A Thousand Times No

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens immediately after you return is another story.

A little over a year ago, I took a red-eye flight back from Sin City and, in my exhaustion, sprained my ankle the following morning while strolling along the sidewalk.  I never systematically rehabilitated the injury, and at times I can still feel its effects when I move my left foot into certain positions.

We’re poised on the edge of an ice storm tonight, and the gelid, damp weather has my ankle on the verge of spouting soliloquies:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.

It seems like the perfect product placement opportunity for Ben-Gay: Aye, there’s the rub.

It should come as no surprise that I’ve been following the Minnesota Senate race recount with great interest. What you may not know is that I myself have served as an election judge in Minnesota in the past, so the state’s entire voting process is very near and dear to my heart.

Back in 1990, it was a topsy-turvy election day in the Gopher State.  Two major statewide offices were being contested: the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat.  Both races left conventional wisdom completely by the wayside.

In the Senate race, popular two-term IR (Independent Republican) incumbent Rudy Boschwitz suddenly found the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) dark horse, a political science professor and campaign neophyte named Paul Wellstone, pulling up neck-and-neck in the polls.

The gubernatorial contest had been thrown into turmoil by allegations that the IR candidate, Jon Grunseth, had made improper overtures to underage females.  Grunseth quit the race nine days before the election — after the paper ballots for the now-familiar optical scanner sheets had already been printed.  A pro-choice Republican, Arne Carlson, became the party’s nominee, running against three-term incumbent governor Rudy Perpich.  Perpich was slipping rapidly in the polls; his pro-life stance had many liberal voters prepared to step away from voting a full DFL ticket.

I was working as a judge during the final shift of the day, and we braced ourselves for the crush of people arriving to vote after returning home from work.  And turn out in my urban neighborhood they did, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder out the door and onto the sidewalk.

This being Minnesota, it’s hardly surprising that voters were polite to one another while they waited.  But it was a lively, animated atmosphere that night in my demographically youthful neighborhood, strangers chatted and joked with one another as they slowly made their way forward in the queue.

The last-minute switch on the IR ticket in the governor’s race meant that a completely separate, supplemental paper ballot was printed for the gubernatorial contest.  Voters needed to fill both paper ballots yet avoid casting votes for governor in the wrong place or in two places.

Part of my job as an election judge that night was to explain the two-ballot system.  I stood on top of a table and in my best carnival barker voice, I went through a cheerful, systematic explanation of how to cast a valid vote.  People smiled and laughed, and by the time I had worked my way through the entire spiel, a new set of voters gathered in the room, and I started the whole routine again from the top.

This went on for hours and hours that night.  I must have repeated myself at least forty or fifty times.  (If you think I was ever in danger of losing my voice for even an instant, people who know me in real life have a barrel of smirks to sell you.)

After the final vote was cast, the work of checking the spoiled ballots began.  The Minnesota system of having representatives from both major parties working together to try to determine voter intent begins with the election judges in each precinct.  We kneeled and hunched on the floor with each other, peering at slashes and squiggles and dutifully marking up duplicate ballots.  We didn’t completely wrap up until sometime around midnight.

Split ballots were everywhere that night, with a huge swath of voters choosing pro-choice Republican Carlson for governor and ultra-liberal Democratic underdog Wellstone for the U.S. Senate.  By the end of the night, both the incumbent Democratic governor and the incumbent Republican senator had lost their offices.  The voting system had borne up under rather extraordinary circumstances.

So when I saw that the Coleman-Franken senate race this year was triggering an automatic recount, I knew just how robust and remarkably transparent the Minnesota system would prove to be.  Now, after the state canvassing board has unanimously certified the recount numbers, the rest of the world knows as well.

One of my friends pointed out that purchasing a house rapidly changes your perspective on money.  “Whatever you think of as a large financial outlay before you take out a mortgage,” he explained, “just add a zero to the end of it.  That’s what home maintenance costs are like.”

I repeated this remark tonight to another friend as he showed me around the lovely, high-ceilinged Victorian house he had been restoring for several years.  He let out a knowing, sadder-but-wiser laugh while he repeated the phrase “money pit” several times.

“Don’t get a fixer-upper,” he counseled me.  “It just never ends.”

Remind me again, who was it that said “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”?  Thoreau, or a home improvement loan officer?

I’ve been clicking away with the jumbo wooden knitting needles over the past few days, trying to knock out a new scarf for myself over the course of the long weekend.

I had mohair on the brain after being reunited with some yarn I had bought and set aside several months ago.  When I had the opportunity to pick up some additional skeins of mohair at a yarn warehouse during the holidays, I made off with even more.

Which is how I came to work on Puff, the Magic Muffler.   This project is turning out to be one gigantic, irrationally exuberant, frothy poof of a scarf, with three separate strands of mohair blends combined in every stitch.

Wearing it is going to be like wrapping a Hello Kitty petting zoo around my head. Whoo-hoo!

Yesterday I was eager to get outside and jog after spending more than a week without running any significant distances.  I didn’t expect to have too much of a problem, since people commonly taper the amount they run in the week leading up to a competitive event.

I laced up the new pair of shoes that I bought a month ago (after my stop-and-try-not-to-go 5K) and stepped out into the sub-freezing air.  Once I reached the parkway and began moving, everything was fine.  My breathing was a bit labored, courtesy of a progesterone spike in my system, but I was never actually short of breath.  Once I completed my run and returned home, I hopped into the tub for an extended warm soak.

Everything felt great.  My pace was as quick as ever.  Even the slight knee tenderness that I sometimes feel shortly after a run was absent.  The new year was off to a good start.

Which brings us to this morning.  When I got out of bed, my leg muscles were sore.  As the day wore on, they seemed to feel stiffer.  But now, in the evening, they’ve returned to feeling close-to-normal again.

What happened?  In the late afternoon I quit working on my latest scarf and left the house, walking through town to run some errands and do some window-shopping.  Once I began to actually use my legs, they came back to life.

I had never previously thought of knitted objects as tangible souvenirs, mementos of long hours spent sitting immobilized on one’s keister, but I suppose that’s what they are.

Now I know why I have no interest in knitting up any sort of throw blanket: for me, afghan = middle-aged spread.  Thanks, but no thanks.

I’ve never been big on making New Year’s resolutions, so I’ve broken few and upheld even fewer.  Across the span of my entire life, I can only recall two resolutions that I managed to successfully keep.

The first one I took up when I was twenty years old.  I was dating a vegetarian at the time, which meant that we spent a lot of time hanging around in Italian restaurants, and I grew accustomed to eating meatless meals.  I figured I would gradually turn into a vegetarian myself, so I stopped eating red meat with the new year.

I never did get around to giving up poultry or seafood, which makes my dietary habits a bit difficult for other people to follow.  When I would say, “I don’t eat red meat,” people kept asking whether I ate lamb or pork. Or chicken. Or fish.

To make matters simpler, I finally began telling everyone that I didn’t eat quadrupeds, which generally prompts one of the same three responses:

• “What about three-legged cows/pigs/sheep?”
• “Does this mean you eat humans?” [wink-wink, nudge-nudge]
• “What if a chicken/turkey/duck/fish had four legs?”

Of course, everyone thinks they’re being original (and funny!) when they say these things. Still, it remains far less tedious than becoming entangled in a debate about “the other white meat” with someone who has been brainwashed by the U.S. National Pork Board.

The second successful resolution, if you can call it that, went into effect at the beginning of 2008:  I wanted to see if I could write a blog post every single day for a year.  And now, 366 days later, here we are.

I was hoping that posting on a daily basis would make me into a faster, more consistent writer.  While I did learn to squeeze out content on a regular schedule, after a year of practice, I still string words together at an excruciatingly slow rate.

I’m not unhappy with the results, but the posts you read have consumed an enormous portion of my free time.  A single glance at the atrocious state of housekeeping in my living quarters would tell you more about the time tradeoffs I’ve made during the past twelve months than a thousand charts from Nate Silver ever could.

So somewhere down the line in the coming year, you’ll discover that I haven’t posted in a day or two.  Don’t worry, I’ll still be here, and I’ll be as given to shamelessly opining as ever.  But if it’s quiet over in this corner of the netterwebs, I may be taking out the trash, catching some much-needed extra sleep, putting in a few more miles of running or biking, or giving extra attention to all the creatures I care about in my everyday life — two-legged, four-legged, and otherwise.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more tasty morsels, © MMIX.

Fresh off the plane and right under the wire for 2008, I’ve just wrapped up my last good deed of the year: showing some love for the Wikimedia Foundation!

In another world, or perhaps another life, I would have something meaningful to say about the conclusion of a very eventful year.

However, in this life, I have just sputtered away the morning trying to get my parents’ new cell phone to come to life, and performing minor topological miracles so that I may fly today with only carry-on luggage.

In that spirit, I hope all of you have a year full of greatness and wonder ahead.  See you on the other side!

I’ve long been puzzled by why Ikea waited for well over a decade after arriving in America to finally open a branch in the Twin Cities — home to more Svenskarnas Dag-loving Swedes than you can shake a Santa Lucia wreath at.  (A conspiracy by the Sons of Norway, perhaps?)

But now that the people of Ingvar Kamprad have finally arrived in the Scandihoovian capital of the United States, it was the most logical place to take my father when we went shopping for over a dozen compact fluorescent bulbs.

I drove through the middle of a steadily falling snow, across unplowed streets.  Traffic was slow, orderly, and almost Zen.

To my surprise, my father said he had never been to Ikea, which turned today’s trip into a sort of home furnishing safari.  “To your right, you can see the free-ranging Pöang, sharing a watering hole with the crafty Ingo, which just may eat your baby.”

To expedite our trip, I confined our journey to the lower level of the store, avoiding the long and winding walk through the showcase rooms.  My father was fascinated with the entire flat-packing concept, and startled by some of the bargain prices.  On the way out, he turned his head, and said, “I think I smell pizza!”  When I told him that you could actually sit down and eat inside Ikea, his eyes lit up.

And thus the great global hegemony continues to unfold, one meatball at a time.

If the way to find good food on the road is to stop where all the trucks are parked, the way to find a good Chinese restaurant is to turn up where the Chinese people outnumber everyone else, even on a weeknight.  This was the case when my parents and I went to Grand Shanghai, the no-frills eatery on Grand Avenue in St. Paul that is notable for its selection of Peking duck dishes.

If you serve up well-loved Chinese food items that Chinese people themselves don’t ever cook at home, you’ve just written your ticket to success.  If you give diners the option to go all-out and consume one duck in three ways (in pancakes with scallions, in stir-fry with broccoli rabe, and in soup with leafy greens), you have just carved out a small slice of food heaven.  Nom nom nom.