I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

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!