some poor reviews until April 2004 when it started to receive great reviews. It is possible that there double bedded room will not be available on the last night of our stay, but we might return earlier anyway.

St. Lawrence Residences and Suites: apartments for rent like my family stayed in once in Winnepeg only probably older.
Hostelz.com | Hostel world
Pros: kitchen and bathroom in unit
Cons: only 1 double bed per unit or else 2 bunk beds (you pay more for the 2 bunk beds), you have to pay for parking.

one day at a time

I was watching a few vignettes of the "One Day at a Time" reunion last night on channel 4. I was surprised to find out that the names of the daughters are the same as a friend of mine and her sister who don't have any other sisters and their parents divorced. And they were born in the late 70's and early 80's.

I found out that my high school's secretary doesn't understand what "certified" means. I asked them for a certified copy of my HS diploma for Germany and they said that they don't keep copies of diplomas and that "my dad should have my diploma". I explained that I actually had the diploma but that if I send copy it at Kinko's and send it to him, it would not be "certified". Needless to say even after she sent out my official transcript with a cover letter explaining everything, she still emailed me explaining that it should be certified because it was signed.

The only reason that I'm contacting my old high school is that German needs some kind of proof of a high school diploma and fill in the gaping hole left by not having an Abitur.

tenacious drunk?

My roommate and I were chilling in our living room last night. He, watching Star Trek intently; Me, knitting my neck gaitor with furvor because it was snowing and snowing means xc skiing.

We hear a loud crunch sound that doesn't at all resemble the crunch of icy snow. Out of our 3rd-story window we see that a little blue sporty sedan was struggling against a tree that it had just smashed against. Not only that, we followed the tire tracks back and see that it had first completely knocked down a telephone pole. While we were still at the window, the little car squirms its way back onto the street and shoots off.

Now there is a telephone pole lying across our apartment building's carriage drive. Yes, our building reminds everyone of Tara and now with the downed pole, it looks like the Union troops had their way with us. My boyfriend and I are going to put up sticks to mark the location of the pole because it is now submerged in snow.

Most puzzling dilemna all day

At Target today (make it rhyme) I was completely befuddled in the electric toothbrush isle. I have been thinking of buying a low-end Oral B toothbrush for a while now. I found the exact one that I wanted, the AdvancePower 950TX. I was pleasantly surprised that it was only $21. I was about to skip away with my purchase when something caught my eye. Right next to the classic recognizable light blue and white toothbrush of my youth that I had selected was a sparkly-glittery one that claimed to give you 3 mp3 downloads. There were actually people on the package. But they weren't brushing; they were crazy raver kids. Upon further examination I found that they were exactly the same toothbrush. They were identical twins, only one was wild and hip. Should I buy the juvenile sparkly brush that is $2 cheaper or should I get the more adult respectable brush that I could use far into old age (if these contraptions even make it that far). Who was this brush marketed too? Why didn't they try to trick the young kids with gabs of disposable income into bying the more expensive one. Were there people that would spend the extra 2 dollars to remain respectable?

Then it came to whether the sparkly brush would make me more immature. Then I realized that the most mature thing was to buy the cheap sparkly brush and be done with it. It is resting in my bathroom recharging as I type.

First entry with the correct time stamp

I just realized that my time stamp was set on the Pacific time zone. That is probably why karianna's blog claims that she posted something at 6:26 am (or maybe it was her comment that I saw somewhere, perhaps on SunPath's blog.

Strong interest inventory

I spent pretty much all day at an event for work making popcorn (I love my job). The goal was to lure wayward freshmen and sophomores into the Great Hall, and then pounce on them with interest inventories so that they can discover their place at the U. I took the short version of the inventory just to see what it was like. You mark on a list things that you enjoy doing. The things are catagorized into the 6 categories that some guy named Strong developed as attributes of employees not being in complementary distribution.
Investigative: enjoy researching on your own
Conventional: low tolerance for ambiguity
Realistic: the only one that really needs explaining. Working with your hands on something tangible
Social: helping people, etc
Artistic: like to do artsy things
Enterprising: if you said you like to sell stuff, duh.

Theoretically we were supposed to have 3 categories with the highest things marked.

For me, the first two tied and the second two tied.
First 2: Investigative and Social (I am told that this is very weird as they are on the opposite sides of the spectrum)
Second 2: Realistic (makes sense, I like working with me hands), and get this
Conventional!

I'm going to go to bed. My apartment is cold and my bed looks warm. I started running again in the evening so I hope that I have a good night's sleep.

Applied to the next 2 years of my life

I can't stop procrastinating. I have 3 reports that I have write up for my Field Methods course in Linguistics. I emailed the last bit of my graduate school application to Germany with minutes to spare (I'm still in denial about the fact that when the German website said "submit all materials by February 15, that they mean the applicant's time zone of February 15 and not the February 15 in Germany).

I better start preparing for plans B through F.

Mark Dayton... uff da

I woke up early this morning and found myself watching the rebroadcast of "Almanac" on tpt over cinnamony coffee (a concoction that my dad invented during his last visit) and peanut butter toast.
I have always liked Mark Dayton. There was just something about him that made him stand out when I watched the panel debates in 2000. I think that it was the way that he listened and tried to discuss instead of just spouting his own rhetoric in the cacophony of everyone else. Today I learned that he graduated from college and started teaching in innercity NYC. And that he overcame alcoholism (a part of me that is still pretty prejudiced against rich people makes me curious about why that wasn't brought up more in 2000). And that he was proud to be on the Nixon Enemy List. They quoted him in the seventies saying that he wanted the fact that he was on the List on his tombstone. My co-worker's knee-jerk reaction to him is that he is a wimp. She is also a great admirer of Reagan (she has a Reagan calendar up on the lee side of her cubicle to me, very smart).

Bass guitarist in Minneapolis

Open any issue of the City Pages , The Pulse, or the Rake and the classifieds are chock full of ads demanding bass guitarists. Is this a problem that starter bands have all over America? Reserved bassists personalities are not inheriantly drawn to the life of a rock star? I see this as an opportunity. My boyfriend reported last night that Aldi is selling a $60 guitar including the amp.

This is the makings of a revolution. He expressed concern that I will plan a bus trip to the new Aldi on Franklin and 13th, buy my bass guitar with my tax refund, and take my rightful place as the smoldering brunette bassist in a Sleater-Kinneyesque band.