I couldn’t get a better picture of this – but I noticed something a little off near 38th street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis/Mexico.
I couldn’t get a better picture of this – but I noticed something a little off near 38th street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis/Mexico.
Sassy Sue: “Are the dogs scared of bikes?”
Me: “I guess we’ll find out.”
Sassy Sue: “Oh hell nah!”
Me: “What did you say?”
Sassy Sue (getting off bike): That answer was unacceptable!”
I then ran into a pack of kids coming out of a youth center across the street.
Oh look, there’s a new law school in my neighborhood:
Jake brought a random pair of tacky douchebag glasses to trivia and made everyone pose with them. Behold:
Everyone has a syrupy facebook friend: the one whose status updates constantly mention their significant other in a cheesy, overly-sentimental way,
Syrupie Smith: “Off to lunch with my amazing boyfriend!”
Syrupton Bergsteiner: “Going to see my beau! Love you babe! Xoxo!”
Syrupy ~LOLZ~ Adams: “So excited for tonight! I get to see my sweety! Tee hee hee!”
Etc.
These are also the people with the preggers pictures and baby-profiles, or the gay guys who upload dozens of nearly-identical shots of themselves posing with their not-so-cute boyfriends. Hay!
We all know these tacky people, and I am trying desperately not to become one. But it’s hard. The new relationship is more Beyonce than Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Today the temperature was well into the 50’s and everyone was waltzed around without coats, and most of us had shorts on.
I had time for the multiple dog walks because I left work early.
My coworkers and I are probably going to start boycotting most of the food options at work. Amber got food poisoning from a cafeteria salmonella salad, and I became deathly ill after eating a pack of sugar-free gummi bears from the company store.
I, of course, ate an entire pack of the jelly beans AND the gummi bears. And yes, the warnings are there for a reason. My goodness.
This coming week is Spring Break for my school. I will work a lot, but I have grand fitness plans. We’ll see if I can force myself into a Jillian Michaels workout routine, or if I will have Har Mar’s curves for another season.
These are the songs that made me shimmy and shake this week:
Kenneling Gertrude, my Rottweiler, has been a problem recently because she paws and flings herself against the kennel door until it opens.
I like to keep the rottweiler kenneled when I’m away because of her propensity to eat cellphones, and after a week of successful rottweiler escapes, I get the brilliant idea to secure the kennel door with my U-bike lock.
This, of course, is a disaster: 1/3 of the time the bike keeps her in the kennel, 1/3 of the time she escapes and the other 1/3 of the the time I come home to this:
Fail.
A few days ago, I find my Rottweiler half-hung with a pool of dog drool and hair on the carpet in front of the kennel:
Turns out that she really hurt herself when she got her head/collar stuck that day. I noticed puss and bleeding and skipped Friday morning’s bail hearing to take her to the vet.
I’m standing in the vet’s office with both dogs, thoroughly convinced that they are going to call the police. Gertrude had three wounds around her neck from rubbing her skin raw, but the worst part was when the vet tech looks down and says, “And she’s also missing a canine tooth.”
I am mortified. She ripped a tooth out while trying to escape from the kennel?! What the hell?
A hospital stay, sedation, antibiotics, and $509 later, she’s back home, looking decrepit:
She destroyed the plastic kennel, but Judd gave me a metal crate that he had from his prior dog.
The metal crate works and Gertrude doesn’t even try to escape anymore…probably because she doesn’t have that many teeth to spare.
This week was made far more dramatic by the fog. Downtown Minneapolis looks like Gotham at night and Eagan feels like a druid stomping ground…with Dodge 4x4s. Pictures:
I had already graduated from the University of Miami, it was my birthday week, and I had a flipcam.
One month later I moved to Minneapolis to start law school and Alexandra moved to San Francisco with her fiancé and started grad school.
Carlos is still in Miami because the place would fall apart without him, and we still hit up Broward when I fly down.
I’m walking the dogs when I run into my mailman:
Mailman: “Eek! Those are huge dogs! Makes a mailman wanna piss himself! Are they friendly?”
Me: “Oh, most of the time.”
Mailman: “Heh. Huge all the same. What apartment do you live in?”
Me: “53B.”
Mailman: “53B?”
Me: “Yes.”
Mailman: “I’ll make sure you get your mail on time then.”
Me: “So that’s how to get service!”
I’m furious.
Remember last month’s epic Sprint customer service fail when it took me three hours to purchase my Blackberry?
Well, this morning Madre Jansen sent me an email:
Madre Jansen: “What is this $30 equipment charge on the phone bill? Here is the username and password for the account. Figure it out.”
So I call sprint:
Sprint Rep: “Hi stranger. What’s the 10-digit pin for the account?”
Me: “Erm… I have a password and username.”
Sprint Rep: “Credentials fail. That’s only for online.”
So I hang up, call mom for the pin, and call Sprint again:
Me: “Here is the pin…”
Sprint Rep #2: “Great. Did you call us recently?”
Me: “Yeah, like two minutes ago. I had to get the pin from a parent.”
Sprint Rep: “Okay Shady. So, because you just called I have to have my manager listening in and….”
Me: “Okay. I have a $30 ‘equipment charge’ on my bill, and I would like to know what it is for.”
Sprint Rep: “Yes. You do have an equipment charge. It’s for equipment!”
Me: “…how helpful. But what does that mean? What is the charge for? What equipment?”
Sprint Rep: “I dunno. You bought something at a store. I just have a sku number. It’s a mystery!”
Me: “…well, would the store know?”
Sprint Rep: “Hm. Maybe. Where is the store? What’s your zip? Let me call them. Hold. […] They said you bought a Blackberry and a charger. It might have been for a charger!”
Me: “Hm. I bought a car charger, but I guarantee it wasn’t a flat $30… and I paid for it with a credit card.”
Sprint Rep: “We are only showing one charge on your mastercard.”
Me: “I don’t think I put it on my mastercard. That was just for the blackberry. Hm.”
Sprint Rep: “Check your bank statements. I dunno…”
Me: “I think the Sprint rep was going to give me a $30 credit for it taking three hours to buy my phone.”
Sprint Rep: “Hm maybe. Call us back when you figure that out. Peace!”
I pull up my bank statements online. The car charger was on my Visa. The blackberry was on the mastercard. Sprint was full of crap, and the $30 charge was still a mystery.
I call Sprint back.
Sprint Rep #3: “Yes, we see that you have a $30 charge. Let me look into that. Hold.”
Me: “… ”
Sprint Rep: Yes. It looks like your blackberry was $291.51 and you only paid $261.51 with your mastercard. That’s why your account was charged.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure the $30 was the “pain in the ass/incompetence” credit the store rep. offered me for waiting 3 hours at the store.”
Sprint Rep: “Oh, well let me contact that store. Hold. […] it seems like Hank, the rep that helped you, is not in today. The store will call me back tomorrow and I’ll follow up with you and we’ll get this resolved.”
Me: “We have to wait for him to go into work?”
Sprint Rep: “Yes.”
Me: “This is frustrating. The point of the $30 credit was to compensate me for his bad customer service that caused me to be in the store for 3 hours and now I’ve wasted 30 minutes dealing with this.”
Sprint Rep: “Sorry that you’ve spent thirteen minutes on the phone. I’m going above and beyond here because normally you would have to deal with the store.”
Me: “Oh, I’d love to give them a piece of my mind. And I’ve only been on the phone with you for 13 minutes but you’re the third person I’ve talked to today. I’m taking this pain in the ass in aggregate. I just feel further inconvenienced by the store’s incompetence and I’m frustrated that I have to wait to get this resolved. Whine-bitch-moan, boom-shaka-laka, laka boom.”
I was seething by the end of the call, and then called Madre Jansen:
Mom: “So grasshopper, how’d it go?”
Me: “BAH!! Next time I need something from a Sprint store, I’m going to Wisconsin.”
Note: the conversation is obviously condensed and paraphrased. The point is, that I’m only a Sprint customer because of my parent’s longstanding relationship to the company…otherwise I’d already be with AT&T.
So you are not taking my advice! You are coming to law school. You are starting blawgs. You have “JD” in your twitter usernames (we will address that later) and you are tweeting and emailing plenty of questions.
Happy reading. I still think you should run (avoid the debt and anguish!) but if you insist on doing this law school thing, the law school blawg clique (see links to the left) will take care of you.
I always release the dog treats a little before Harley bites down…
Now you know why.
The “treat” in that picture is a pig ear. They come in sacks of 20 at Wal-Mart and the dogs love them. And yes they are greasy and absolutely disgusting to handle.
Oh, and that mess of wires is the power-strip for my laptop and speakers. I’ve decided that the futon is a better study area than my desk, aesthetics be damned.
I have not watched the Oscars since middle school. The show is excruciatingly boring, has no fun musical performances, and there are only 3 or 4 awards anyone cares about.
Although I suspected the Oscars would be a snoozefest, I joined the boyfriend at Jeff’s house to watch the Oscars anyway.
Nothing has changed. We are halfway through the Oscars and everyone is bored and bitchy. Vera Farmiga’s cupcake dress is almost as awful as the unflattering shots of Gabourey Sidibe. There is a random interpretive dance segment, and ample shots of the face-lifts in the audience.
The awards show was awful, but the real purpose of the evening was for me to meet the freshly-minted-boyfriend‘s friends.
“Meeting the friends” is like playing minesweeper. If I give too many beauty pageant answers then the friends will think I’m boring, fake, or stupid. What I am left with is the countless ways to accidentally offend people.
One of the friends asks us how Macbeth was. We saw Macbeth on Friday, I was underwhelmed, so I say “skip it” before learning that the friend is the promoter for the theater.
Woops…. It was lovely, I swear… the pinnacle of theater…
Ugh.
Fail.
Aside from Oscars dullness and minesweeper fail, I blitzed through the rest of the week. I think I’m busy. My week felt like it was already over on Monday.
Monday morning starts with international tax at 8:30am. I spend the next three days studying, getting flat tires fixed, and being dragged throughout the city by the dogs.
There is also Trivia on Tuesday evening with Carson:
Judd came to Trivia and we lost, but we didn’t really care.
I get up early on Wednesday to finish studying, show up for class, and then skip to work for the evening.
On Thursday and Friday mornings I’m in my car by 7:30am to observe bail hearings in Anoka.
Anoka is a town 26 miles north of my house. After the bail hearings and hanging around at the public defender’s office, I commute back down, let the dogs out, and then head 16 miles south to Eagan and work for the rest of the evening.
Friday night is usually date night with the boyfriend, and I work for the bulk of Saturday.
Then on Sunday I hope I’m not too exhausted to finish my tax reading for Monday morning…where the cycle continues again…
… this was supposed to be my light semester…but at least I’m not bored?
There’s a new player on the University of Minnesota East Bank skyline:
Fall construction pictures are here and here. The demolition pictures of the prior building are here.
I expected an uglier building than this, and I am still not sold on a sleek new building so close to the UMN mall. I guess this is called progress.
Things are actually rainy and muddy right now, but a few weeks ago we got some pretty hoar frost.
The images link to larger files.
The pictures were taken on my Blackberry.
I’m ambivalent about spring coming. The temperature is warmer but the dogs are muddier, and there’s no dramatic hoar frost.
The worst part of the thaw is that all of the trash, dead animals, and dog shit that has accumulated all winter is now visible. It looks like a big septic tank exploded all over the city. Ick.
See also:
Brilliance.
This is the side of Uptown’s Arise Bookstore. Many of Uptown’s buildings have cool street art, but the Arise flaming fart is right up there with the giant blue baby on the side of Cal Surf store near Lake Calhoun.
I plan to let my future kids tag the house for their school art projects so I can pretend to be a laid-back “cool” parent. We’ll see how that goes.
See also: The Creep Circus.
Dog time comes at a terrible price:
Luckily, Judd wore two shirts, and took the button-down off before letting the dogs use the other one as a kleenex. He’s a smart cookie.
It’s 5pm and I’m sitting in a Mexican-operated Italian restaurant on Lake Street.
A Spanish announcer rattles over the soccer game on the restaurant’s TV. The announcer’s voice isn’t as loud as the restaurant’s music: Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. The front part of the restaurant was empty, but snickers came from the pool room.
So it was just me, Tina Turner, and the soccer commentator. Perfectly random.
The place was cute enough:
And a diet fail:
The waiter told me the special was the seafood-something-or-other. I figured that the burger wouldn’t make me sick. I was wrong, but it was delicious.
I was at the Mexican-Italian restaurant because I was waiting on TiresPlus to fix my flat tire.
This is the week of waiting. It took my Family Law professor 40 minutes to figure out how to work the VCR to show us a documentary. The school clinic had staffing issues so my 20 minute appointment took 2 hours, and getting a new tire took close to 3 hours.
These unexpected pauses are made much better by the crackberry, and I’m glad to have it. I have never been so caught up on email and tweets. I figure if I can do something mildly productive during my waiting time, even if it’s responding to emails or tweets, then it’s not time lost…or at least I can get a new high score on Brick Breaker.
