Dead rabbit voodoo? (and the answer)

So I'm talking to Dottie on the phone the other night, about nothing in particular, when I venture over to the window that looks out into the narrow patch between our house and the fence of the house next door (I'm in the sunken half of the house, so the ground outside comes up to about chest high on me).

And what's lying there looking up at me? Dead rabbit. On it's side, eyes open, little front legs looking as though he dropped dead in mid stride.

Odd, I thought. There are no live wires around for him to have stumbled upon, and he certainly didn't fall off the roof. Oh well, it doesn't really matter what happened -- I've got to get it out of there before the girls see it and Kim has a panic attack that there's a dead animal on the property.

So I go outside with shovel and trash bag in hand, stand over the critter -- and suddenly notice that his left hind leg is missing. And it's not just missing -- the entire hind quarter, up to the small of the back, appears to have been purposefully cut away. Then I finally notice the leg, lying about 10 inches away from the rabbit's head, on the opposite end from where the hind quarter is.

I've run a hundred possible scenarios though my mind and nothing makes any sense. Either we've got Pheobe Buffay's cop boyfriend in the neighborhood -- someone who lies in bed or in a hammock, pistol in hand, waiting to shoot any bird or woodland creature that comes into view, or we've got a voodoo witch doctor living nearby who's trying to tell us something.

ANSWER -- I was thinking specifically of telephone/electric poles, but streetlights also work (there are hydrants nearby). I actually made a point to look around on my way to work (a 15-mile trip, though most of it is on the highway), and found only one or two areas where there were poles to be seen. Makes me wonder what visitors to greater Boston neighborhoods think of all of that wood and wire cluttering up the view.

Picture puzzle

For all of our kinfolk back in Boston -- look at the pictures of our street below and identify what sizable feature of the neighborhood landscape is missing:

There may be more than one, but I'm thinking of one in particular -- one that neither Kim nor I noticed until just recently. Answer next time.

No caption necessary

Feature presentation

You'd think that finally settling in would mean a mostly complete level of comfort regarding the house, but in many ways, it's still as if we just moved in this morning.

Here's a rundown of the features of the house that still make us feel like novice homeowners:

• Central air conditioning -- this has been the godsend I knew it would be, yet even that caused some confusion early on. As with furnace switches back home, central air also has a "mast" switch that took us a while to find. And we've yet to figure out the "auto" thermostat -- we just turn it on and off manually when we think it needs it.
  
• In-ground sprinkler system -- another case of turning it on when we need it, even though there is a date/time function that puts it on a schedule. It's also not as effective as we'd like. The lawn gets watered alright, but the circular reach of each sprinkler is such that the coverage doesn't overlap. So what we're left with are rings of discolored dry grass all over the lawn that make it look like a scene location for Mel Gibson's "Signs."
  
• Humidity control -- we haven't even bothered to touch this yet, and wouldn't know what to do with it if we did. Unless a manual turns up, we'll continue to leave it alone.
  
• Water conditioner -- every house we looked at outside of St. Paul had one of these, an obvious testament to the "hardness" of the local water. There's a knob at the top of our unit that indicates "service," so undoubtedly we'll either have someone look at it or explain it to us before the summer's over.
  
• Trash service -- this one actually took us by surprise, and is one that should produce a "wow, really?" from the folks back home. There's no municipal trash collection built in to the town service structure -- we have to contract with a service for a once-a-week pickup, one large bin only, with extra charges for extra trash.

If there is one feature of the house that can genuinely be described as both "cool" and useful at the same time, it's the laundry chute -- or, as the girls call it, the "dirty clothes hole." A little door in our bedroom wall leads to a zippable hanging bag in the downstairs hall, just outside the laundry room. Very handy, though sometimes we have to reach way up and loosen "clothes clogs."

New pics

A few shots from the company outing at Como Park Zoo & Funpark:

And a little shot of the thing most responsible for getting us here in the first place (just received in the mail):

From a distance

For a time when I lived in Indianapolis, I was a regular runner, eventually getting up to 5 miles per run (seems unfathomable now). When I started out, I logged only about a mile per run, and I recall the surprise of people back home when I told them that a mile run was a run around the block. Literally. After leaving the entrance to my housing development, one lap around the block I lived on was slightly more than a mile.

This is an example of how distance can be distorted by what you're used to vs. what actually is, and we're finding that living in a Twin Cities suburb provides a similar distortion from what we were used to in Winthrop.

Out temp housing complex was right off Rte. 35E, but was removed from Eagan's main retail drags, so every time we needed to go shopping or hit a restaurant, we had to get on the highway to get there. On our first day in town, I went grocery shopping while the Kim got the girls settled. I was familiar with Cub Foods (think Market Basket) from my days in Indiana and knew there was one a few exits down the highway, so that's where I went. The mere concept of getting on the highway to do grocery shopping made it seem SO far away, compared to the 3-4 miles I usually drove to get from Pleasant St. to Shaw's in Revere, but it was actually about a mile and a half.

A similar distortion occurs every day when I go to work. The drive to the campus is about 14 miles from out house, then it's "just" a walk from the parking lot. But there are 4500 people working in this one location, and the 6 available parking lots fill up quick. By the time I arrive at the lot at around 8 am, I have about a .4 mile walk from my car to the back door of the building -- which is almost exactly the distance I walked from the Aquarium T station to the Northern Avenue Bridge on my way to my former place of employment.

No deep insights today -- just a reflection. Just as perceptions of time have been disturbed by network programming coming on at 7 pm and daylight still visible past 9:30 pm, perceptions of distance also need considerable adjustment.

Video of the girls

Kim has joined the YouTube generation and posted a short video of the girls in the yard. Check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etfFdhIxq9Q

Father's Day, and another big scare

Flashback to May 2000 --

Kim and I had just moved into our first house, with all of the caution and nervousness that goes with it. Within the first week or so, Kim noticed water in the basement. A call to Winthrop's major plumbing outfit resulted in the discovery of a broken pipe in the wall along the kitchens of the apartments. A major expense right that we weren't ready for off the bat -- although, truth be told, it would up being a blessing in disguise. The guy who took care of us, Bill Grayson, became our "plumber friend" and my personal hero for all of the small jobs he did for us at a moment's notice. (And his daughter Maura was a godsend to us as Ellie's first babysitter.)

Fast forward to 2007 --

The other day -- not 2 full weeks into the ownership of our new house -- we noticed a wet spot in the carpet of the family room that was getting bigger and wetter by the day. Once again, we were bracing ourselves for a big expense that we weren't ready to tackle, and visions of ripped out walls and jackhammers kept me up most of Wednesday night. Two visits by a local plumber later, it turned out the culprit was a condensation hose from our air conditioning unit that was supposed to be positioned over the drain, but was instead tucked away behind the furnace in our laundry room. We've got to replace the padding under that section of the carpet and dry the whole thing out, but that's nothing compared to the major pipe replacements I was envisioning. (It's yet to be determined if this episode is a blessing of any kind.)

In both cases, my immediate reaction was to call my dad.

When it comes to things like this, I guess I never really grew out of the childhood notion that he knows how to diagnose and fix just about anything around the house. As I got older, I realized that he just learned by doing and watching, like I did. But that has never kept me from going to my "go-to" guy.

And truth be told, he's been, and continues to be, my "go-to" guy for just about everything in my life. Advice on my first mortgage, unexpected tickets to a Sox or Bruins game, sharing oversight duties at the Stool, or just needing a guy to talk to about something going on in the family -- JD has always been my go-to guy.

So when we noticed that the carpet was getting wet, it stung a bit to know I couldn't call Somerville and have the voice on the other end say, "I'll come over tomorrow and take a look at it." The sting wasn't that he wouldn't be the one to figure it out -- I could care less who figured it out. The sting was that my "go-to" guy wasn't close by, ready to give me reassurance that his mere presence has given so many, many times over the years.

Perhaps it's appropriate that the carpet got wet when it did, four days before Father's Day. It gives me another blog entry, to be sure, but it also gives me a long overdue opportunity to let the world know how much I honestly love and miss my dad.

The flying car

I briefly touched on the differences between relocating 15 years ago and doing so today in an earlier post. But my sister Lynne reiterated as much following an online game session we had the other night:

"Though I know you've probably thought of this already, an observation on what it's like to live in the future: Twenty years ago the long-distance rates were such that you could only talk to the family once a week, and we had to watch the clock the whole time. Now we can e-mail as much as we want, long-distance calls don't break the bank, and last night people in three different states played Scrabble together. Where's my flying car?"

All within an easy drive

Sunday was our warmest day yet here, and the sun was particularly strong. Historically, it just the type of day we would have packed up and went to "Nana & Grampy's beach" until 6pm, so after finishing breakfast, my mind immediately flipped to the trying to find a place to take the girls swimming.

Fortunately, a quick look on the Burnsville web site turned up Crystal Lake Beach (about 3 miles away), so I decided to give it a try. As I suspected, it was very much like Sandy Beach on the Mystic Lakes in Medford -- big parking lot, a roped off area for swimming, a bath house, and picnic tables in the shade. The main differences were no life guard on duty and a lot of speedboats and jet skis further out on the lake.

The girls liked it well enough, and of course I couldn't help comparing it to afternoons with the cousins on White Horse. But I have fond connections with Sandy Beach as well -- that's where my Nana & Grampy met, and to this day, I can recall the summer of 1984 and how fantastic it was to pull over on my way home to take a plunge after a long day of unloading tractor trailers at the Marshall's warehouse in Woburn -- so that took care of some of the home sentimentality.

But get this -- as I was sitting on the beach watching the girls, I looked out over the lake and saw, looming over the far side, Burnsville's Buck Hill ski area, and I couldn't help but think of one of Boston's major tourism selling points -- "skiing and swimming, all within an easy drive."

Apparently, our surroundings haven't changed as much as one would think.

First looks

Well, pretty much everything is unpacked and put away, which means it's as good a time as any to give everyone back home a few glimpses of how we're living now:

Kim said Maggie walked around the house the entire first day saying, "I'm SO happy that all our stuff came back!" And I must admit, there is a certain euphoria that comes with seeing so many familiar things after 3 weeks (until you have to sort through it and dispose of the boxes).

Does everyone know how much I hate hate hate hate hate hate doing the grass? Or any other kind of yard work, for that matter? Well, how's this for poetic justice:

My father-in-law and brothers-in-law and no doubt are tickled to see this.

Finally (for now), I leave you with this shot of our garage ceiling:

This hole was not there when I woke up this morning. I'll leave it to you to figure out what happened (hint: think the 3 Stooges).

Wild life

Ever since we committed to this move, Kim & I have been discussing the possibility of getting the girls a pet. Both of them are mildly intrigued by the prospect of getting a cat, and their parents think it might benefit them (Maggie especially) if we got a dog.

Negotiations are still pending, but getting an animal may turn out to be a moot point. Today Kim met the acquaintance of Mrs. Gregerson from across the street, who gave her a flurry of information about the neighborhood, including a few things about our property that we weren't prepared for:

• A family of bunnies has been noticed in our driveway -- she seems to think they're living in a burrow under the garage.
  
• We can expect to see deer in our backyard from time to time, as they apparently are drawn to the apple trees at the back of our property.
  
• On a somewhat creepier note, coyotes have also been seen in the neighborhood from time to time.
  
• To top it off, she says to expect a lot of mosquitoes in the summer -- which, I would expect, would in turn mean large numbers of bats.
  

Under the cherry spoon

With the traditional Plymouth cookout out of the picture for a while, we spent our day before Memorial Day by getting out of temp housing and exploring a little bit. Every book and brochure about Twin Cities tourism features a shot of the cherry-and-spoon sculpture, so we set out to find it.

Kim has posted the pictures taken that day at the Walker Arts Center sculpture garden -- you can see them at:

http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=94151181097802673/l=268438970/g=31956021/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Southbound and down

It was like a white-collar, upper-Midwest version of Smokey and the Bandit -- all I needed was Sally Field riding shotgun and Jackie Gleason chasing me.

The closing of our home on Pleasant St. went off without a hitch on Friday May 25, and the proceeds were deposited in our Massachusetts bank account the following Tuesday -- plenty of time, we thought, to have the money transferred to our new Minnesota bank account in time for our closing on Friday June 1.

Silly us. Nothing so seemingly simple ever is. Turns out the wiring of so large a sum is not a simple thing -- there are rules, regulations, restrictions and, of course, fees and more fees involved. We were told that the only way to make sure we had a cashier's check in hand for our closing was for one of us to drive to the closest Bank of America branch and get one.

That's how I found myself on the road at 6am Friday morning, headed for Mason City, Iowa.

I logged an awful lot of miles in my Indiana days, and this trip reminded me very much of that -- miles upon miles of wide open spaces, farmland as far as the eye could see, and not much to choose from on the radio. In fact, after my CD of choice ended as I near the Iowa state line, I committed to listening to the first station I came across on the dial (at least until I arrived at the bank). It turned out to be the local affiliate of the American Family Radio Network -- lots of songs featuring lambs, rivers and light.

I reached Mason City at 8am on the nose and found the bank branch 5 minutes later. Having just short of 30 minutes to kill before it opened, I decided to get my oil changed at the Jiffy Lube next door. Had a fun time telling my story to the guys who work there as well, as the older Michigan couple who was having their car serviced.

I stepped into the BOA branch at 8:30am and waited for the teller -- "Bobbie Jo," by her name tag -- to finished up with an elderly gentleman she referred to as "Marshall." Throughout my short time there, I didn't hear one "How can I help you?" or explanation of what banking service was needed. Every bit of talk was a pleasantry of some kind:

• "How y'all doin' this morning?"
• "Where's that fine granddaughter of yours?"
• etc.

When I explained to Bobbie Jo that I needed a sizable cashier's check, she immediately said, "Oh, closing on a house today, are we?" Again, flashbacks to Indiana, where every small town is just like that. Bobbie Jo fixed me up in short order and I was back on the road by 8:50am, just enough time to make the 11am closing.

Kim and the girls pulled in to the parking lot not 2 minutes after I did, and we were soon signing away across the table from the former owners of our new residence. A very nice couple who were headed back to their native Wisconsin, they gave us the names of three potential babysitters in the neighborhood, wished us the very best and gave us the keys to our family's second home.