Out it goes to a good home

Eight feet of poker table was slid into the back of a pickup truck today. We kept the memories, lost a pain to haul around.

Look at those arms. An obvious
choice for a poker table home.

When you're parting with a bulky sentimental item, it's always good to know it's going to a good home. In 2005, at the height of the Texas Hold' Em craze, Stan built this table top for his wife, St. Paul Katie. Many home games were played around it, lots of memories and bad beats and money changing hands. But interest in the game has faded, and it became hard to gather a group big enough to sit around the table to play poker. Of course, Katie's interest never waned, she still enjoys the game at a variety of venues. Nevertheless, we sadly advertised the tabletop for sale during our present down-sizing effort. And what do you know? Among the bidders was Brian B., a professional poker player from South St. Paul, who has taken to offering home games during this pandemic, with Las Vegas games and his livelihood shut down. Brian assures us that the home games on this additional table will start up immediately, with local poker players galore ready to shuffle up and deal! He promises some photos of enthusiastic players gathered around the homemade poker table. Socially distant, of course.

For Sale

Stan built this in 2005 for his poker-playing wife and she hosted numerous parties at it. Interest in poker has waned and we go out for poker now. So today the table top went on the Facebook Marketplace for $50 to anybody who wants to haul it out of the basement.. The honker is heavy and eight feet long; certainly not the item for a couple looking for their next home.

Yellowtail wonder where everyone's been?

Covid restrictions have been lifted on The Liberty, so my man Hai headed three miles out into the Pacific and soon had his limit of five 30-pound yellowtail tuna. Hai doesn't eat fish (that's another story) but was happy to give his up to some newcomers who had immediately gotten sick aboard the ocean-going vessel, and weren't able to dip a line.

Bye, bye Jemima

Quaker Oats is taking Aunt Jemima off the shelf?

First black person I ever saw was a woman paid to depict ever-smiling Aunt Jemima and appear at an all-white Alexandria supermarket to promote sweet syrup on pancakes. Also, summers we’d see an occasional black servant, shopping for some rich white people vacationing in our fair lake city. We gossiped about such an oddity.

That was pretty much the extent of my inter-racial experience. So when our renown choir director proposed that our quartet appear in blackface and sing a blatantly racist song about African Americans caught stealing corn from a white man’s field, I was all for it. Um. We didn’t sing "African Americans." The N word was right there in the lyrics. We memorized them and I enthusiastically sang the bass lines. I could sing it today -- if I had a willing group.

Our sophomore quartet was quickly supplied with the school’s handy black-and -white minstrel show grease paint. We didn’t win the talent show, but we got a big round of applause from a packed gym largely as ignorant as we were.

I am the only surviving member of that black-face, white shoe quartet; Paul, Steve and Mike are gone, as well as our esteemed director. 

But I think they would all agree today that we’ve got a lot to learn about systemic racism.

The toilet paper shortage is over!

The toilet paper shortage is over! Eden Prairie street crews used miles of it again to protect cars from new, wet tar. A small sign, but we are getting out of this pandemic, one thing at a time.

Cast iron

Tried out the new cast iron skillet on the new induction cooker as a sidebar to our grill set up. Lots to learn about cast iron cooking, low and slow. These eggs and yesterday's burger came out great. Something new for pandemic idleness. Smell the ham! Is 180 degrees too low? Probably. Going to bake fish inside the grill next.

Box of chocolates...

When we opened the condolence note from a friend, out spilled a packet of seeds, wildflowers to plant in Jennifer's memory. It was like a box of chocolates when we planted them at Hotel California. We didn't know what we were going to get. Now we know. The sunflowers pushed everything else away and now stands 7 feet tall beside the pond.