Milwaukee Public Market
Mykala is in this picture for scale — this building was once the department store Gimbels. According to Wikipedia, this Milwaukee store was where “Adam Gimbel had first found success (and alleged to be the most profitable Gimbel store)…”. It became a Marshall Field’s for a little while, and is now a Marriott Residence Inn. You can see at the top of this picture the large, ornate coffers that make up the architrave of the Roman façade. The curtains are covering the capitals of some huge ionic columns. They don’t build buildings like they used to.
Mykala made this incredible vegan quiche for my birthday. Wish I had gotten the depth of field right on this one, but I think the picture still captures the deliciousness.
This has been making the rounds today, and I don’t usually post something just to link to it (anymore), so you will understand that this is for future reference. Semicolons; So Tricky by Mary Norris at the New Yorker, quotes from a book called “Punctuation..?”:
Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.
Stronger than a comma, weaker than a period. So, the semicolon has both a comma and a period in it.
Two days ago, we saw a live puppet theater in the backyard of a Prospect Park neighbor on Franklin Avenue.
The title of the production was “The Adventures of Juan Bobo”, and the second half of it, which we caught, was really fun. The live accordion player made it really… lovely, too.
I do wish I could have seen the production of “The Amazing Cow Boat”, which can be summarized thusly:
The Amazing Cow Boat tells the story of a boy named Charlie who is playing pretend in the bath tub. He dives into his imagination where he becomes the captain of a boat that is part cow, part boat, part amazing.
There are more shows in other places, perhaps I will catch the Cow Boat show.
One day ago, it was our third year wedding anniversary. Somehow, with all the changes we’ve been going through (buying our first car together, considering living somewhere by choice rather than by necessity, figuring out our careers and family plans), we both knew that a lot needed to be written in the cards we exchanged. And we wrote a lot, a lot about how we felt now and about our future. And you know what? That brought us closer together. It’s probably a good sign that one of us didn’t write a novella while the other just put “Love you lots!” Nice to be on the same page.
So we went to a lazy river at the new Como Park Pool. We lazy rivered for about 20 minutes, which is exactly the right amount of time to lazy river on a small lazy river on a beautiful late summer’s evening on your third wedding anniversary. I suggested we make this a tradition. No matter where we are or what we are doing on our anniversary, we find a lazy river and then lazy river on it. (This paragraph brought to you by verbing).
These days, we’re starting to do more things. Saw a movie on a weeknight with Nils. Had dinner with old and new friends (Emily Fulton and her boyfriend Nick). Did stuff that felt more like living life than surviving. We’re both trying to figure out what type of structure we want for our days, weeks, years… and it is hard because right now we have fewer restrictions on our lives than ever before. Mykala is beginning to consider her transition out of school, I’m in the middle of mine.
I love her more than anything, and that fact is my North Star.
Just ate at Wok in the Park in St. Louis Park. Wow! Not only was just about everything on the menu vegan-friendly by request, but they had two flavors of vegan cheesecake. One of them we actually thought they’d made a mistake and told us it was vegan. Nope: the head chef stopped by and explained to us how he made it without any dairy or animal products. Yum.
Mykala converted my idiosyncratic and decidedly gentle ill-will towards some selfish strangers to something called “Unlikely Retribution”, and here’s how it works. First, a stranger must do something bad, wrong, or otherwise morally repugnant to you. They might cut you off in traffic, spend 5 minutes ordering coffee, or take your parking spot. The offense usually occurs in an incidental way where you don’t directly interact with this person, though that isn’t a requirement.
The stage has been set, then: someone slighted you. To participate in the game, you describe the most unlikely misfortune that you hope your subject faces:
“I hope that they develop a slow leak in their tire, which forces them to drive slightly slower than normal for the rest of the day.”
“I hope their microwave malfunctions, so that it makes noise for 2 minutes, but their food still comes out cold.”
“I hope their remote control batteries die and the replacement batteries are hard to find.”
“I hope they patch the scratches in their car’s paint, and someone dings their door right after they’re done.”
“I hope they ask for extra ketchup packets, and only receive the normal amount of ketchup packets.”
“I hope the handle on their briefcase loosens so that it has only one questionable attachment point and they have to hug it for the rest of the day.”
“I hope they think there is one more stair, but they’re really on the floor and they awkwardly push their foot into nothing.”
Brainstorming such mishaps makes the whole event feel silly, trivializing the slight against you. The game pulls your thoughts out of anger and into humor.
I wish somebody would figure out how to disrupt the car buying process. It’s unimaginable how bad things must have been before you could easily find the models of a certain type in your area — you would’ve been completely at the mercy of the dealer at which you ended up. In this day and age, we can narrow our search from home with CarSoup, reference safety and reliability using hard data rather than here-say, and can make decisions outside the pressures of car price negotiation. But, it’s still bad out there.
We found a Honda Element in our price range that looked like it could work, so we went to see it. “Oh, the car was really dirty! We’re cleaning it up.” We drove up the road to the other lot that the dealer owned, where the car was supposed to be. Wasn’t there. Back to the original dealer — OH — there it is, in the ‘detailing’ department of the original location.
‘Really dirty’ was now downrated to this: “The folks who sold this owned two dogs and we noticed some things in there that we wanted to clean up.” We looked at the car for a while. The front seat was still wet from… shampooing. We wondered what was so dirty. “I guess they took their dogs in the car sometimes—no stains from them or anything.” It smelled like dog and some shampoo. Why do you list a car for sale when it’s not ready to be sold? What has been covered up in the cars where we haven’t seen this process?
We said we’d stop back later. Which we won’t. Their lies mean one things, ours another. “I noticed a list of things to clean on the dash,” said Mykala. “It said ‘disgusting shit stain on seat.’” No matter how reliable, we’ll let someone else buy this just-cleaned, gnawed plastic, shit-stained Honda Element.
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