I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Maybe it is because in the Madden football videogame I chose the Houston Texans as my franchise and built them up into a two-time Super Bowl champion team. Or maybe it is because I feel really bad for their quarterback, David Carr, whom I've always had an affinity for because he went to an obscure school kind of like UMD -- i.e., Fresno State. Or perhaps it is because interesting sports coverage during the spring is so sparse that I've actually started reading NFL mock drafts posted on MySpace. Whatever the reason, regardless, for some reason I am extremely distressed by the Houston Texans' first pick of the draft. They need an offensive line or a runner to help David Carr, and instead they chose some big defensive tackle because he was cheaper than anyone else. The Twins made this mistake by drafting a catcher, Joe Mauer, with the first overall pick, instead of a star pitcher, Mark Prior, because they didn't want to pay too much. And now they are not-too-arguably the worst team in baseball. Shit, Houston. I don't even like Texas, but I felt an affinity for your team. And you blew it. You blew it!

And so it comes out. Yes, I'm a closet sports fan. I've loved sports since I was about three years old. I just have to hide this fact from everyone but my wife, because academics aren't supposed to join the masses in such a sociological behavior as to cheer for identity-based teams, and because bohemians are supposed to scorn sports as an anti-cultural trait. Well, bullshit. Sports rule. And after seeing that a pyramid and massive basketball court are the only two buildings left standing in Chichenitza, I would argue that sports are far more cultural than spray painting buildings, because the spray paints disappears due to elemental decline within 50 years or so. So there.

I'm exhausted. I doubt this entry even makes sense. Oh well... sometimes those are fun to go back and read. Sometimes... g'night.

I've been slack at writing recently. Partially because Mette has been a lot of work. But just as influentially, it is the end of the semester, I am leaving for Brazil in a week, and I'm trying to tie up some loose ends before the semester comes to an end.

Who is Mette? Mette is the name of Loki. We changed it about a week ago. We decided naming a female dog after the male Norse God of Mischief was not a good idea. Mette, which is short for Margaret in North German, works better, we reckon. Besides, now we can make endless bad jokes about meta-analysis, metadata, etc. She seems to have taken to it pretty well... partially because she thinks her name is "Good Dog."

Mette is growing damn fast. She has probably doubled in size. She is getting a little too smart and adventurous too. She has a tunnel dug halfway to the neighbor’s yard. The Beagles over there are completing their half, and pretty soon our fence will be as pockmarked with tunnels as the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Her terrier side is starting to show through. She is still a snuggler, people pleaser, but when she gets ornery… holy mother of whomever, watch out! She starts kicking, grunting, whining, biting, flailing, and fighting more cheaply than Mike Tyson versus Tanya Harding in a Celebrity Boxing Match. Normally, though, all one has to do is give her some rawhide or a stuffed pig and run like hell for cover behind the makeshift barricade between the kitchen and living room. After several minutes her blood pressure comes down, she grunts a couple of times, takes a few sips of water, and flops down into a heap of fur on the ground. Once she passes out, I creep back into the kitchen, tap in her kennel gently and announce “It’s kennel time,” which for some odd reason freaks me out. It just sounds weird, because I say it all cheerily, and it is disturbing that I can use behavior modification on a mammal to make it like prison. She normally plods along half-asleep, crawls into her cavern and passes out, at which point I run upstairs and hope to get some work done. (Or write this blog entry.)

***

Enough about dogs, though. A lot of other stuff has been going on too. I was invited to guest lecture on “mapmaking” in different contexts at the Minnesota College of Art and Design (MCAD) this past week. My former colleague from the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel, Kate Bukoski, recommended me to her friend who is teaching there. It was a blast! Essentially, I think it is any cartographer’s dream to be able to speak with designers about how map design relates to, and more importantly how it differs from, graphic design broadly. I came in with way too many PowerPoint slides and map examples. I was so pumped about this opportunity, that before I had to go, I was hopping around the house, breakdancing on the wood floors, and driving Birgit bonkers. By the time I got there I had mellowed out a bit from the horror of rush hour traffic near uptown. But then when I met Nicole, the lecturer who had invited me, and the six design students, who were intelligent and interested, I got hyper again. I started hopping on furniture to draw charts. I explained DiBiase’s theory on maps for exploration versus maps for understanding. I went into projections, scale, cartographic generalization, use of color, propaganda maps, and ethics. I was all over the map, and in the end, it was the most fun I’ve ever had lecturing, quite simply because it was a “one off” and essentially a “one act.” I had one hour to get the students interested, engaged, and to teach them a ton of stuff. I think I was pretty successful, even if they had writer’s cramp afterward.

MCAD is a nice facility! Holy cow! I wish I would have gone to art school. But I’ll make do… I’m a little too mathematical and into security to be totally swayed by the career path of being a penniless artist. But hell… if you can’t be them, join them. I really dig hanging out with designers, and it was just nice getting to know some here in the cities. I hope to get another opportunity to spread cartographic knowledge to those students again, as designers arguably make far more maps than cartographers do these days.

***

Last weekend was a blast – so much so that I’ve been recuperating all week. Friday was the department’s Brown Day celebration. I spent the day at the doctor getting chest X-Rays, which would generally be considered a shitty way to start a weekend, I suppose, but in this case it turned out okay. I don’t have lung cancer or anything too terrible. My lungs are fine. Quite matter-of-factly, I just feel as though I am dying because part of my body is rebelling against harmless fornication residue from plants. I thought about doing what the King of Nepal did – offering these rebellious cells an opportunity to select a leader for a faux parliament, but my advisors notified me that the rebels would refuse to accept any such offer. So I did the next best thing – i.e., outside of aligning oneself with the US and acquiring nuclear technology, as India has done – and went to see my doctor again. She seemed irked that my cough hadn’t gone away, or was it because I came in on a Friday afternoon? Either way, she sent me for X-Rays, where some creepy guy kept touching me and mentioning that he had curly hair too and that we should meet up sometime to “discuss curly hair,” and then upon determining that I am not dying of anything by holding my X-Ray up to a window for several seconds, the doctor prescribed me a lung enhancing steroid. (There goes any baseball career.) I inhale some powder from a spinning disc thing twice a day now, and holy cow, my chronic cough has disappeared. What a relief.

Back to the weekend. Brown Day was a good time. Birgit and I got to mingle with people we liked primarily and exchange faces about people we didn’t like. Attendance was a little down this year, primarily because half of the human geographers seem to be on sabbatical, and I think many of their students decided not to show, which at $18 a plate, makes sense to me. We came home and passed out.

The next morning I met up with my longtime friend, Darren, at a breakfast joint called “The Louisiana” or something. It’s on Selby. Good time. Good food. Keely was there, and that was nice, as I don’t often see Darren’s wife. Birgit met up with one of her friends that morning, so she couldn’t make it.

My neighbor Nathan is really becoming a good friend. We now have the garage set up for wargaming. We set up Axis & Allies Europe last week and started playing one weeknight. On Saturday we continued, and I am proud to say that I creamed him. I sent three Russian troops through Romania, and in the end, it was those three troops that took Berlin. It was a frenetically paced game, and surprisingly ended faster than most of ours. (That’s not a bad thing!) He’s really gone over the top recently, and is so pumped about playing war games all summer that he keeps stopping at the huge game shop near our house, The Source, on the way home from work, and buying Star Wars miniatures, Axis & Allies miniatures, and WWII tank games. I’m not so into this stuff, but it is really cool to have a neighbor that is up for rolling dice over the fate of the world in his garage at any time. And now that we both have dogs, we’re bumping into one another a lot more. Yesterday we played Frisbee and catch over the fence for about an hour while our dogs ran around and played. Very cool!

On Sunday… Sunday I had my sister down from Duluth. She brought her little rat-looking dog, Chase. He is the one that fetches. He is homely, but his character is pretty excellent. He is definitely an alpha-male though, so he ignored Mette for the most part. She didn’t like that, being a terrier, and kept charging him from behind. Eventually he got irked, tossed her over and took a nip at her tummy. After that, she was cool with being ignored.

It was great seeing my sister. We walked around the lake and just chatted the entire evening. She had to leave early in the morning for Duluth – work and then a job interview – but it was fun.

***

And now I’m getting ready for Brazil. This week I basically graded, helped students in lab, read some cart books, and started to get pumped about my trip. My brother has a condo in Coba Covanna (or Copa Cabanna or whatever) in Rio. He is going to be staying somewhere else the first few nights, so I’ll have the place to myself. Then we’re heading up the coast to his house. This should be so cool! I’m trying to load up on good fiction reading material. Last night I went to Half Price Books and bought “Shogun,” one of my favorite novels ever. I am going to reread that. I also found a Monmonier cartography book, but I’ll probably leave that here, as I am assuming the odds are slim I’ll feel like reading about Rhumb lines on the beach, unless we’re talking about lines of rum shots.

***

Very cool happening just yesterday… Colin, my former advisor at Penn State, now at Illinois, emailed me and noted that Radiohead are playing shows in Chicago on June 19 & 20. He asked if I want to go… so if he can secure tickets, we’re going to go rock out to Radiohead with his son Doug! I’ve always wanted to see them in concert, and I figure my time is running out, as their last album seemed somewhat apocalyptic from a band standpoint. I think their years are numbered. (Watch, I’ll be eating these words when they are still together in 25 years.) At any rate, it will be great to just meet up with Colin and Doug and rock out like we used to in State College. I hope it happens.

Alright… alright… time to go check on the dog. Life is good. Brazilwill be a trip. The cartography topic switch is the best move I ever made. I am happier than I've been in years. I'm starting to creep myself out, because I sound like one of those crazy new age people that is always optimistic. I'm not like that, though. Just to prove it -- I still think the US government is shit right now. US hegemony is fleeting -- and along with it, so are my mutual fund values. So take that and party, Robbie Williams! Ha!

Okay, so I am the first to admit that the last several entries are disturbing. This blog has taken a turn for the grotesque. It's becoming a suburban schmooze fest -- dog pictures, talk about a new family member, blah, blah, blah. Disgusting. I'll try to hold on to my bohemian side as long as I can, but let's face it, I'm getting drawn to the simple things in life -- marriage, house, and dog. Kids are still a long way off, but only because I'm pretty sure I still need to go through a 30-year old crisis and start an electronica-punk band before I am ready to really settle down.

But I digress... listening to "The Bad Plus" right now. Best jazz band ever, possibly. Of course, I've only really ever listened to about five, so I'm probably way off the mark. Let's just say the best jazz band that I have ever heard. Their cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit,""Chariots of Fire," and the way they play the "Empire Strikes Back" were enough to entice me. But their "1972 Bronze Medalist" and "Keep the Bugs off Your Glass, and the Bears off Your Ass" were the ones that made me realize their true brilliance! When I hear the former, I can actually see this Italian dude walking down to the beach from his summer villa on the Riveria with his towel draped over his shoulder, a wife beater on, and his bronze medal dangling around his neck. He swaggers and walks slowly, as people peek out from behind windows and doors to stare in admiration. Or is it pity? Is there a difference? When you look at a People magazine in the checkout line at Rainbow Foods, do you look at the people on the cover with admiration or pity -- to be so rich and clueless. I'm still not sure which it is. But maybe I'm just weird.

I have a break from dog sitting. Loki has an infection. (Probably from my bringing her over to the neighbor Beagles and letting her wrestle with them. I read yesterday that you are supposed to keep your puppy away from other dogs or it will certainly get very ill. No immunity or something. Whoops!) The people we bought Loki from run a petting farm -- which I don't have time to deconstruct, but isn't that kind of weird? -- and they have all of the vet stuff there. So they said just to call them if Loki were to get sick and they would take care of it. No vet fees or anything, which is nice, because I'm not looking forward to spending $500 on blood tests to hear my dog has a cold. But they live in the city of Ramsey, which is a haul. So we left her there through Saturday or Sunday. They're going to give her antibiotics and a "nebulizer," which still sounds inherently frightening to me, but perhaps I've watched too much Star Trek for my own good. I have to admit, it is nice having a little break. Watching a puppy to make sure it doesn't pee, etc., can be very draining indeed.

Example. The phone rings on Monday. It is Normandale Community College calling for a job interview. I've prepared. I've brought Loki out for the 15 minutes before the 9 a.m. phone call. I've brought up my coffee and placed it on my desk next to my computer so that I can readily access the course outlines I've created, etc., during the interview. I bring Loki up under my arm. Answer my phone. Set her down. Turn to my computer. Knock over my full glass of coffee. It starts flooding toward my new monitor, soaks my keyboard, and totally saturates all of these important papers on my desk. "Yes, yes, I'm ready for the interview," I say, while busily soaking up the half-pint of boiling hot coffee with isoline maps of Europe as it gushes toward my new monitor.

"Okay, I'm going to put you on speaker phone now. We have a room full of people," the lady mentions.

"All right, I'm ready," I repeat... perhaps giving away that I was lying. Having stopped the flooding, I turn around to see what Loki is up to. Oh shit, she is sniffing... And then there it happens. She crouches and pees on the carpet in front of my bookshelves. "Nnnno--" I start shouting, but then I realize I am on speaker phone. My hands are covered in coffee; my keyboard is a sticky mess; the carpet under my feet is soaked in a warm brown liquid; I'm on the speaker phone for a job interview I really want to ace; the dog is peeing in the corner; I am not supposed to discipline the dog after the fact, so it is now or never, but I can't very well shout "No" on the phone right now, or I will blow the interview before it even begins... I let her finish her duty, I keep an eye on the dog across the room while the people across the Cities at Normandale introduce themselves. I am frantically trying to write down their names and job specialties, but the pen I've grabbed is dry and the paper I am writing on is now a soggy mess.

Bloody hell. Bloody, bloody hell. I'm still trying to find the pee spot to this day. It doesn't stink too much, as at this age it is a mere trickle and my sinuses are so bad I still couldn't smell a thing anyway. Anyway, it is nice to be able to sit here right now and not have to run downstairs to take Loki out. But at the same time, I miss her. I can't wait to hang out with her again. Get on the floor and growl at her as I flail a stuffed pig around the room. After all, it isn't everyday that I have a phone interview. And she won't be so much work forever... I hope.

Okay, that's it. I'm outta here. I've got to do about four hours of grading today. Then I would like to read. I'm going back to the doctor to see them about this nasty month-long cough that won't go away. The nurse told me she thought it was the beginning of asthma, perhaps. But I don't want to believe that. No way... smoking two packs a day for five or six years could never result in such a thing, could it? They said emphysema on the side of the packs; they didn't say shit about asthma! Those bastards! Had I only khown, I'm sure I would have surrendered my addiction realizing that the 30-year old Ian would suffer the repurcussions of the 17-year old Ian. Yeah, surely. I wasn't self-centered or anything at 17. No, Ian v.17 would have understood and put the cigarettes down, taken up softball, and Tai Chi or something. Definitely. Definitely. It's weird, but sometimes I think that we don't only change as people over time, but we become totally different people. I am pretty sure I would slap the teenage Ian silly if I bumped into him today. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure Ian v.17 would kick my ass. So we'll call it a draw. An uneasy truce, and I'll just hope that rat bastard Ian v.17 didn't screw over Ian v.29's bronchial tubes.

Oh yeah, one other thing before I forget. I had a nightmare that I couldn't get out of Hungary last night. I couldn't catch the 3A to Ferihegy Airport to leave. Everyone was evacuating the country. (The 3A is the bus I take to school here, so that is kind of odd in hindsight.) While attempting to get out, with Birgit and my advisor Bob, etc., I ended up meeting up with Bjork, and she showed me this kick ass instrument she made from some delicate wood. It had the coolest bass sound -- made by two little wooden boots hitting one another -- and it also had really cool strings. She played "Big Time Sensuality" for me and one other person. At any rate, I fell for her big time, but I didn't make a move, realizing she was out of my league, etc. She said goodbye, and I knew I would never see her again. And then when I tried leaving I was on a modern version of the Titanic. I was trapped below a trap door made out of particle board. I smashed it open and freed a bunch of the people behind me. At any rate, I think I'm feeling trapped. Eventually I made it to Ferihegy Airport with Birgit. We were the last two people in Hungary. We bribed our way on the plane and left. Bizarre shit. I woke up at one point flailing my arms in the air. I forget why (i.e., what I was doing in my dream), but I remember waking up, falling back to sleep, and picking up the dream where it left off.

Pointless ramble... I've got to go see the doc!

I have an announcement. On Easter Sunday Birgit and I lost our minds. We had her parents over for breakfast. They brough Kimba over too. We had a great time. That's not when or where we lost our minds. We lost our minds about three hours later. After vacuuming up Kimba's dog hair and settling down to do "some work," we ended up surfing dog sites on the web. We found the "perfect" dog breed for us -- a non-shedding, typically non-barking, intelligent, loyal, medium-sized dog (i.e., a Wheaten Terrier). We then found several people with eight week old pups for sale. We called several places in the greater metro area to see about visiting the pups. No one was home. I left a message with one. (Neither of us had ever heard of a Wheaten Terrier before Sunday.)

We went for a walk. We got home. The phone rang. It was a friendly sounding chap. He said we could come out that night and look at them. He lived past Anoka. We hopped in the car at 7:30 p.m. We arrived at 8:30. There she was. Loki, as she has come to be named, was sitting in a cage with her brother. A Schnauzer was circling the cage barking at them both. I picked Loki up. She immediately snuggled up into my sweatshirt. There was no going back.

We wrote out a check and took off like bats out of hell. The sun was down and we had a long way to go -- to Plymouth. Birgit's parents gave us a kennel to borrow. It was made for a lab, which we found out was a bad idea later that night when Loki shat everywhere in her kennel, freaked out and flung it around for hours. The entire inside of the kennel is covered in dog tirds. The dog was covered in dog dung. It was disgusting. At two in the morning we got her out. We gave her a quasi-bath -- because we didn't have any dog shampoo -- and picked the dried poop out of her long, curly hair. Disgusting.

But since that night... everything has been perfect! She is such a cutie. She is quiet, kind, and is even becoming quite potty trained already -- she's only had two accidents. I've been bringiner her over to the neighbors' to play with the two Beagles over there. Those Beagles are the dumbest dogs I've ever heard -- they bark incessantly. I hope she doesn't pick up their bad habbits. But I don't think she will. She already holds her own against them and has one scared of her, even though she is only a quarter of his size. I'll post pictures when I get home. Or sometime soon. I've realized that watching a puppy is a lot of work. I haven't gotten anything done otherwise. But life is definitely more amusing with Loki in it. I'm glad we went crazy last Sunday.

I'm on a non-wheat diet, which must mean I have gotten old. But it's really weird. Wheat has been doing strange things to my stomach. For years I've sworn off cutting wheat out of my diet, because it is my diet (at least 67.8% I would say). But after cutting wheat out worked for several people I know, I figured I had nothing to lose. Plus, my doctor recommended I cut the wheat out after I tested negative for picking up Third World stomach infections from Birgit.

Stomach dicomfort is probably the worst thing outside of a sore throat, in my book. I was becoming really irritable all the time. So to hell with it... one morning last week I woke up and stopped eating wheat.

And low and behold, it worked! I haven't felt like shit for two weeks now. It's all corn cereal, rice meals (lots of sushi rolls), fruit, vegatables, tortilla chips, and candy... oh yeah, I'm still a real sucker for pure sugar. I haven't felt this good in years! Incredible. Maybe my doc was finally onto something.

Getting old sucks. If in the future I happen to become allergic to coffee, I'm a dead man. But I'll take that hurdle if and when it comes.

Exhausted. I've been up all night projecting and tweaking shapefiles for a Duluth-Superior street map I am going to make just for the hell of it. I'm kind of pumped to make a map of my home town. It will take months, no doubt, but it is a fun project. I hope to use it in my Auto-Cartographica project. Put it right next to the map of my feet.

Birgit and I went to Duluth yesterday. Good time. We got our hair cut by my Mum, and then we met up with Chris, my sister, Clair, Macy, and Chase. The last two are dogs. Chase is a little Smooth Haired Terrier thing my sister bought recently. He is a dear! I loved that dog. Birgit thinks it looks too much like a rat for her to own one, but this thing was so nice, so sweet, didn't bark, and just fetched like no dog I've ever seen! Seriously, we sat in Leif Erikson Park next to Lake Superior -- a beautiful, sunny 70-degree day, which is surely a sign of the end times when something this extraordinary occurs in Duluth before Easter -- and I kept throwing a tennis ball as far as I could, over-and-over, and that little devil kept chasing it at full throttle, picking it up and returning it. He'd drop it at my feet and just pant, and look up at me, waiting for me to throw it again. It was unbelievable. The thing is only about a foot-and-a-half long, and even shorter than that, but it ran about four miles full-sprint. And it never barked once, even except for when it thought another dog was going to make a move for its ball. Unbelievably nice dog. Damn... my sister got lucky.

It was great to see the family again too, but truly... Chase ruled! Animals win over humans again.

Got my passport with its new visa in the mail from the Brazilian Consulate. That was a relief. I'm definitely going now. Don't know if I'm thrilled or terrified. Never truly sure if there is a difference.

My friend Nin called me today. I met him in China when I was 14. He's Japanese. His dad was working for Toyota. Now Nin works for them. He was relocated to LA this past December, and he works in their North American Sales and Marketing department. I guess he got married to a British woman in Hong Kong a couple of months before Birgit and I were married. He says he loves LA and isn't in a hurry to move back to Japan. He's here for three-to-five years. I hope to visit him sometime! It was truly great to hear from that guy!

This is really lame. I'm writing a lot again, but every time I write about my mundane, aging life, I feel a tinge of remorse -- how can I subject anyone to this. But I don't make people read it. It is their own voyueristic curiosity that is is going to kill them in the end. Right? Right? Please feel free to comment. Yeah, sure... 'night.

Well, the last posting was a little premature. "Up and running..." is a great idiom for a website, but does not accurately describe our situation here. Birgit and I went to a Fellowship dinner on Tuesday night at the McNamara Center. I was kind of forced to go, because I won the Zoltai Fellowship last year and the university emailed me (a half dozen times), called me, and called me again, insisting that I really should go and mingle with the bigwigs that give money for fellowships. I figured, why not, it is a free dinner and piano concert, and I really did like Mrs. Zoltai the one time I met her last year after hearing I was receiving the award. (She invited Birgit and I over at 9 o'clock at night, this 80-some year-old lady, and kept pouring us shots of Baileys and talking about Hungary. It was surreal. Very cool.)

So we went to this big hullabaloo, and of course, Mrs. Zoltai wasn't there -- I can't say I blame her, as she's probably been to a million of these, and the main purpose the university has this event is to get more money from the donors. So Birgit and I nervously stood around eating appetizers, etc. At some point a dear old woman named Charlotte came up and stood next to us. She was going blind, but had more wit about her than the rest of the room full of pompous donors and graduate students combined. Her husband had been a Forestry professor -- recently passed away. She was now the representative of the Trust he had founded. We sat and chatted about everything for a long time. I kept helping her down wine -- she couldn't really see where her glass was, and Birgit helped her find her seat when it was time to eat. At one point she said: "Ah, you don't have to stand here entertaining me just because I'm here. You can go mingle with more interesting people you know." And was forced to turn to her and honestly state, "Charlotte, you're the only friend we've got here. You can't get rid of us!" After that, the three of us bonded and huddled around this little drink table until it was time to eat. She doesn't live far away from here and invited us to swing by any time -- particularly because I sometimes play basketball on the courts near her house. Who knows if we ever will, but it was really great meeting such a down to earth lady at a place as full of itself as that.

We then sat at Table #53, in the back room of McNamara Center, and watched the University President and Provost and some other really important people, including several Regents, espouse how great the university is and how the room was "loaded." (I thought the latter statement was a little risque, but I suppose the university knows how to work over millionaires.) We were seated at a table with a bunch of other fellowship winners who were coerced into coming -- none of our benefactors had shown up. I met a cool Korean pharmacist Ph.D. She was really nice. The others were so far across the round table that we couldn't hear them or communicate. The table was over half empty. Luckily -- or un-luckily, as you will hear later -- we were sitting next to the kitchen, though, so we were served our food first. We were then served both fillet mignon and Red Snapper, and a bunch of expensive deserts. The whole time waitstaff kept coming around filling our glasses with wine like it was going out of style.

We came home. I worked on cartography stuff until about midnight. Birgit finished a novel. We turned the lights out. I woke up at 2 a.m. to the sound of someone vomiting in the bathroom. Birgit was on the toilet the entire evening and morning. She went to the doctor -- the university gave her e. coli! So we were forced to go to a dinner we weren't that excited about attending. We were stood up by my donor. And on top of it, Birgit got a nasty food poisoning, while still recovering from shigella and still fighting off C-deph, which is deadly. She was supposed to go meet with some specialists at the state institute for gastro-diseases on Wednesday, but actually couldn't because the university poisoned her the night before. So now she has to wait another month before she can be checked up on for the deadly disease. She's irked. I'm pissed!!! I'm actually wondering if anyone else, including the 90 year-olds who may not be able to survive e. coli got sick that night. This is ridiculous!

And so... Birgit was on an IV drip yesterday. I taught lab with about two hours of sleep. But today she is feeling better -- on yet another anti-biotic. She's taking a nap right now. I'm tired and about to take one as well. We've decided to continue with our plan of going up to Duluth for haircuts tomorrow and then wandering off to work on the portfolio part of our website, boycotting Easter. But we aren't rolling... more like sliding along slowly.

One fun thing of note: I guest lectured for Bob today, as he is out of town at a cartography conference. It was a lot of fun. I forgot how much I enjoy lecturing. I can't wait to teach Europe again this summer. I love that course. And oddly enough, I'll be doing even more lecturing as it turns out. There is an outreach workshop being put on by the Institute of Global Studies for K-12 Educators. It deals with immigration and nationalism in Europe. I was invited to lecture for three half-day sessions. I'll get paid some money, and since I am teaching Europe this summer, the topic will be fresh on my mind. I'm looking forward to it!

Now... I have to finish two short articles for an academic encyclopedia that I foolishly signed up to write by May 1. May seemed so far away in October! Then, I need to prepare for my phone interview on Monday morning with the community college. And finally, I want to finish a great book by Mark Monmonier from 1985 -- Technology and Cartography. It is kind of funny reading such an old book and realizing that half of what he predicts comes true and half of it is utter nonesense. It is rare that you read a book these days that defines and then explains what a CRT monitor is. "In the future, most maps may be read on CRTs." Wrong! LCDs! ;>) Ha!

So much going on this week. It is kind of making me dizzy with excitement. Plus, the weather is so bloody nice, it's hard not to have a grin from ear-to-ear!

First, the Muehlenhaus Studios website is finally and truly up and running! Birgit spent many hours over the last week creating a very cool, professional looking template for our static pages beyond the intro page, and man... did it pay off! I'm pumped! I drank about four pots of coffee and wrote the content about a month ago -- much of it over the top and laden with verbose pomposity -- but the layout, etc., was so ugly it disturbed us. Birgit figured out how to do a bunch of the programming in Dreamweaver to make it look snazzy. Yippeeee... I retouched up the homepage last night, and we are rolling. This weekend we are skipping Easter to create our digital portfolio. Should be fun!

On top of all this... I'm guest lecturing for Bob McMaster on Thursday. I'm going to speak to the class about critiquing maps. (One of my favorite topics.) I met with Bob yesterday and I really enjoy having him as my advisor. I feel a certain affinity for him that I haven't felt at Minnesota before. I'm pretty grateful I switched -- dissertation topic and everything else.

I am also going to be guest lecturing at the Minnesota College of Art and Design on April 26th. I am going to give the design students a little breeze over on cartographic principles and the art of cartography. Also, I am going to discuss the importance of thinking of your audience when designing maps and how to persuade with them. I'm really pumped about this opportunity, as I dig graphic design and hanging out with bohemians in general. I never thought I would be lucky enough to be able to teach them.

And then the coolest news since I heard that they were coming out with Oreo breakfast cereal... I am interviewing for a one-year, full-time instructorship position at a local community college here. The interview is on Monday. Not to sound repetitive, but I AM SHAKING WITH EXCITEMENT about this potential opportunity. I would have to teach a heavy load, but teaching is what I love. And I am excited to teach a broad range of geographic topics -- urban, physical Minnesota, US & Canada, world regional, human, economic, and a little geology, perhaps. Plus, I would finally be able to help Birgit pay our living expenses! ;)

So that's all the news that is fit to print. I'm busy as heck this week, but things are rolling. Gotta go catch the bus now...

At 10:30 Wednesday night, I made the fateful decision. It was time to completely rearrange our upstairs office. This was no small endeavor, particularly considering that I have four large bookcases brimming with books -- all of which would have to be relocated. One is about five feet-by-five feet and double-sided.

Once I started, though, rearranging the furniture became a compulsion. Birgit joined in, and by 1:30 or 2:00 we largely had our computers and bookshelves and lounge chair and books and pens and paper and closet shelving and boardgames and CDs where we wanted them. We had also taken out the television -- Ned's Atomic Dustbin's "Kill Your Television" is rubbing off on me, me thinks -- VCR, DVD player and considered replacing these objects with a microwave before ruling against it in the name of bed.

The older I get, the more I love moving furniture. I don't know if this is an ailment that most near-30 year-olds suffer or if it is something about being a geopolitician in charge of his own space, but damnit, moving shit around is addicting!

Thursday I woke up sicker than a dog. I've been developing a cough for about two weeks now that has gotten to the point of hacking up a lung. I felt like crap; so I just organized the room further and hauled a bunch of shit to the basement that was littering our floor up here -- miles and miles of telephone wire, even though we haven't ever had a landline in this house and never assume we will, etc. I was too sick to go to lecture. I did go to the doctor, though, as I was convinced I had bronchitis, which of course, I don't.

The doctor was a bit of a meany. She wasn't my usual doctor. I had to sit in the waiting room for a good 45 minutes, and then sit in the doc's office another 15 after learning that my blood pressure is back to being low -- the last time I went they said it was high, but that was after downing a half-liter of coffee while discussing music and Ukrainian music pirates with Adam at Mapps. When the doctor came in she was terse, kind of unsympathetic, and basically a little cursory. She was loud too. She was so loud that I could hear her through the wall while she was with the Sophomore woman next door, explaining her birthcontrol options, and which ones might work best for her. At hearing this, I apprehensively eyed the free condom dispenser on the wall and examined the posters around the room -- I hadn't accidentally gone to Planned Parenthood for a cough, had I?! I've been known to get lost after staying up too late moving furniture before.

Went for a walk in the rain and hail once my appointment ended. Lived it up and went into a McDonalds and ordered two cheeseburgers just because I can. Was picked up by Birgit on the corner of University and 10th Ave. We went to US Bank to cash a Money Order that I filled out for the Brazilian Embassy but then realized they wouldn't accept. Man, money orders are a bitch! I have to call South Dakota now and it will probably take months to get my money back... rrrrRRRRR... the $210 visa to Brazil, I guess. Merde.

Spent Thursday evening touching up the office again. Friday came. Birgit went to a doctor's appointment, then picked me up, and I drove her to work. I hung out at the Macalester Library -- because it was National Library Week, the library there had free Caribou coffee all week, which was incentive enough for me. We drove down Grand Avenue and had lunch at Woellets or some weird sandwich shop. I dropped her off and came home. I had a stack of Geog 3511 papers to grade that was starting to intimidate me. Actually, "stack" is the wrong term for it. I had graded the hard copies, but only about five people turned in hard copies. The rest were in digital format on my computer. So I came home and graded for about five hours. And then... Friday night.

Went to some grad student's house to have a salmon pasta dinner. We played a British version of Trivial Pursuit. The questions all dealt with Cricket. I’m not kidding – in 1999 which Australian Bowler married Ginger Spice? It was a bit onerous. There was one Brit there, the hostess, and she dominated. The rest of us kind of sat around praying for a question on North American baseball or anything… The game stretched on at the end, and Birgit and I suddenly stood a chance, but were doomed in the sudden death round – called at 11 that evening – when our opponents were asked what the longest river in Africa was and our question was “in what year did Bangladesh score 293 consecutive wickets against England?”

Saturday, Birgit and I sorted through piles and piles of photocopied articles, old papers, bad teen poetry, and whatever else we could find to weed out. We cleaned the house and ended up with about 75 pounds of recyclable paper. (Academics for being environmentalists sure waste a lot of paper!) I threw out a ton of the articles I had on CyberFeminism, Hacking the Counter Culture, and Classic Geopolitics (e.g., “The Grand Chess Game: US National Security in the 21^st Century”… gag). These things were cluttering our closets and file cabinet. It was unbelievable. I also began sorting through the 500 pounds of baseball cards my parents asked me to get out of their attic the last time I was up. Holy shit… I hope my kids never get into baseball cards. They are pretty much worthless, dirty and take up a ton of space. I did find a bunch of Barry Bonds rookie cards stuffed in some box, though. I need to try and sell those before he gets stripped of all his records. In the photo he looks as though he weighs about 140 pounds. Of course, today he is around 300 pounds of steroid built muscle. I also found about 10 boxes of unopened cartons of baseball cards, still in their packs. I have Fleer, Donrus, Topps, and even Topps Football cards – which, I never remember collecting at all. It’s kind of surreal, because they look like they could be sitting on a store shelf today, unopened boxes and packs of baseball cards. I think I will keep those. Who knows, those are probably considered antiques now that they are 20 years old.

Gave up on sorting the baseball cards when my cough forced me out of the basement. I’m now on three anti-allergy medicines, because the doctor is convinced my cough is caused by allergies. I’m not sold, but I’m trying the drugs. What the hell, I suppose.

Met up with our Dutch friends – the Geography professor and punk rocker and their two little girls – on Sunday morning for breakfast at the Sunnyside Up Café on Lyndale. It was pretty fun. We were crammed into a pretty nice corner under the window and I couldn’t stop coughing, but no one seemed as annoyed by this fact as I was, so we had a hoot. I had blue corn pancakes, which was something new. They were delicious. I’m on a real corn kick recently. I’m eating Crispex and Kix cereals almost five times a day. But I digress. The professor went through her coffee hour presentation (that she is doing this week on Friday) for Birgit and I to proof. It was far better than any other urban geography coffee hour series this semester! She is going to rock the house. Of course, she is a little nervous, English not being her native language and all, but she shouldn’t be. Her presentation was polished. She had sound data – incredible data, actually, in that she surveyed thousands of Dutch on how much energy they use going to and from work, etc. She has numbers, an argument, and a conclusion. Basically, she has everything that I learned at Penn State makes science scientific, and everything that no one at the University of Minnesota seems to think is important. I’m excited for her. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be at the actual coffee hour, because Birgit and I are off to Duluth that weekend.

Yes, next weekend is our official – do not celebrate Easter weekend! So we are going up to Duluth to see my folks on Friday, and then the weekend is open. We may go rent a room somewhere up in the northwoods and work on Muehlenhaus Studios – the website needs to be finished immediately! Or we may come back to our new kickin’ office and work on it here. Either way, we are turning our phones off and not doing that whole Easter family thing. Turns out our Generation X rebellion was diminished somewhat by my mum and Chris, though. When I announced our plan, my mum noted that she hadn’t invited us up for Easter, because she and Chris weren’t going to do anything either. Bugger!

Time to roll. I spent about 14 hours yesterday working on two labs for Geog 3511. I had to make them from scratch. One is an isoline lab that the students are going to hate me for. The other is a relatively easy assignment that… well, they’ll probably still hate me for it. What can you do, you know? I try to be laid back, but when half your class doesn’t even show up to lab – last week everyone came in half-an-hour late or not at all – they have a grief coming. Slackers. (I can totally relate to them, of course, having been one for about half of my undergraduate career, but it was a tough ass cartography course that got my act together… so I like to believe in hindsight.)

12:18. Shit. Spending the evening playing with computers and rockin' out to some old school records, including Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, Jesus & Mary Chain, and of all things, the No Alternative tribute album, which I have never listened to more than a song from before. The punk show the other night has me reaching back for my roots, which may be a mixed blessing for my office mate. But she can't complain... she just got a computer upgrade that makes what I'm typing on look old and decrepit.

Sat at my computer tracing the body of a male from an anatomy website I found. I'm not into guys or even into tracing them. Just needed to get a good male body outline for an art project I'm working on. I am going to attempt to map my insides, artistically of course, and then compare them to an x-ray picture. What? Have I gone off the deep end? Are all those years of drinking homemade, fake wine in Hungary caught up with me. I'm also planning on scanning my feet and making them into a topomap, so... yeah, I guess they have.

Not much news to write. I'm really into old school music again. The fact that I can get nostalgic scares me a bit, as hell I never thought this would happen. But I'm listening to new tunes too. Some that Adam gave me after meeting for coffee the other day (thanks, dude), Atmosphere (I just started listening to this Minneapolis native in January, and man do I wish I would have taken the French Guru's advice and begun back in 2002), Public Enemy, Tricky (finally caved in and bought his "Rough Guide" DVD, which is far better than I remembered after watching it at Julien's flat in Besancon), and my favorite recently, Bjork. Can't get enough of her earliest stuff, post-Sugarcubes.

And shit, who cares? I just felt like writing something. I'm not going to worry about whether or not it is interesting anymore, because little is in this world anyway. Quantity over quality, I say. That's how mother nature works. At least according to something I heard on NPR about the reproductive systems of mammals.

Wow! What a show. What a brilliant show. I haven't been to an authentic punk concert since 1998, I don't think. I forgot how much fun they can be. All the stink. All the moshing. All the politically charged screaming! And all on a Sunday evening! What a great way to start the week. I haven't felt this revved up to fight the system in years. (Probably helps that I am reading Kurt Cobain's diaries at night to put me to sleep, a bargain book at Barnes and Noble I couldn't pass up.)

Our new Dutch friends, here for the semester... one an extremely cool geography professor. The other an outgoing punk guitarist. Friday night as we were wrestling with their two children in our basement, I decided it was as good a time to get into the punk scene here as any. After all, I ain't getting younger and the music these days is pretty unbearable -- with the exception of international stuff. It felt really good to crack the door open on the scene again. I only wish I would have seen the bar fight at the gig the night before...

Anyway, I really forgot how great small punk venues are, especially when you know a person or two in the band. Brilliant stuff. Just like Dillinger IV up in Duluth back in 1995. Just like the Exploding Chickens in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1998. And now my new fav local punk band -- In Defense. Another show on April 22nd. No idea where yet, but I'll keep all of you readers posted.