Saturday, May 27, 2006

News from MN, 5/27/2006

Yo-yo to all yo-yo fiends,

And hello as well to those who don't yo to the yo.

Nick as survived his first week at the IBM. His mentor predicts it will
take a month of learning before he will be of much use. This week the
challenge was to read as many technical documents as possible without
falling asleep. Today he and the Munger brothers are rabble rousing.
The first photo shows them enjoying a computer program game that Nick
wrote last semester.

btw, I tried that experiment Nick wrote about last week, about not being
able to crush a properly held egg in your fist. Results were messy.
Definitely a deck experiment. Nick blames the failure on my egg being
brown and organic. I call him a white supremacist and then attribute
the egg failure on my superior unstoppable white muscles.

Zach has a week of vacation, starting today. He needed it. He has been
like zombie man the last few weeks, waking up early for work, staying up
late working on a zillion (for you non-math majors, that is more than a
billion) projects, usually for friends. This week he moves out of the
shop he rented for the winter. Today he and Jessy went on a bike ride.
After riding her bike one block, he concluded she needed a new one, so
they biked to a bike shop and he bought her a nice one.

Last weekend I had my long awaited visit with my 6 month pen pal Helen.
I took a couple days off of work and we drove the city in search of a
place for her to stay when she moves here the 1st of July. The 2nd
photo shows her talking to the landlord of the small 1 room house in the
background (near St Mary's Hospital), trying to bribe him into
by-passing the no-pet clause for her dog, a 10 year old border collie.
After meeting with her, the landlord and his wife were thoroughly
charmed, much like I was, and could not help but say yes.

We spent the rest of 4 days she was here having a wonderful time. Mom
and Dad, you will be proud. That 3rd photo is composed of real flowers
Helen bought for me. Neither of us are flower experts, but since both
of our parents were, we figured it was the right thing to do.

The 4th photo is Helen teaching me how to tame the wild fennel, imported
by her from New Hampshire. Turns out we found plenty of it here, right
where it should have been when I was fennel hunting. I simply didn't
have the right fennel whistle to attract it to my fennel blind. Just as
well, as I didn't have a fennel gun either, so probably would have been
tickled to death by agitated fennel fronds.

We made lots of fun food while she was here, filling the fridge with
exotic wonders. Cooked buckwheat, Greek triangles with feta cheese,
stuffed mushrooms, fried Papad, mango salad, Poha (flat rice) with
Indian sauce. After she left, Zack friends emerged and were having fun
temping each other into taste testing various things. The Pomegranate
juice nearly killed a few of them, but the Russian cookies disappeared
quickly. I forgot the name of the cookies, but I remember the recipe,
so I'm doing another batch of those tomorrow.

The last photo is what you get when you ask a rock wall to take your
picture. We were walking around Silver Lake about midnight and found
this rock that was willing to take our picture, but I think that it had
been up partying hard with the lake's wild geese and ducks, as the fuzzy
result would indicate the rock's vision was blurred. Probably drank too
much lake water.

Bruce

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