What's Brown and Sticky?

My friend Katy's favorite riddle: "What's brown and sticky?"

Katy would usually start laughing before she ever even reached the punch line, which was:

"A stick."

Try telling this joke sometime. You'll find it gets funnier and funnier (to you, at least) every time you tell it. You'll also find that whoever you tell it to will think it's a really lame joke. For some reason, that's part of the fun.

On Friday afternoon, I found something brown and sticky waiting on my porch. It wasn't a stick. It was a gigantic cardboard box covered in sticky tape.

So here's a new riddle: What comes in a brown and sticky cardboard box?

*** Oh, the suspense... ***

***

Answer: This!

I missed my old beastie piano really badly, so early last week I went on an urgent mission to find something to fill the void. The result is this digital Casio keyboard. It produces really gorgeous grand piano sound, will never need tuning, and it's hammer-weighted so it feels a lot like playing a real piano, but it's light enough for me to lift by myself so it will be super easy to move. (No more dying wildebeest tragedies!)

It arrived by UPS on Friday afternoon, just after I got home from a pediatric advanced life support training session. I spent the rest of the evening setting it up and giving it plenty of musical pounding. It's amazing how this place feels so much more like home now that there's a piano in it!

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Speaking of this place, here's a little tour of my apartment now that I'm all settled in. It's got a lot of old-world charm, and reallyreallyreally tall ceilings that make even my tallest bookshelves look like teensyweensy dollhouse furniture. And the more I look at it, the more the carved scrollwork on the fireplace mantle looks like Santa Claus. Am I crazy, or is there an uncanny resemblance there?! If you're ever in the mood to see Virginia, (...or, um, Santa Claus) you're welcome to visit me here anytime!

Getting your hands dirty

Once upon a time, Jorge had a steeply-sloped front lawn that caused him to weep, wail, and gnash his teeth whenever it needed to be mowed.

Meanwhile, in a land far, far away, Val was trying to sell her house (a multi-acre horse property 15 minutes north of town) because she and Jorge are engaged. Sadly, she was regretting that she'd have to give up all the plants in her flower garden when the house eventually sells.

Solution? A bunch of us got together and dug out the slope in Jorge's yard to make a terraced landscape, then transplanted Val's favorite perennials into it. We made the retaining walls out of fieldstone salvaged from the foundation of a demolished old barn on her property. With all of us working, the bulk of the project was done in a single Saturday afternoon! Even better, since the only thing that had to be purchased was the woodchip mulch, the cost for the whole project was under $15. The village rejoices!

All of this happened over a month ago, but I just barely unpacked the cable today to connect the camera to my computer, and found these pictures in the process of transferring the images over. I've decided that finding forgotten photos on a camera is kind of like finding $5 in the pocket of your jeans when you're sorting the laundry. It's just nice.

Surreal

. ...And then an airplane crashed into my high school. - Click this link for pictures - .

Mourn the Downed Wildebeest

The move is done and I'm in Roanoke now. To tell the truth, I'm kind of having a rough time of it. I keep telling myself it's going to get better, and I'm sure it really is going to get better, but for the first time in my life I'm honestly homesick. Embarrassingly so. Bordering on huddle-in-a-blanket-and-cry-on-the-floor homesick. Making matters worse, I lost a dear friend on moving day: My piano. If you've ever known me, you've known my funky old piano. My dad bought it at an army surplus auction when I was about 3 years old and brought it home on the back of his big orange work truck. It turns out that before it was auctioned to dad, it had been through the Korean war, the Viet Nam war, then got sold a few different times over the years to a few different military families who each painted it a different hideous shade of brown or green. It was a dismal burnt-caramel brown color when it finally came to live with us. The auction lot number was still written on the front in black magic marker, and took many years to fully scrub off. I was the only kid in my family who ever really learned to play it, plus I spent several long messy days stripping off all those hideous paint layers, so when I finished high school my parents gave the piano to me. It has moved with me 8 times since then. From Eagar to Tucson, then to another apartment in Tucson, a house in Tucson, an apartment in Rochester, a house in Rochester, another apartment in Rochester, and another one after that. At the second Rochester apartment, it lost a wheel in the process of going down 9 steps when I moved in or perhaps while coming back up those 9 steps when I moved out (...my deepest apologies to the inevitable hernias induced in the 3 guys who helped get it back up those stairs). And then it made its final move to Roanoke, where even though the landlord had promised the apartment would be ground floor and the piano would roll right in, there were five steps to climb up to reach the door. There was no way to get it in. I don't know 3 strong guys here. There was no affordable way to put it in storage. So it sat in the moving truck, homeless, for a full day while I thought about how to avoid saying goodbye to it. I didn't win. I decided to donate it to Goodwill. As a final insult to injury, during the drive to Goodwill it suddenly spun around in the otherwise-empty truck and fell down flat on its back on the floor. BOOM. Looking at it like that -- with all of its keys lifted out of place like old yellowed teeth trying to fall out of an old brown mouth, and its lid flown open, and its front panel popped from its hinges, and its legs in the air -- it looked like a dying wildebeest. I found some highway maintenance workers mowing grass on the nearby roadside and asked them to help me stand it back up (...my sincerest apologies yet again, for causing three more hernias, but my sincerest thanks to these three pallbearers). Then I rolled it into Goodwill. They said they're going to auction it off. Maybe at the auction the high bidder will be a hard-working man who'll drive it home on the back of his big orange work truck and let his 3-year-old daughter learn to play it. Maybe. I want to go home.

Reunited and it's understood...

Lots going on here, but not much time to write about it... Medical School Graduation at the Mayo Clinic! Surreal. Thank you to everyone who sent happy thoughts my way. :-)

Jacobs family reunion! It's been over ten years since we've all been together, but my whole family came to Minnesota for graduation! It meant a lot to me to have them here. I love them so much.

Camping trip to a deserted island! Look up the fascinating history of Rock Island, WI, if you have a chance.

Next up: Moving to Virginia tomorrow to start residency. I'm guessing this blog will be out of commission for a little while until I'm settled in there. Wish me luck!