Archive for July 2011
Shocking News
I am seriously struggling to figure out the best way to explain this. It seems significant to me that it all started after too long a day at work. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the situation that followed, as I walked in the door at home to find a note that read, “Shocking news.”
It didn’t take long for my mind to stumble over a wide variety of reasons for such a note, but since Cyndie was sitting right there at the counter when I walked in, I cut straight to the point and asked. I certainly didn’t expect that it wasn’t the news that was shocking. It was news of a shocking!
It’s not every day you hear of a garden giving someone a shock. As a matter of fact, I have never heard of such a thing in my life, …until now. Cyndie explained that she was trying to lift a cucumber vine back up on its support frame. When she planted her other hand in the dirt for support, she received an intense electrical shock that caused an involuntary scream. Her heart raced and she thought she was being electrocuted. There would be no more gardening for her on this day. She went back indoors and scrolled the note for me to find.
Our garden is on the side of our house where the newly installed air conditioner fan unit is located. There is nothing else electrical in the area. It didn’t make any sense to me. I told her she should have called the power company immediately. Better late, than never. She made the call and we had a service technician at our door in about an hour.
The expression on his face, as he tried to discretely mask his smirking disbelief over our description of her experience, was priceless. He explained that there are no power lines in the area. He actually was very understanding, and he agreed to go to his truck and bring back a device that can detect live voltage. I got the impression he was just patronizing us, with no expectation of verifying her story. That made it all the more dramatic when, to his obvious surprise, he discovered hot electricity in the dirt.
A little additional probing revealed it wasn’t the dirt, after all. It was the downspout of the gutter. No less intriguing. The entire gutter and downspout on the back side of our house is energized with 120 Volts of electricity! Maybe that is why there haven’t been as many chipmunks trying to set up residence in the bottom section of the drain spout this summer.
Phase II of this adventure will involve trying to figure out how in the heck this happened. Best guess is the recent gutter repairs and the probability that they ran a screw through the siding and struck some house wiring. The technician was kind enough to assist me in finding which circuit breaker would cut the power to the gutter.
Tonight, I actually have a valid excuse for walking through the darkened hallway to the bedroom. Tomorrow, we contact an electrician.
Melodramatic Melon
Raving about fruit is not something you will normally find me doing. I would not be surprised to learn that I have an allergy to one or more foods from the fruit category. Maybe I’m just a bit hyper-sensitive. I get a tingling in the corners of my jaw that most people might associate with too big a bite from a sour lime, but I get it with almost every fruit I eat. I am also incredibly picky about texture. The prime palatable ripeness for me is about a 10-minute window between “not ripe enough yet” and “yuck, too ripe.”
All that being said, I know fruit is healthy for me, and I continue to consciously select it, even if I don’t usually love it. But there are exceptions. Take watermelon. That is one fruit that continually surprises me for the number of people who gush over how spectacular it is. For me, it usually shows up as filler in a serving of varieties of cut fruit –the item with no taste. I usually find watermelon to be the most underwhelming fruit I encounter. Last night, I had an insight about what it takes for watermelon to earn my praise.
First of all, the sweetness and full-flavor should be a given. Even avowed watermelon lovers should grant me that. But just sweet and flavorful is not enough to win me over. My body needs to be uncomfortably hot, and the watermelon needs to be really, really cold; as cold as possible without being frozen. Anything short of that is just more of the same-old, boring melon. Incredibly cold, sweet, juicy, flavorful watermelon, when I am too hot, is indubitably the best possible fruit experience in the universe.
It was last night, anyway.
Where’s Cyndie?
Timing is everything. …Image captured from the U2 website fancam. It’s a gas! Check it out.
Cyndie is there. Really! You can see that I am talking to her. It almost looks like some sort of domestic incident happening in front of us. The guy couldn’t have covered her any more completely if he tried.
Real Event
Just a (not really) typical night down at the U…
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Did I mention that it rained? Rained and rained? It did. That was the wettest I have been from rain that I can recall. My fingers became pruned. I am only a casual fan of U2, but I have the utmost respect for them. Being there was definitely special. It was a really remarkable event Saturday night. In addition to the natural excitement of such a large gathering of fans, and the world-class production of the show, we were able to view the fireworks of the Minneapolis Aquatennial Festival during the concert. And it all coincided with a pretty dramatic lightning display traveling across the sky. It was not very clear which of the flashes and booms were coming from which source.
With the weather having been so incredibly hot and humid lately, the fact that the evening started out pleasantly comfortable may have caused me to drop my guard. I did not fully prepare for the obvious outcome that played out. Not only did I get really wet, so did everything in my pockets. Luckily, both phone and camera survived. My wallet looks a bit worse for the wear.
Actually, the soaking was not the worst part. Waiting can be a real drain, but waiting in the middle of the night when you are soaking wet was a real buzz-kill. There was gridlock in the vicinity of the stadium for a long time. We were prisoners in the parking ramp for 1 hour, 45-minutes. The eventual exit involved turning around and driving the wrong way down, since everybody else was doing it.
Eventual bedtime… after 2 a.m. Fitting, I’d say, for such a significant event.
Tour Excitement
Hooooeeee! What a day it was yesterday in the Tour de France. Thrilling! Audacious! Climbing in the Alps. A big challenge by Andy. Alberto struggling. Thomas clinging to the Yellow Jersey. Fifteen seconds! Cadel doing so much work on his own.
Today they climb again. I have no idea what to expect. Col du Galibier and Alpe d’Huez. Who will attack? Who will counter? Who will have any legs after yesterday?
In honor of all that pedaling, I present petals…
Scrabulized Spelling
If you have been reading here regularly, you may have picked up that one of the ways Cyndie has passed time while convalescing her broken knee is by playing Scrabble on her iPad. As a result of my frequent close proximity to her, I have been playing more Scrabble in the last two months than I probably have for my entire life. I’m enjoying it a lot. It is a bit addicting. But I’m discovering that it is doing a number on my spelling. It has ‘destroid’ my ability to spell.
After innumerable rounds of struggling to construct some kind of word out of the 7 tiles in my possession, and also getting it to somehow attach to letters in play on the board, I’m finding myself at a loss, lately, when it comes time to spell words while writing. I recently typed out, “anxst” and then recognized it was wrong, but couldn’t for the life of me come up with “angst” without asking for help.
I have spent so much time arranging every possible combination of letters to come up with a word, that now I’ve scrambled my mental database of actual words. It’s franticking. Ooh! I used all my letters to extend the word ‘king’!!
Relative Something 