Author: Shawn

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Oh my God, it’s the worst snow ever!!!

I’ll admit it: I’ve accomplished almost nothing today since I crawled into bed last night. The sky has been dumping loads of snow on us the entire day—it started around midnight—and is still going as I write this around 6:30. Up to this point, I think we’ve had 15″; one area in the state is over 20″. With the snowing and the blowing and the drifting and the… rifting… today seemed like a good day to sit inside and accomplish almost nothing.

But there’s a problem. It’s the media. Actually, I think it started with the media and had a snowball effect [ba-dum-bum] that’s spilled out to the general public. It’s taking events like this and giving them names. Names that blow everything out of proportion. We’ve had plenty of snow here in Minnesota before. We’ve had lots of snow come down in a short period of time. We used to call this a “blizzard” or a “snowstorm” since it’s comparable to a “rainstorm”, but way colder and fluffier.

Nowadays, you see it on the news or read it on the Internet: a foot and a half of snow in a day has become “Snowpocalypse!” “Snowmageddon!” “Snowapalooza!” “Snownami!” (Yes, I saw that one on the Internet, too.) Everything is insane and crazy and if the weather gets the tiniest bit worse, you’re gonna buried be up to your nostrils in snow as soon as you walk out the door. Assuming that your house hasn’t collapsed from the weight of the snow, thereby crushing the door frame.

This is all I want to know: What happened to weather forecasts for “Blizzard”?

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Soup for dessert?

I was eating dinner with my dad at Erbert & Gerbert’s yesterday—I had a sandwich and Cheetos while he ate a bowl of chili—and it was kinda late, so there weren’t any other customers in the restaurant. Out of the blue, one of the guys working there (the night manager, perhaps?) asked if we wanted some chicken noodle soup. They can’t keep stuff like that overnight, so he was about to throw it out and he “didn’t want to let all that good food go to waste.”

Thus, to supplement our already tasty dinner, we got some small bowls of chicken noodle soup. (I imagine Dad felt pretty good about ordering chili instead of ending up with a second batch of the same stuff.) So to the dude who didn’t want to dump out all of the soup last night: Thanks for your generosity. It was yummy.

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Crazy hopes it’s a dry heat

WEDALI. My little brother Justin’s adventure racing team. 5th place at Primal Quest last year. USARA National Champions this year. They didn’t do as well in the Checkpoint Tracker National Championship—apparently, there were multiple other teams complaining about how the race was set up and organized as well—but the final result was winning the overall rankings. The championship was worth 200 points, but no matter how the Checkpoint Tracker people played with the numbers, WEDALI was the only team that reached the maximum 500 points.

As a result of those 500 points, they’re currently in Abu Dhabi getting ready for the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge. Checkpoint Tracker covered the cost of their flight, hotel and race entry fee. Well, not the entire hotel fee, given that they flew out a couple days early so they could tour around a bit. How many times do you think they’ll be heading to Abu Dhabi again?

Up to this point, they’ve sprinted through the Chicago airport because their arriving flight from Minneapolis was late, rode camels, visited a falconer hospital and the Grand Mosque, and stayed in a $3,000,000,000 hotel (sure, I could have written “billion”, but all those zeros look pretty awesome). The race itself is beginning… I can’t find a specific starting time on the website, but it’s about 3:00am in Abu Dhabi right now and the race starts today, so they could be bounding through the sand dunes already.

They’re not expecting to win. Out of 50 teams, they’re one of three from the United States. And given that some team names are “Russia”, “China 1” and “China 2”, my money says some of those are professional racing teams. And then there’s “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. They’re from Germany. I think that team may have been put together for a particular race somewhere in the world, but I can’t figure out which one.

WEDALI is awesome at races that last for a couple days and they’ll sleep maybe three hours, but this race is set up more like the Tour de France—teams push themselves hard during the day and sleep at night. Buncha sissies… So like I said, they’re not expecting to win. They have no idea how they’ll place amongst teams that specialize in races like this. Teams like “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. But it’s an experience of a lifetime and they’re there to compete and have a good time.

All of the teams are carrying a GPS, so feel free to check out the satellite tracking system and join me in cheering them on. Cheering on their little dot as it moves around on the map. They might not be able to hear us, but I’ll go ahead and cheer anyway. Assuming that it’s not 3:00am here, where there’s a much higher potential of waking someone up who doesn’t like being woken up at that hour. If that happens, it won’t matter how many points I had at the beginning of the race—I’ll be the loser.

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A quarter century and counting

Today was Jeremy Gustafson’s 25th birthday party. Two days ago, I also thought that today was supposed to bring freezing rain and seriously hazardous road conditions. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, although there wouldn’t be as many guests at the party, but that doesn’t account for the last few years when his birthday has brought heavy snow, ice and pretty much everything but frozen gerbils falling from the sky. If that rain had come down tonight, we might have started wondering if God didn’t want Jeremy to celebrate his birthday anymore. Or maybe our eating at IHOP was enough of a punishment, I’m not sure.

There were also a few quotes worth sharing (there were a lot, really, but only a few that make sense without worrying about context):

“I stay out of trailer parks. That’s Cracker City.”
“It’s funny how talking about sterility can kill a conversation.”
“To pronounce the name ‘Marissa’, just pretend you’re a Chinese person saying ‘Melissa’.” (I’m probably going to Hell for that one, but it sounded really funny when I said it.)

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Wiiiiiiiii!!!

Yep, to celebrate the season of lavish consumerism, I went out to Best Buy with my mom today and we bought a Nintendo Wii. Some of you might think it’s to create an excuse for playing video games for hours on end. You’re probably right. But it’s also to create a means to exercise at least a tiny bit instead of just watching TV or staring at the computer all evening.

So tonight, I opened the box, spent about an hour fiddling with all the pieces and cords, got it hooked up to the TV in the family room, spent another hour playing Wii Sports and broke a sweat from exercising for the first time in… it’s been a while. I know, I know, that’s pretty pathetic, but I’m aiming to play soccer again sometime in January. Then I’ll be lucky if I can run around on the field for five minutes before collapsing and dying from an inability to channel blood through my body with an atrophied heart.

Incidentally, did you know that the Wii is officially endorsed by the American Heart Association? I’m not kidding; it says so right on the box.

Now poor Facebook and Twitter will probably start to feel neglected because I’ve got another toy to play with in my spare time, but they’ll have to suck it up. Besides, it’s not like we had that close of a relationship. Especially not during the season of lavish consumerism. After all, they’re free.

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Keep driving waaaaay past “Go”

I’m on the verge of registering at Augsburg here in MN to earn an MBA degree, but I just ran into some bad news. They held an informational session at a building in Bloomington a while back, which was essentially an off-campus location for the entire program. That was probably six months ago. It must have been at least that long ago because when I started filling out the application form today, “Bloomington” wasn’t on the “Which campus do you want to attend?” list.

Apparently, there wasn’t enough demand for taking classes at that location, so they’re not enrolling any new students there. Bloomington is less than 15 minutes away. Augsburg’s main campus is in Minneapolis, which is half an hour with no traffic. And it’s near downtown Minneapolis, so there’s always traffic. So now I have just over a week before the registration deadline to decide… everything.

I mean, sure, some people drive that far every day to their jobs, but they’re earning thousands of dollars by doing it, not paying that much for school. How much do I want the degree, how much do I need the degree… but on the bright side, I just started filling out all the forms, so by making this discovery now, I haven’t paid the fifty bucks or so that it’ll cost for the registration fee and all my transcripts. The glass may not be half full, but there’s at least a little sip of water at the bottom. Cheers!