Happy Birds

When I’m missing my garden during the long Minnesota winters, it’s not just the plants, soil and sun I’m longing for, but also the company. In summertime, bees, birds and butterflies stop by for the pollen, for a bath or a sip of water, or maybe to sun themselves on the warm bricks. When a cat or rabbit stops by, that’s even better. (Squirrels, as previously documented, are far less welcome, but I digress.)

Snow reminds me that some of these animals are still around (there were kitty-sized paw prints on the front steps this morning), but I rarely get to see their visits for myself. That’s why I was so intrigued when Pat extolled the joys of a heated birdbath during one of our conversations last winter. Given how difficult it is for birds to find open water this time of year, he explained, they find a birdbath with standing water even more attractive than food.

Onto the Amazon wishlist went a birdbath heater, which Dad gave me for Christmas this year.

I got excited and picked up some suet, as well. (I’d never heard of suet until I moved up North, but it’s easy to see why the high fat content makes it a preferred food source for birds in these cold days.)

I set them both up on the snow-covered patio, right outside the TV room window.

Lo and behold: birds! Even a robin – in January!!

Kitchen Progress

Slowly but surely, it's coming together!



I'd been debating between gray and black for the lower cabinets. Sounds odd, but the second I did the two test swatches below, I fell in love with the black.

Carpool Updates

For a while now, M and I have been carpooling to work with next-door Tim. (Our carpool used to include Seza, too, but her office moved to downtown St. Paul -- we miss you, Seza!) Starting last week, we’ll be joined three days a week by a new commuter, pictured here on the ride home from daycare last Friday.




Without going into all the details, one result of our new companion’s schedule is that two days a week, we take Tim and Seza’s car; on the other three days, we take our car. This has introduced some minor variables into our previously static commuting process. Nothing major -- we just have to remember whose car we’re taking, who’s got the parking pass, what time we leave, etc. Should be no problem, except that remembering things is made complicated by the very nature of reality at 6:55 a.m. in January in Minnesota: it’s dark, it’s cold, and we’re usually running late or under-caffeinated or both.

All of those things were true this morning when we encountered a little bump in our departure. Back story: When I worked from home last Friday, M needed the car key to drive, but I needed the remote access fob attached to my key ring to get online. So I took off the car key and gave it to M, but forgot to ask for it back. M put it in the cubby in the driver’s side armrest so he’d know where it was when it was time for him to give it back.

But then a weekend goes by, a new week begins and this morning, M gets ready to go warm up the car (temps are in the single digits again today).

“Got your keys?” he asks.

I peer into my purse and see the corner of my keychain. “Yep!”

M starts the car with his key and leaves it (locked) to warm up. Five minutes later, we’re all ready to head to work, except -- I don’t need to tell you where my car key was, right?

Thank goodness for AAA (Dad, once again, that membership makes a terrific Christmas gift -- thank you!). They had someone there within 15 minutes. The best part: he arrived with a Boston terrier in the passenger seat of his tow truck. Forget the car; I had to know all about the dog!

Evidently, the terrier (named Frankie Sinatra -- how awesome is that?!?) hated being left alone and routinely tore apart his owner’s home, so the driver starting bringing him along on his service calls. “These days, he’s the calmest terrier I’ve ever met, he loves people and he never barks,” the driver told me. Frankie’s been coming to work with him for several months now and the two of them are having a ball.

A happy puppy story almost makes being locked out worth it.

"Costa Rica Blue"

... is what we ended up with for the walls, plus a touch-up coat of off-white on the trim, windows and doors.

Next up: cabinets!

New Colors!

Thanks to ETC for helping freshen up the blog colors! :)

Voice, Gone ...

… thanks to a viral infection of some kind. Should make today’s conference calls interesting! Anyway, if you’ve been holding back something to yell at me about for fear of interruption, now’s your chance.

Belated Post: New Year's Eve Pics

On New Year's Eve, Pat and Sam had us up to their place for a wonderful meal.

Heavenly desserts!

Snowy puppy thinks that her disc-retrieving skills should be rewarded with ice cream.

Patient puppy waits for ice cream.

Flirty puppy attempts to use charm to obtain ice cream.

Desperate puppy pulls out her best tricks to earn ice cream.

Happy puppy!

Sleepy puppy.

Mini Kitchen Makeover

When we moved into the house five summers ago, we painted every room except the kitchen. At the time, we had similar feelings about both the kitchen and the backyard: they were too much of a mess to worry about at the time. Obviously, things changed a bit with regard to the backyard in recent years, but holy hannah, the kitchen was a whole other story.

The counter space was ridiculously inadequate. The fridge was almost as old as I am. The flooring was embarrassing. (Why, yes, that is ancient, cracked and yellowing linoleum -- thanks for asking!) The pantry was awesome in terms of space, but ugly in terms of everything else.

And while it’s been the least favorite room in the house for years, it’s not like it’s easy to cute-ify a kitchen. Living room? Sure, slap a coat of paint on the walls and the trim, add one’s usual furniture with a couple new throw pillows and wall art from a different room -- done. Kitchen makeovers, on the other hand, generally mean things like power tools and dust and months of eating microwave-only food and, of course, thousands of dollars. That just wasn’t in the picture for us (law school debt, anyone?).

Over the years, though, we started to see opportunities that, together, end up being a mini-makeover for the kitchen -- less expensive, more incremental. Ron built us an awesome countertop/shelving thingy (yes, I believe that is the technical term), partially financed by Mom. Dad gave us a Lowe’s gift card towards a new fridge. I found some simple fabric shades on sale. We bought a dishwasher. Ikea had a cute barstool for 15 bucks.

And then, there’s paint.

It has begun.

Anybody see ...

... what 43 said just after he walked out on the dais, right before the swearing in? He wasn't miked (obviously), but you could read his lips. He said, "This is a great day for our country."

"Edge Says, 'It's Better'"

On September 23, 2005, we saw U2’s Minneapolis stop on their Vertigo Tour.


I could go on and on about the exactly how much ass they kicked that night (Jon Bream of the Strib wrote that they “blew the roof off the Target Center”), but lately I’ve been thinking about a particularly poignant moment towards the beginning of the show.

My memory is aided by the fact that M was smart enough to call home during the show to memorialize it in a voice-mail (which we still have), and lucky enough that he did it at just the right time, so we have a recording of the lovely little episode I’m about to describe.

They’d opened with the beautiful “City of Blinding Light,” played another song or two, and then The Edge began the opening strains of “Miracle Drug” as Bono stepped forward to speak to the crowd. He thanked everyone for coming and spoke briefly about what he liked about Minnesota, citing first the Mississippi River and then commending the work being done by the physicians and researchers at the Mayo Clinic down in Rochester.

All the while, The Edge continues the soft melody of the “Miracle Drug” intro.

Then things get a little odd. Bono says:

So we took The Edge down to the Mayo the other day. All the doctors wanted to get a look at him because you know, Edge is from the future.

M and I looked at each other. Edge keeps playing and Bono continues:

And all the doctors and all the nurses gather around him and want to know everything. They say, “Edge, what’s it like in the future?” And Edge says…

Huge pause.

Edge says…

Pause.

… “It’s better.”

The crowd went freaking nuts. And that’s when I started crying.

In some ways, 2005 seems like a million years ago, but since November, I’ve been wondering whether maybe -- maybe! -- Edge is from the future, and he’d had a glimpse of Tuesday.

Photos of Edge and U2 in Minneapolis, Sept. 23, 2005: J.Drury via U2gigs.com

“Do the Thing You Can’t Not Do”

There was a time, not that long ago, when I was convinced I wanted out of Communications. (Not the department, but rather the function or field or job description or whatever. Financial services is my industry; Communications is my job.) When I left the Corporate Communications Department (with no job lined up) in 2006, the reason I gave was that I wanted to do something different. My then-boss sent out a lovely e-mail announcement with the subject line, “Laura S. Embarks on New Adventure.”

And God knows I wanted to. I was researching vet tech school and thinking about a job at a gardening center. Various people were encouraging me to write a book. A friend thought she could get me an audition as a cage dancer in a club I liked. I was up for something, anything!, different because I was sick to death of how others’ perceived my job and -- this was the kicker -- got in my face (and my work) about it.

After years of being a professional writer (good writing is necessary but not sufficient for effective communications), I was both insulted and wearied by the near-ubiquitous attitude others had towards the job, which is, in sum: the vast majority of adults think they can write. Because they send e-mails on the job, or have a blog (cough, cough), or got decent grades on papers in college, or because they regularly write letters to friends or family, or maybe because they just like it: people think they can write. And worse, they seem to see nothing odd about telling a professional writer how to do her job.

Think about what that means for someone who has spent decades (I count three of ‘em: I was word-crazy from the get-go -- thanks, Mom and Dad!) honing her craft. I wouldn’t dream of telling a programmer how to code or arguing with a financial analyst about the content of earnings reports. Yet, day after day in my role as a senior communicator, I encountered (and still do, sometimes) folks who acted like they could do my job as well as I could -- or at least, well enough.

These are the people who would call to say, “Why did you change my article?” Why? Because you don’t know the difference between “effect” and “affect.” Because you have no concept of where commas go when there’s a day and date in the middle of a sentence. Because the poor syntax you employed made the sentence factually inaccurate. I got lots of reasons -- you want ‘em all?

Sometimes, I could shut those folks up with a reference to rules they didn’t know: “I made the punctuation changes to comply with Associated Press guidelines, which dictate our usage protocols except when overridden by our internal style guide. This is standard in both corporate communications and journalism; I can direct you to more information if you’d like.” This was usually met with confusion or silence, but almost always made folks back off.

That kind of thing takes a toll. You hear yourself snapping at people who question your (far more informed -- on matters of punctuation, at least) judgment. You find that you feel angry about and unappreciated for your work -- and we Type As generally derive a lot of pride (and perhaps an unhealthy portion of our identities) from the work we do.

So then what? Well, I didn’t quit my job 2006 to get out of Comm; I quit because I couldn’t take the ever-mounting stresses of the department I was in and the impending horrors of a certain merger/conversion (which, as it turns out, wouldn’t happen for another two years). But still, it seemed like an ideal time for a change, to get away from fixing bad grammar and having to defend my efforts.

Except, I couldn’t turn it off, any more than I could when I was employed. I’d drive down Lake Street and wince at the missing hyphens or superfluous quotation marks in stores’ signage. I’d mentally copy-edit restaurant menus -- every one I saw. I’d debate myself about whether to follow AP style in my personal e-mails. I’d mutter corrections under my breath when I heard “that/which” errors.

Two years later, I’m back here, in Communications. Same firm, no less -- although a very different department. And while few things still piss me off more than “How come you changed the headline before you posted?,” I’m a little more philosophical about it than I used to be.

This is partly because I’m surrounded by a team of people who really are grateful for my contributions (and frankly, a lot of them are good writers for being non-writers, you know?). But I’m also a little older and wiser about myself. I know that I can’t stop trying to fix the world’s word messes, even if it’s only in my head, so I may as well do it where I’ll get paid, add value, and have a boss who is thrilled by my ability to nit-pick bad grammar into submission.

Long post! Why now? Two things:

First, I was in a meeting yesterday with Aeric, who started out a coworker and is now a friend (Aeric is not to be confused with coworker-friend Eric aka ETC from The Band). Darcy, also in the meeting, passed out a sample letter that one of our vendors has been using for some time. When I saw “… requests will be handled on a Best Efforts Basis [sic] …” and groaned out loud, Darcy looked at me quizzically, perhaps thinking I was unhappy with something she said.

“She’s just copy-editing; she can’t turn it off,” Aeric volunteered and smiled at me.

Second, this morning, I read an interview on Slate’s new Happiness Project blog that included this exchange:

Q: Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?

A: Actually, it’s something that was shared with me by the soon-to-be former editor of Lifehacker, Gina Trapani. When I was interviewing her for my book, Career Renegade, at one point she said, “You do the thing you can’t not do.”

Just Sayin'

The actual temp at the moment is 19 below. The wind chill? Hovering around 40 below.

I'm just sayin'.

Highs Below Zero

Posted this afternoon to the Strib's site:

The temperature was in the low teens at 2 p.m. at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, but will tumble well below zero by nightfall and stay there for at least the next few days. Highs might not make it above zero on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and lows will sink to minus 19 degrees on Wednesday night, which would be the coldest night since the mercury sank to minus 24 degrees on Jan. 30, 2004.

Slightly warmer air will arrive on Saturday with a high of 13 degrees expected and by Sunday sunny skies and highs in the 20s are expected, the Weather Service said.