It's snowing in Baghdad. Does this mean Hell is freezing over?

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1146182220080111?rpc=92

The Truth Comes Out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TeNdsoCIgc

Reflections on 2007

Oh my, what a year this has been! A very good year. Nathan and I have been surrounded by friends and family and love. I feel very lucky as I look back. Here's a brief recap of the events that made me happy, joy-filled and proud this year:

January - My dear friend, Amy, along with her boyfriend Brian, bought their first house. We warmed it up with a few friends, some beer and a meatball and grape jelly concoction that is not nearly as bad as it sounds.

January also marked the arrival of Ms. Paige Marie Erickson, daughter of our good friends Missy and Craig. Smiley-est baby ever.

February - February brings with it Trivia at KVSC. The Hamsters recorded more songs that will haunt me forever such as "Metrosexual" and "We Will Mock You" and I was inducted into the Trivia Hall of Fame for 12 years of volunteerism, tongue wagging and general bossiness. Check out Jeff in the hotpants in his ode to Freddie Mercury!

That same week I had the luxury of spending an afternoon on the beach in San Diego drinking Sailor Jerry wop from an ice bucket and watching the sun set over the Pacific. It is random moments like this that make travelling for my job not so bad.

March - In March, planning for our wedding kicked into HIGH gear. Appointments for tuxes, dresses, flowers and cake filled our days. Several evenings were spent making and sending the invites and cleaning and organizing the house. Stress relief showed itself in two great parties. First, the annual St. Paul St. Paddy's day bar crawl on the 17th was a welcome day of hanging out with friends. Since it was a Saturday this year, I got to spend the whole day and it was great. I highly recommend the Hot Dagos at DeGidio's. Okay, you may be thinking, "what? Italian food on St. Paddy's Day?" In St. Paul, yeah, that's what you get, a fusion of Irish and Italian immigrants stretching down 7th Street as far as the eye can see.

March also brought what I lovingly refer to as the "Attack Kegger." After a nice dinner with with our friends Mike & Michelle and their two children, a ruckus was heard at the back door. I walked back there to find Don and Tyler hauling two kegs down the back stairs. I followed them down in a bit of disbelief to find they weren't alone. A throng of close friends stood in the bar, all accompanied by newly sewn sock puppets singing a Foreigner song at the top of their lungs. I was stunned. We christened The Puppet Lounge that night and celebrated my and Nathan's engagement with high octane revelry.

April - This month can only be described as amazing. Two wedding showers, my bachelorette weekend that found Angie, Amy and I in Madison and Chicago. OH YEAH!

and, of course, our wedding. It is hard for me to believe that our wedding was only 8 months ago. It seems like a dream. I am so thrilled to be Nathan's wife. Our relationship and love grows every day. He is so sweet to me and I don't know what I'd do without him. Insert dreamy sigh here. Our wedding day was incredible. The weather was a perfect sunny and 70 and all of our friends and family turned up to spend the day with us. Thank you so much to each and every one of you, it meant so much to us to have you all there. I would be remiss if I did not mention the best wedding band ever that included a revolving cast of our closest friends anchored by Slip Twister and followed by the best pool party ever. Truly, a day I will never forget!

May - With the wedding over, we headed to the British Virgin Islands for our honeymoon. We spent an entire week being lazy - eating, drinking rum and floating in the ocean. Ah.

This is the hammock at our cabana. Sweet. We followed up our honeymoon with our annual pilgrimage to Maiden Rock, Wisconsin to drink Maibock and sit in the grass. Good times.

May also brought the arrival of two new friends. We welcomed Tobin Micko and Lukas Houkum to the universe and have watch them grow tremendously already. I can't wait to see them at a full run next summer.

June - This month brought my crushing defeat by the wind on the MS 150. Day one from Duluth to Hinckley included a 25 mph head wind. At mile 50, Nathan and I hung it up and crawled aboard the sag wagon. I felt like such a loser, but the charity still gets all the money I raised. I will have to redeem myself next summer.

My nephew, Tim graduated from high school along with his step-sister, Jenny. We attended their party in West Fargo to wish them well as they both started NDSU in the fall.

I spent a whole week out west in Oregon and Seattle. It was a pleasure to visit my sister-in-law, her husband and nieces and to spend a day out on the coast.

I also got to make a return visit to Safeco with my friend Troy in Seattle. A lot of the month was spent enjoying our Twins season tickets, although I missed Batgirl's daily commentary quite a bit.

July - Summer means lots of time with friends and we made the most of it with weekends at Pinky on Big Watab, The Gohman's on the Mississippi River and Levi's on Tomahawk Lake in Wisconsin. July also marked my first trip to Lake Tahoe for a conference and a booze cruise on the lake.

August - We've been making an annual pilgrimage to Madeline Island in August for Amy's birthday the last several years and this was no exception. We spent a most memorable day drinking beer and laughing, laughing, laughing as we sat in the "pit of bliss" with friends and danced several nights in a row to the rhythms of the Pachanga Society. It's like being in the Caribbean, but the water is just a tad colder.

The first week in August we just missed being a part of the 35W bridge collapse. Nathan and I were on our way downtown when it happened. I was driving and as we approached our exit to get on to 35W, I looked down the road and decided there was too much slow-moving traffic and that we should just stay on Hennepin. Lucky for us. We were likely on the Hennepin Bridge (two bridges upriver) when it fell. It was very much a shock and I really feel incredibly sorry for the people who died, thier families and the survivors that will be dealing with physical and emotional trauma for years to come.

September - Labor Day weekend means a blissful weekend camping in the woods. Much beer was consumed and many saunas were taken.

I started grad school at Hamline and this year September also meant a lot of work for me as we hosted the biggest industry conference of the year here in M/SP.

October - Work, work, work for both me and Nathan. I traveled to California and Nathan to Orlando for conferences.

November - I turned 32! And I spent most of the month working on my final project for my class. Nathan was consumed by work this month and I spent a lot of time curled up on the sofa with a bunch of books and my laptop. Thanksgiving was a welcome break as we headed to Georgia to see my sister and her family as well as my mom and dad.

December - A whirlwind of parties and celebrations have filled our weekends this month from champagne tastings to the Santa Crawl to family Christmas gatherings. We got to babysit Paige who is now 11 months old and a sockless wonder.

There has been lots of good snow to play in and Nathan and I hit Rice Park for some ice skating, which resulted in a giant bruise on my rear as I got wiped out by a little girl. Funny sure, but painful.

I look forward to another wonderful year in 2008 and I wish all of my friends and family all the love, joy and peace they can stand.

For the love of bacon!

Nathan and I have successfully completed a full year of the Bacon of the Month Club. It was good. Really good. And our cholesterol is just fine, thank you. It was sad, though, the end of the bacon. We thought, you know, maybe we'd renew for another year... but rationality took hold and we realized that good bacon can be found everywhere, especially Clancy's. So, we will leave the BoM to others. In fact if you need a last minute gift for someone this holiday season, I highly recommend bacon. The gift that keeps on giving. http://gratefulpalate.com/



In other bacon related news, now everyone can enjoy the beautiful flavor of bacon every day, even vegetarians! Thanks, Bacon Salt! http://www.baconsalt.com/
You've made the end of BoM a little bit easier to ,um, swallow.

Manic - Randy - Pelican

I've been having very vivid nightmares lately. And, I remember them which is unusual. The first happend about a week ago. I dreamt that I was travelling through Canada by car and I stopped in this cheerful small town to visit the Manic Organic and to have dinner with him and his wife and family. If you are not familar with the Manic Organic, it is a TV show on the FoodNetwork in Canada. http://www.foodtv.ca/ontv/titledetails.aspx?titleid=63174 Well, the visit in this idyllic Canadian town got weird. I was to stay the night and like any good nightmare or horror movie, the seemingly sweet loving family was actually possesed (my subconscious holds no harsh feelings for the real guy, I'm sure). Late at night I began to hear fighting, yelling, slamming of doors, creaking of wood. I find out in my dream that the M.O. is brainwashing women and having them pose as his wife/wives. The community thinks that he is simply a hippy polygamist and that when the "wives" disappear they are simply returning to the States to go about their lives having tired of the hippie farmer life. In my dream reality, of course, he is a serial killer that does away with the wives when they start to get squirrel-y about their forced servitude. In other words, the brainwashing eventually wears off. However, not before the women manage to have at least one child, so the house is full of little demon kids that appear to be normal children by day, but go around stealing farm supplies and implements by night. When I get wind of all this, I try to flee. Of course, my car has been tampered with and so I start to run. Again, like any good horror movie or nightmare, the town is not as it appeared during the day. It is closed up, no phone lines work and no one really lives there. It turns out that the M.O. has purchased the whole town under the guise of "restoring" it to its historic significance. He hires in folks to work on the town during the day and since he is a good employer, no one thinks that this is odd. As I run through the town, he slowly follows me in a large, late 70's staton wagon filled with demon children, laughing maniacially at me, knowing I can't escape. He finally catches up with me at the brightly painted grain elevator where I find his stash of "ex-wives" in various levels of decay. Since this is a nightmare, there is, of course, no ending. No rationality to it, no resolution. I do not think that the M.O. is in real life anything but a weird nice guy. I really enjoy his show and cannot explain why my brain made him the focus of this nightmare. Maybe its because my husbands new hairdo looks oddly like the M.O. when he wakes up in the morning. Hmmm.... honey?



This second nightmare is really quite odd as I was not the main character but a narrator. It was like an early 60's mob flick and my friend Randy was the main character. However, Phillip Seymore Hoffman was playing the character of Randy in the movie. Randy is running from the mob, knowing quite well that he is going to get his ass killed as he pissed someone off. He runs to his fathers place which is a trailer house with a huge carport on top of a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. It is fall and the leaves are falling. It is daytime, but dark and raining. As the mob begins to turn into the unbelieveably long gravel road driveway, Randy contemplates flinging himself off of the bluff into the river. It seems a better alternative to what the guys fast approaching in black Lincoln town cars has in store for him. He decides instead to run into the house, dial 911 on his cell phone (I know what the hell is cell phone doing in the early 1960's? But, dreams don't adhere to rules about time and place, you know?) Randy leave the phone on the table and grabs a shot gun. He figures why not go out blazing? The cops miraculously show up at the same time the mob does and arrests everyone. Randy goes into protective custody. That's it. That was the whole dream. Was it a nightmare really? I don't know, but it seemed scary when I woke up.



The third dream was just last night and it was a recurring nightmare that I've had for the last ten years. What's odd about it that I haven't had it in a good long while and I'm wondering why my psyche decided to dig it up now. The nuts and bolts of it are that I am riding my bike around Pelican Lake (near Detroit Lakes) and I'm left behind and panicked. I'm searching for someone. Someone in real life I hope I never see again.

I have another dream that has been recurring since I was five years old. It is about life and death and the meaning of it all. It started shortly after my grandfathers died. I will write about it in detail at another time. I bring it up know because this recurring dream has a soundtrack which is running through my head right now. It's set to "Wheel in the sky" by Journey. Seriously. Why? Well, my grandfathers died in 1981. That year Journey released the album Captured with which had "Wheel in the Sky" on it. This song originally appeard on thier 1978 album Infinity, but no one paid any attention to Journey until "Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin" hit the Top 40 in 1979. "Wheel in the Sky" was a big hit in 1981, making it to #57 on the billboard charts, becoming a favorite at high school proms all across the USA. I also happened to have two sisters in high school that year who were prom-bound and Captured got a number of spins on the home record player. Thanks a lot Shelly and Brenda.

Beer tastes better than academia

I am in the final stretch. Pun intended. My final paper is due on Thursday. I now have 14 not so rough draft pages, and six pages of absolute shit. I've been sitting at my computer for about 12 hours straight today with work and then paper writing. My back feels like crunchy little rocks, like I flew over the handle bars of a mountain bike into the middle of a gravel pit. I am going to reward myself with a beer, maybe two.

UPDATE: Ha ha! My paper is done! I am worried that it sucks because I feel like my classmates presentations were much more put together and thoughtful than mine, therefore their papers are likely to be much better than mine, right? Anyhoo, I've completed my first Masters class and it feels pretty good. It's all over but the grading. I should know by Monday what my prof thought of it. Next semester I am taking Professional Ethics. ThatI oughtta be enlightening...

Georgia on my mind

This is a blaze marking the way to the Appalachian Trail. The AT itself is marked with white blazes. Side trails and shelter trials are maked with blue. This photo was taken on the
Approach Trail in Amicalola State Park in North Georgia. It is about 7 miles from the top of the falls to the AT trialhead at Springer Mountain. There are about 165,000 of these marking the 2,175 miles of trail from Georgia to Maine. Nathan and I hiked the first two miles of the Approach Trail. Only 2,172 to go. The 604 steps up to the top of the falls are tough, but the view is quite breathtaking.

I love the idea of hiking the entire length of the AT. I imagine weeks of solitude and nature, quiet contemplation and beautiful scenery. I imagine in the inner strength and sense of accomplishment that such a journey would provide. I imagine my body fit and strong from day after day of hiking. Yep, I love the idea of hiking the whole of the AT - in theory, that is. In reality, I know better. Its a long, hard slog that only about 9000 people have every claimed to accomplish. I would get tired after a few days and the desire to be on my couch with a baseball game on the tube and a cold beer next to me would drive me off the trail and to the nearest airport. Maybe I could do the trail slowly, in 3 day increments over the rest of my lifetime...

Or not.