And so another fine summer has come to a close. Another State Fair has come and gone. The school buses are back slowly rolling down the side streets once again, lights a-flashing and STOP signs popping out of their sides until the coast is clear and we can drive on without running over children.
We do this out of the goodness of our hearts, so that those children, too, can suffer like we did back in the day when we were serving our 13 years of edjamacation and waiting to grow up. Some day they'll eventually grow up too and get stuck behind school buses on the way home from work not running over the kids getting out of those buses. It's all about keeping the chain of involuntary education unbroken.
Yes... another fine summer has come to a close. The leaves are beginning to turn yellowish and reddish shades of green, a telltale sign that the trees will soon be bald. The mornings are cold and crispy. It's time to put away those all-white outfits for yet another winter, lest you want to be shunned by the fashion savvy folk for sporting such garments after Labor Day. (The double-V in "savvy" is dedicated to you, Scrabble Queen.)
At any rate, I hope you all had a fantastic summer. I know I did, and I'd like to share with you some of the highlights:
- Attempted to train sunfish from Lake Calhoun to re-enact Season 2 of Sex and the City. Sadly, the project was canned after receiving a cease-and-desist order from HBO.
- Ate a lot of ice cream. Whenever we'd go grocery shopping, I'd bring a spoon with and just load up on whatever I had a hankerin' for at the time.One Saturday, Goldie and I ran a lemonade stand! We made $13.22. That's nearly 4 Happy Meals!Cooking tip: during periods of extreme summer heat, frozen pizza is much more cool and refreshing when you skip the part where you bake it.
- Collected flattened, dead, dried up frogs from roads and found creative uses for them (coasters, elbow pads on shirts, coin purses, frog jerky)
- Learned while moving into new apartment that you can't fold a pane of glass
- Stole a Metro Transit bus, gutted it out, and filled it with 4 giant tubes of 4x4-foot saltines.. those always reminded me of cracker boxes and I've always wanted to do that. Next summer I'm stealing a giant satellite dish and filling it with soup for the crackers.
- Challenged a McDonald's employee to sell me a burger patty with cheese on it for 11 cents or just an empty bun for 78 cents. Regular cheeseburger = 89 cents. Double cheeseburger = $1.00. If you do the math, this makes perfect sense.. but that's not how they McOperate.
- Naired the hair out of my nostrils. Not a good idea; those hairs are there for a good reason.
- Developed homemade Etch-a-Sketch out of ant farm. I bought some high tech remote controlled ants at Radio Shack (one x axis and one y axis) and put the two controller knobs on the base of the ant farm.
In all, it was a fantastic summer, and I hope you all had one at least as half as exciting and fulfilling as mine. I would like to thank Goldie, my family, our pizza oven, my bandmates, Rockstar: Supernova, Chef Gordon Ramsey and Hell's Kitchen, and anyone else who helped make the summer of '06 one of the best. I would like to thank the bees and mosquitoes for keeping the annoyance factor to a minimum, although I know you bees are just getting started... so let's put a hold on thanking you just yet.
I would like to NOT thank my job for making me get up early 5 days out of every week this summer. I would like to not thank the Minnesota State Fair Amateur Talent Competition as well for not finding my performance of the Dog Seed Shuffle "Amateur" enough. I have something on a stick for you, and will gladly tell you where you can stick it, if you know what I'm sayin'.
Here's to a kick ass Fall!
