I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

I can't believe June is already coming to an end. Shit, if I were a kid on summer vacation, I would be pissed! Hell, as a grad student on a summer sluff-off of sorts, I'm pissed! But I write nonsense... simply because not much has happened to write about. No Twins games. No real wargaming in my neighbor's garage. (Although, I guess I met him and several interesting people to play Axis on Friday night. There was a Ukrainian woman and her husband from New Jersey. She's a real estate agent and he's an engineer or something. I wasn't really in the mood to play, though, having just spent the day supervising a bunch of Vietnam vets cut down our Maple tree. Man, that was stressful. Not just seeing the beautiful beast go, but trying to coral all of these 50-something year old yahoos back into my yard. They had a giant bulldog without any teeth and a twisted leg -- it had stupidly attacked a riding lawn mower once and successfully flipped it over but then paid the price, I was told. It rummaged around the yard sending the neighbor Beagles beserk! This in turn drove the Vietnam vet guy nuts, and he began shouting at me about the neighbors' dogs, which were barking at his goddamn deaf bulldog without teeth, telling me that he refused to work if the Beagles barked all day, because after living next to a howling dog in New Orleans he just couldn't handle it. I was a bit perplexed. I got Nathan to bring his dogs in for the most part, but then his daughter, a five year-old who is cute but high maintenance kept coming over and letting Mette out of the kitchen, who in turn wanted to play with the bulldog without teeth, while branches were falling from the sky every which direction. The phone was ringing and I was trying to find wood slabs to put our logs on... We found some at an Oxygen facility on Pierce Butler Avenue. I took the Vietnam vet's beater truck to get them. The truck didn't have any gas and almost ran out on me. It didn't have keys either -- you just turned the damn ignition switch without and it started. It was a wild ride, because the transmission didn't show which gear you were in and I damn well nearly put it in reverse instead of drive and backed into a container full of oxgygen and liquid nitrogen tanks!


The day ended, and like I said, I went to Nathan's to play in the garage but by about nine o'clock I excused myself and collapsed in exhaustion.

Saturday was a little less stressful. To Ikea for a bench thing and then to Sam's Club for cleaning supplies and bulk fruit. Yes, I hate corporate America, but I'm not one of those that lives in poverty so I can buy overpriced free trade coffee that tastes like shit and pays Brazilian bean farmers $5 per acre instead of $2.50. I just don't see how that is going to change the world for the better -- all I see is that I'm drinking crappy coffee and can't afford cool technology. I totally agree with people that say this is self-centered thinking, but let's face it, the Soviet Union proved there are too many people like me for the socialist thing to work as foreseen by Marx, so I'm not going to change until someone comes up with a better plan than going on strike every other month to be offered less money than one was making before going on strike. What?! I don't know. Fuck it. My French friends would kill me. But one of them even admitted the only reason they went on strike while at university was to avoid taking tests. So the progressive solidarity a lot of the academics go on about here is, in reality, little more than bored, hung over students avoiding school work. That I can respect! But I can't subscribe to it as an ideology worth following. Or something.

Hung out with Adam on Saturday night. Birgit, he and I played a game of Settlers of Catan. Birgit and I were at one another's throats throughout the game, vying for victory. Adam couldn't get a roll to drop for him, so the poor sap ended up getting the short end of the stick for most of the game. Birgit was hyper and giddy when she thought she was finally going to win for the first time ever. Then weird things happened, I got lucky, or maybe unlucky, and somehow won out of the blue. She was pretty livid.

Adam and I watched "La Haine (Hate)" after that. Great movie, though my left eye's vision is still blurry from it. It is a black and white movie with white subtitles. At first it was funny, then it caused a migraine, and by the end I couldn't see straight. I felt kind of bad for not turning it off and making Adam endure the film, but I had really wanted to see it for about six years now after seeing the first half once, and well... I'm still blind. I don't know how I will show this in class without getting bad teacher reviews on RateMyProfessor.Com, even though it is a pretty good flick. I can only hope the VHS has yellow subtitles. Merde!

Sampled some excellent Ukrainian vodka with peppers floating in the bottom of the bottle. Delicious stuff. Very smooth stuff. Didn't help the vision, however.

Sunday, Birgit and I went to Lake Harriet with the dog. Bumped into people we knew all around the lake, which creeped me out somehow, considering we don't live over there and don't know that many people in the Cities. Spent the afternoon reading, went for another walk, then read some more, put Mette to bed, and then we both read until two in the morning, which was foolish I realized as soon as I had to wake up. I'm almost through one of the coolest novels of all time -- Shogun -- and Birgit is almost done with a marathon read of all six Harry Potters, so we were both kind of fixated on finishing. Neither of us did, and I'm not sure if the lights ever really went out or if we both ended up passing out with books on our faces. It was surreal because this is the first time I have ever gotten the feeling that I am becoming the cliched, 1950s television show, content married man. There I was, lying half-naked next to a half-naked attractive person I love and all I felt like doing was reading until I passed out. Yes, I guess I've definitely changed from even a year ago. Peculiar indeed.

But lest I disturb you... today I watched Italy steal a World Cup match from Australia in the 90th minute -- while doing the laundry. I took Mette on a long walk. Spoke with my Vietnam and WWII veteran neighbors. Watched the deserted house across the street have its beautiful, living pine trees cut down by some people that were far more efficient and professional than the people we hired. Played with Mette quite a bit. Put her in her kennel. Walked to the Christian-dominated Caribou Coffee. Read "A History of Spaces" by John Pickles. Took notes fiendishly, as he discusses a lot of things I wouldn't mind doing research on, walked home, struck up a conversation with my poker playing, sport-watching neighbors next door about splitting Twins season tickets next year (bizarre conversation, but for some reason I brought it up... weird), and then came home. I went for a walk with Birgit and Mette and am now writing this while reviewing my PowerPoint slides for tomorrow on Religion and then I'm going to finish Shogun, goddamnit! Yes, that is my day. Not thrilling to say the least, but not deadly either, and therefore, I would argue my karma is safe. I suppose the highlight of the day was subscribing to "The New Yorker" again for two years after receiving a great deal slip in the mail. I miss that magazine, even though I despise NYC. Our weekend subscription to the New York Times, that we never subscribed to but received for two years every weekend morning, suddenly stopped showing up. I estimated the value of the free papers we received and it came to over $1000. So the way I see it, spending $45 for a two year subscription to a well written weekly magazine is not too bad. I don't know... I'm just a man full of contradictions today, but that's okay... I am only human.