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My friend Kenny has the cutest pet rat.

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But I make no guarantees about how long it’ll last. I’m sitting in Rick Beach's DigiComp Pedagogy seminar, after having lectured on teaching with blogs for the first part of the session. We’re all talking Twitter now, and so I set an account up and installed the feed on the sidebar in spite of my previous objections.

Tweet tweet tweet. (Hi, Candyce! Whose name I’m probably mispelling!)

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When I moved here from Little Rock a few years back, my teaching mentor told me to keep a journal of the transition because it would all fade so quickly. Of course my good intentions about the matter got lost in the shuffle of moving and starting PhD work, and of course now I remember less and less about the whole thing. I was telling Compatriot G. the other day that I really wish I had written down the little things that were so different to me about Minnesota culture before they became just the way things are. Like snow emergency signs.

When we were about to begin our Grand Tour of PhD Programs, I started reading about the Twin Cities. I remember sitting in my mother-in-law’s living room in Pocola, Oklahoma reading a guide to the cities and irritating her with the idea that I would take her son so far across the country. I reached the section on snow plow routes and snow emergencies and paused, because I couldn’t really imagine the weather that would make such a thing necessary. Where I’m from, we get two inches of snow every other year if we’re lucky.

From the time I was tiny, I had always wanted to live somewhere with consistent snow. When we got here, I was a little mesmerized by these signs. It meant it wasn’t just something I had read in a book. It was real, and there would be real winter. Of course, every winter that we’ve been here has been mild by Minnesota standards, but I am Arkansan, and so I have been pretty happy. It’s pretty wonderful to get something you wanted after a long time and find out that yes, you really did want it after all.

The next thing, I still don’t really understand. Minnesotans raffle off meat. From the New York Times piece:

My lovely female relatives steadfastly drank me under the table. They drank me, in fact, under the green plastic fake-grass rug under the table. And so I wasn’t at all certain I was hearing things correctly when a man in a plaid flannel shirt approached us and asked, “Would you ladies care to participate in my meat raffle?”

The ladies reached for their purses again — not for guns, as I would have imagined, given the man’s question — but for wallets. They were each peeling one cool dollar bill off their private stashes as I stammered: “Wait! His what? His what raffle?”

“It’s just a meat raffle, Liz,” Aunt Luana explained. “We always have meat raffles around here.”

“But what do you win?”

“Meat.”

The bartender reached into a freezer and produced for my benefit the evidence: several giant packages of, indeed, meat. Frozen meat. A stunning pack of pork chops and a handsome four-pound chuck roast. These were the prizes of the night — beautiful meat to be sweepstaked off to some lucky drunk! Saloon meat! Chance meat! Destiny's meat!
You know you’re an outsider when something that seems perfectly normal to everyone else is impenetrably bizarre to you. I was dizzied with a thousand questions. (Where does this meat come from? Why is the meat-raffle game board imprinted with an official stamp of the Minnesota State Gambling Control Board? Is that an official Minnesota State Gambling Control Board chuck roast? Is it unsanitary to consume pork that you found in a bar?) But there was no time for questions because, lo, the meat raffle was quick approaching, and there were only a few tickets left. I announced, “Mr. Meat Raffle Man, I shall buy all your remaining tickets!”

Perhaps I will figure out a way to live here long enough to understand meat raffles.

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Wabasha Street Caves, 2007

Castle Royal Nightclub, c. 1933, as pictured in John Dillinger Slept Here

S., her friend L, and I spent part of yesterday on the St. Paul Gangster Tour, which starts at the Wabasha Street Caves. We didn’t actually see the caves, but I skulked around the outside taking photos for awhile, and last night I picked up a copy of Paul Maccabee’s John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook’'s Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 for bedtime reading. Published by the MN Historical Society Press, it looks like a marvel of research, and the materials are now collected at the Society. A little reading there and a little googling, and now I know that the caves have been in use since the 1840s, first as a silica mine and then as a mushroom farm of sorts run by French immigrants. In the 1930s, it became a speakeasy at the center of St. Paul's police corruption. Maccabee offers a description of the roaring nightlife it supported:

In its heyday the Castle Royal featured rich oriental carpets and glittering chandeliers, gambling in the back room, and performances by Cab Calloway, the Dorsey brothers, and Harry James. Although there is no proof that Dillinger and other gangsters frequented the Royal, current owners Donna and Steve Bremer have heard all of the gangland legends. “Ma Barker and her gang stopped into the club” claimed Donna Bremer. “In the 1930s, the underworld would come to these nightclubs on the weekend, and then the wealthy of Minneapolis and St. Paul would come just to see the gangsters.”

“The Castle Royal was built in a mushroom cave,” recalled former St. Paul police officer Pat Lannon Sr. “They turned it into a nightclub, put in gambling—craps and poker and cards—in the back end.” Lannon claimed that the Castle Royal’s gambling operations figured in a scheme by Tom Brown [formerly the corrupt police chief, reassigned as a police detective on the vice squad] to destroy rival George Moeller’s campaign for Ramsey County sheriff. Lannon took candidate Moeller on a guided tour of the Royal when the police held a party at the club. “But we skirted the gambling room and didn’t take him there,” laughed Lannon. “Next day, talk about a con, there’s a newspaper article about gambling in the Castle Royal and the article said that [Moeller] was there. They put him on the spot and the grand jury was going to have an investigation to railroad Moeller!” Lannon went to Ramsey County Attorney Michael Kinkead and explained Brown’s political maneuvering; formal charges were never brought against Moeller.

When it opened in October 1933, the Castle Royal promoted itself to newspapers as “The World’s Most Gorgeous Underground Nite Club.” Its motto, “Fit for a King,” referred to opening night entertainment by Juan King and his ten-piece Castle Royal Orchestra. (45-46)

The place is apparently believed to be haunted now. Several murdered gangsters, both male and female, are said to haunt the caves. At least one of them doesn’t care for disco, according to the site, and several of them have played with child visitors.

We’re planning to go back in a few weeks and do the cave tour. Should be fun.

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You might have noticed that things seem quieter around here since the semester began. It’s because of the usual reasons, namely being that there are just some things that I don’t write about here, and my job is usually one of them. That’s especially true now that my department has transitioned from a Department of Rhetoric into a Department of Writing Studies that has incorporated faculty from several departments and taken on the first-year writing program, among other things. We’ve changed colleges (College of Food, Agricultural, Food, and Natural Resources to College of Liberal Arts) and campuses (St. Paul to Minneapolis). Transitional years are best not blogged by graduate students who would like to have a job, I think. But as you can imagine, it still takes up a fair amount of brain space, which means that it crowds out some of the other things I might be writing about instead.

The AFSCME union, which represents our clerical, health, and technical workers, has been on strike since the first week of school. It began as a rather friendly strike (as these things go), with waving and honking, and has mostly remained so. The tone is beiginning to change a bit this week, though. Eleven students (and a professor and staff member, according to some reports) began a hunger strike in support of the workers on Tuesday. This morning, picketers slowed traffic in front of the main parking garage on the St. Paul campus until traffic backed up for several blocks. The tone in front of the garage was fairly unpleasant, but not ugly. (Think Minnesota Nice unpleasant, not Typical Angry Union unpleasant.) When I came back out three hours later, things had cleared out, but it makes me wonder where all this is headed.

I’m finally getting the chance to teach with wikis this semester after two years of teaching presentations. In my Professional & Technical Writing course, the students have split into five groups for the collaborative Instructions assignment. Each group gets a wiki with which to built their text and ancillary documents. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

It turns out that these students don’t code, not even a little bit. When we were beginning to work with the wikis this morning, I asked if any of them writes HTML or CSS. Not a hand went up, even though they’re nearly all web natives and almost all of them are on FaceBook. It makes sense, once you think about it. They’re mostly 19 - 21 now. LiveJournal and Blogger launched in 1999 — a good eight years ago. MySpace and Facebook are both almost four years old. This group never had to know code; to them, the web is just something you write on. They are fully generation web 2.0.

'Tis the season for talks. I’m talking about using blogs to teach digital composing next week in a graduate seminar on Teaching Digital Writing. I’ll primarily be discussing the Internet Tools & Issues course I taught last spring, and that reminds me that I also need to talk about that here. The week after that is Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s), where Mary Jo Wiatrek-Uhlenkott, Jeff, and I will do a panel on constructions of public trust. Mary Jo is talking about the legal rhetoric surrounding public breast feeding; Jeff is examining the invisible role of women photographers in late 19c photography parlors, where a male name on the shingle connoted a more trustworthy public image; and I’m discussing trust and authority in Wikipedia. The week after that, I’m doing a live chat with an undergrad class on wikiality. And sometime later this semester I’m going to talk to another class about blogging and 'zines, if I accept another invitation that showed up this afternoon. And then I think no more talks for a little while.

Regardless, I still have time to cook. Fall brings the urge to stockpile, and we need a pound or so of garlic, some honeys, and some jams. I think I’ll make the first pumpkin pie tonight. I’ve been having roasted red pepper soup with sandwiches at lunch this week, and I’ll probably whomp up a pot of squash soup this weekend. Gawd, I love fall.

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Back in the spring, C. and I decided to split a share of veggie and fruit boxes from Harmony Valley Farms. It was a cost-effective choice — much less than buying an equivalent amount of completely organic produce from a store — and we both wanted to support local, sustainable agriculture. I also figured that having a box of mixed produce automatically show up every week could only improve my eating habits.

The fruit box, which is filled with items from an organic fruit co-op that seems to span the continent, has been an unqualified success. It’s amazing stuff, and we both fear that it’s turned us into total fruit snobs. C waxed rapturous on her blog (which seems to have no permalinks):

The pears were creamy and luscious, only slightly grainy. The grapefruit, perfectly pink, sweeter and less bitter. The pluots sweet and firm. The oranges the epitome of citrus sweetness. Everything was SO VERY RIPE, I felt as if I had tasted fruit for the first time. And then TODAY. Today is when I ate the last of my melons, a personal-sized watermelon. I cut it open---and---yes, it was a yellow watermelon, and likely the sweetest, most flavorful watermelon I've ever tasted.

The veggie box is more of a mixed bag for us. The produce is high-quality, and the farm obviously puts a lot of effort into producing lovely specimens. They also put a fair amount of thought into growing new and different things each year. I’m a fairly adventurous cook, and I’ve mostly enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what to do with unfamiliar foods. (I know now that I like black radish, for instance.) But C. hasn’t been feeling quite as up to it, which is understandable. She has a high-pressure job, and isn’t always in the mood to figure out how to cook some strange thing after a long day of logistics and text wrangling. I’m tired of trying to like certain things, and of feeling guilty about the beets and turnips that go bad because there’s nobody in this house that will go near them.

The other problem for everyone involved is the massive flooding that happened recently in Southern Wisconsin. The farm suffered major crop and topsoil loss as well as structure and equipment damage. They’ve had to lay off workers because of the lost income, which in turn means that things can’t be cleaned up and repaired as quickly because of the lost manpower. It’s a terrible time for small farmers in this part of the country right now. In spite of that, the farm newsletter reports that quite a few jerks wrote or called to cancel their shares because they “would not accept anything less than bounty.” We’ve kept our share, because we figure that when you buy into a farm you’re in for better or for worse. But the boxes are smaller. And shortly after the box pick-up the week after the storm, an email was sent out notifying everyone that some of the produce was likely contaminated by unsanitary flood waters. I ended up throwing everything out that week, and now I’m increasingly paranoid about washing food.

We’ve decided that we’ll continue the fruit box next year, but not the veggie box. Instead, C and I will resume our weekly trip to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, where everything is local and small-farm but not necessarily organic. We’ll buy the things we want and only as much of them as we need, which will result in less waste. And it’ll be a chance to walk and talk together outside, which is something that picking up a box just doesn’t encourage.

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- Fall is here; it’s two-blanket weather already when the windows are open. I’m enjoying every second of being able to sleep under blankets and wear sweats in the house before the tropical hot-water heat gets turned on.
- A tolerant Mister Husband, who is putting up with me orchestrating freezing bedroom temperatures. I think it’s because he knows I’ll be thwarted soon enough.
- Winter squash. Apples. The last haul of red peppers, which I’ll roast today.
- A smart, interesting class full of Technical & Professional Writing students.
- Some conference road trips coming up.
- The Muppet Show exhibit will be in Little Rock at the same time we are.
- Sort of mastering the art of frothing milk. Or at least getting to the point where I’m no longer causing milk explosions.
- Peruvian coffee.
- Sending the RSA proposal off. It’s a fun one, and I’ll be thrilled if it gets picked up.
- Starting to find the groove of the semester. The first two weeks are always a little funky.
- Going to the season opening of A Prairie Home Companion last night. I’ve enjoyed Keillor’s writing since I was a kid and had wanted to go for just about forever. (There goes every ounce of punk cred I’ve ever had.) We were some of the youngest people in the completely packed house, and it turned out to be sort of comforting to sit in the dark, surrounded by the smell of clean, white-haired people, with Keillor’s down-comforter voice settling over us all. I almost fell asleep after intermission. Still, I’ll admit to being disappointed that the Lake Wobegon monologue was 20 years old — a mishmash of two stories from Leaving Home. I really expected a fresh monologue, but I suppose there’s some wonderfulness in hearing live something I had read so long ago.

- The Derailers were guests on the show, and they were awesome live. They did a wonderful cover of Buck Owens’ Big in Vegas* (available on their MySpace) as well as Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass and two others that I’m spacing right now because I’m so entranced by their version of Big in Vegas. There’s no video for it on the Internets (somebody get on that!), but here’s the video for Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass:

*I’'d include the original Buck Owens video, but the YouTube upload is flagged "embedding disabled by request.” Grrr to you, Buck Estate. I’m not linking to it if I can’t embed it. Update your views on media distribution and economic effects, please.

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Last fall, I would teach on the St. Paul campus on Friday mornings and then drive over to the East Bank with Mister Husband. I'd drop him off for his Friday afternoon seminar and head off for a late lunch at the Vietnamese joint, where my favorite waiter would fill me in on what his band was plotting and playing that week. Then I’d go on over to the Engineering library’s second floor reading room to read for exams (and procrastinate on reading for exams). It was a good space for me, and I got quite a bit done there. Now I’m thinking maybe I should work in one day a week of diss writing in this room. Can’t hurt, might help.

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Hastings Saturday Night Cruise-In, 8/25/07. Nikomat EL.

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Hastings Downtown Saturday Night Cruise-In, 8/25/07. Nikomat EL.

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As I worked, I soon realized that I was not able to foresee the best pictures and often could not identify the better negative until much later. This meant that in my future efforts there would be an element dedicated to what can't be foreseen—to risk and to chance. (It turns out that “The unknown is more friendly than we think,”; as D.H. Lawrence said, “Even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind, he could never have thought it before it happened.” Rarely am I tempted to speak of originality.) That simply means that I am responsible for it—that I accept the consequences. ... I had set out to describe the world within my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things—which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things teach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world.
— Emmet Gowin, Photographs, p.101

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Hastings Downtown Saturday Night Cruise-In, 8/25/07. Nikomat EL. Full set here.

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You should read this as a dog picture.

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Necessary background:
1. We are both distracted geeks.
2. We’ve spent pretty much all day every day together since we moved into The Cohabitat four years ago, but we still like each other. Still, all day every day is a lot of sameness, so every once in awhile one of us will take it upon themselves to pleasantly surprise the other one. I always blow being the recipient of these little moments through sheer obliviousness, and I was feeling bad about that until I was once again reminded that Mister Husband is no better.

This morning, I bestirred myself to brew up a serious iced cappucino for him, complete with Actual Foam. (I never ever do this, since I am mostly afraid of the cappucino machine and we rarely get up at the same time. I french press my coffee early in the morning and then he makes his own later on and I steal sips from it.) I delivered it to his study along with a humorous yet romantical card and a new school year sticker. He, of course, was busy cussing the new iMovie and was entirely oblivious. There was a time when I would have been quite disappointed about this, but that was before I knew how bad I am about the exact same thing. So I went off to the kitchen to clean up the cappucino explosions, and when I came back I got many hugs and thank-yous.

Still, I think we must have a new rule around here. Instead of persisting with this thankless task of surprising the oblivious, it would be better to announce that perhaps the object of one's affections should perk the hell up. Something along the lines of Alert! Impending Romance! Cease geekery and pay attention!

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I was headed for the Apple store to pick up the new iWorks and iLife. They opened the doors to me and about 8 middle-aged guys. The geniuses all flocked to help the guys and ignored me. I grabbed my software and headed for the checkout. When I got there, the Apple guy peered down his nose and said, “You do know this is the Family License.” “I have four Macs,” I replied testily.

Love Macs. Not particularly fond of the Apple Store, especially since my favorite ex-student Genius shipped out for London. I usually do all my Apple business via the Internets, but the impending new school year means that we both decided we needed new software right this very minute.

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