Confession Time

Yes I have a confession to make.  I used to make blog entries at least once, sometimes twice a week.  I used to be constantly smiling, happy, positive, full of life and looking forward to each and every day with a gleam in my eye and a song in my heart.  But I have not been myself for quite some time now and I think it is time I let you all know why. 

As I was standing in the shower yesterday morning half-asleep and letting the water rain down on me for the first time in 72 hours, I got to thinking about how much I have changed.  First of all…my personal hygiene has gone to hell.  Did I brush my teeth this morning?  Who knows.  Deodorant?  Maybe.  Shaved?  Certainly not today.  Weekends are the worst…I have no incentive to bathe, change my clothes, look in the mirror, and I usually just forget about that stuff or blow it off.  Have you ever gone days without showering and your hair is so oily that the water just repels off it, like a duck?  You try to introduce shampoo to your hair, but it’s so greasy that it just soaks up the shampoo and then it’s gone…where did the shampoo go?  So you have to rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat until you have your hair back again.

Sleep?  Fahgettaboudit.  I do not sleep more than an hour or two at a time.  My eyes are red and bloodshot with heavy black bags beneath them.  When I do manage to get to sleep I often times dream about getting to sleep.  I literally dream that I am going to bed and sleeping.  Time is either absurdly fast (I will hit the snooze button, fall back asleep and seemingly a quarter of a second later it is going off again…and on a larger scale the days/weeks all fly by as they blend into one big blob) or time is painfully slow as I stare at the clock waiting for daylight to come and put an end to the misery that is nighttime.  I am perpetually sick, with the winter’s cold never really leaving my body as I sneeze and cough my way through the days.

I do not seem to care about work (it’s just there…something I have to do), or TV (I have dozens and dozens of hours of my shows piled up in the DVR that I cannot imagine ever getting to), or sports (I have not attended a live sporting event or sat down and watched an entire game on TV in eons), or the internet (I checked my email last night…286 unread emails…hopelessly behind), or reading (I have a stack of unread magazines about 2 feet high and I cannot remember the last book I read), or even sex (just too tired to even go there).  Food is something I do to stay alive rather than enjoy as I usually cram most of my microwave/box/can meals in my mouth in seconds without thinking or barely chewing.  This unhealthy eating combined with the lack of exercise has led to my weight getting too high.

My friends do not really know me anymore as I have become a recluse.  I stay in my house for days on end without hardly ever leaving except to go to the grocery store or to work.  I do not go to concerts or out to the bars or the movies or hardly any social events.  Golfing with the boys is nothing but a fond memory.  I just emailed my softball coach to let him know I am going to skip playing this year.  My social life has been reduced to pulling open my junk drawer and staring at all of the old concert ticket stubs from days gone by.

The house is a disaster, with stuff strewn everywhere to trip over.  The layers of dust on the mantle and book shelves and any flat surface in the house are growing thicker every day.  The pile of dirty laundry has taken over the entire walk-in closet as I am down to my last pair of socks.  The kitchen floor has become a delicatessen for enthusiastic ants scooping up old food that has gathered under the table or has been kicked over to the perimeter of the room.  Stains from hastily cleaned piles of vomit on the carpet are scattered throughout the house.  Old syringes lay on the dresser, crusted over with various liquids that profess to offer relief and good times.

And maybe worst of all I have become grouchy and negative.  Let’s take the god-forsaken month of February for example.  This cold, dark, bleak, terrible month of February in the past has had one redeeming feature:  it is shorter than the rest.  28 days.  Get through these 4 weeks and then we can move on to happy, hopeful, life-giving March.  Today should be the last day of February right?  But nooo, not this year!  It’s frigging leap year!  As I stare out the window with tired, blank, unfeeling eyes at the snowfall piling up on my car I yearn for a new day.  But I do not want that day to be February 29^th.  I just want to be able to get off this rollercoaster I am on, get my life back to normal and…really…just get a good night’s sleep for a change.

Okay, here it is.  I am just going to come out and say it: 

“Hi.  My name is Sneaky Sweets, and I have...a 6 month old son and a 2 year old daughter.”

Air mishap #5

Okay, here’s one more installment in my run of flying adventures that had the potential for disaster.  At the time I was still a student back in the early 1990’s and flying with my instructor Blaine.  On a nice sunny afternoon we took off from Madison, WI and headed out for a small airport about a half-hour west of there to work on touch-and-goes.  (It was the same little airport where I emergency-landed with my buddy Chris to locate the missing/burning cigarette butt in my 9/2/11 blog entry). 

It is a single-runway no-tower airport, so again—when you enter it’s airspace you are required to announce your intentions, location, and all of your turns on the assigned frequency for that airport so that all of the pilots in the area will know where each other are and avoid any ‘mishaps’.  Well we flew into the airspace, noted the wind was out of the north, and we announced our intention to do touch-and-goes landing into the wind on runway 35. 

We announced ourselves on the radio with every step of the way and never got a response so we assumed we were the only plane in the airspace.  Sweet, we had the whole airport to ourselves.  So on our very first approach I am on final just a few feet over the ground and about to set her down when suddenly we both notice another plane heading right at us!  This moron is landing on the same runway but from the opposite direction and he’s bearing down on us fast!  Not only did he never bother to announce that he was in the airspace much less announce that he was landing, but he was landing with the wind on our runway.  He was just wrong on so many levels it was mind-boggling. 

I didn’t know if I should abort the landing and pull up, but we thought he might do the same thing so Blaine had me finish the landing and slam on the brakes while taking a hard left off the runway.  Just as we were sliding off into the grass next to the runway this idiot landed, rolled right past us and then took off again.  Blaine got on the radio and yelled at him, but no response so who knows if the guy even had his radio on or was turned in to the correct frequency.  My heart was racing and I was pissed.  I wanted to report him to the FAA but neither of us caught the tail# of his plane.  Lesson learned…eyes wide open at all times because even if you are going by the book and doing everything perfectly, you never know when some dumbass might ruin your whole day with a head-on collision.

The Dark Continent

As the administrator of this blog, not only can I see the # of hits the site gets (as can all of you…a quick check of the counter shows that we are up to 3,142 hits), but I can also track what countries the hits are coming from.  How or why anybody outside of my circle of friends and family sees and reads this blog is beyond me, but there have been hits from all over the world including almost every continent.  So far the good people of Antarctica are the only continent that have completely ignored ‘Sneaky Sweets’, but that’s okay…they are probably too busy hanging with penguins and trying to stay warm to read my blog.  Plus, contrary to my blog entry from 1/17/12 they probably feel strongly about warming up their cars for awhile before taking off, regardless of the year of the car.  So Antarctica withstanding, we have had hits from some pretty distant countries.  I can understand hits coming from Europe as maybe a friend of a friend might know someone there and told them about it…but Indonesia?  Check out the list of Sneaky nations so far:

United States

Russia

United Kingdom

France

Germany

Romania

Japan

Canada

Czech Republic

Latvia

China

Italy

Ireland

Peru

Indonesia

Costa Rica

South Korea

Columbia

Malaysia

Australia

Netherlands

Serbia

South Africa

Kenya

Note the last two…South Africa and Kenya??  I know very little about Africa, but in my limited mind it is separated into two sections:  1) South Africa…a place that we have always been lead to believe was evil.  I guess they are better now, but I think I might still be a little pissed at them and maybe do not completely trust them yet?  2) The rest of Africa…a wild place full of elephants and lions and monkeys.  I know from reading the magazine covers in the checkout line at my local Rainbow Foods that Angelina Jolie and Madonna have adopted a good chunk of the population and relocated them to various mansions throughout Europe.  And I know from being a good U2 fan that Bono is trying to save the rest.  But I fear that those they do not get to will be struggling with a lifetime of war, drought and famine.  Why in the world would anyone there be reading about Sneaky Sweets? 

The youngest of my two sisters Cindy is an African expert so maybe I should check with her.  Her husband Gus Savalas is extremely tough, cool and smart.  They travelled throughout Africa together and even got married there.  I am ashamed to admit, but as adults Cindy and I have not kept in contact with each other as much as we should.  I do know that Cindy is crazy smart, loves animals, is strong in every sense of the word, and she makes really good bread.  I am not really sure but I think she got her bachelors degree in ‘partying’ at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, her masters degree in horseback riding and hockey at a fancy Canadian college in Montreal, and her doctorate degree in African Politics at a fancy U.S. college like Yale or the University of America in Washington D.C.  Obviously I need to give Cindy a call and say hi, catch up, and stay in touch more.  I hope they know that I think about them often.

So here is what else I know about Africa.  I know from seeing the movie ‘Blood Diamond’ that the place is full of horrible diamond mines and we should never buy our diamonds from there.  I know from seeing the movie ‘Out Of Africa’ that it is a vast and beautiful place full of biplanes and steam locomotive trains.  I know from watching the ‘Weather Channel’ that Africa is guilty of annually spawning numerous hurricanes that jump off the west coast and scurry across the Atlantic, talking careful aim at our great eastern cities with intent to do grievous bodily harm.  And I know from watching ‘Man vs. Wild’ that the place is chock full of strange but tasty bugs that the star of the show ‘Bear Grylls’ likes to eat whenever he hangs out there.

So anyways, my completely naïve sense of Africa makes me wonder why anybody there has the time or the inclination to read my little blog.  If anybody from Africa could login to the site and email me your story about how you heard of ‘Sneaky Sweets’ I would be thrilled.  Or if you could leave a comment in the ‘comment box’ I would be honored.  And Cindy, I promise I will call soon.

I've Been On Fire Three Times...

The first time I caught on fire was in December of 1985.  I was over at my new girlfriend Lona’s house for Christmas with her whole huge family (mother, dad, brother, sister, grandparents, and a bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins).  This was back during the beginning of my Grateful Dead/hippie days so I had long hair half-way down my back and I think the relatives were a tad suspicious of me.  I was pretty nervous but I successfully made it through the entire dinner without spilling my milk or saying anything too stupid.  But then it was time for the big family picture in the living room, and since I was not in the family I graciously offered to take the picture. 

So everybody gathers in the living room.  They are all sitting/standing/centered around the couch and I am looking through the view-finder trying to fit them all in.  I am trying to be cool…directing, telling them where to go, scrunch together, smile, etc.  All the while I am backing farther and farther up in order to try and fit them all in the picture…finally it’s all starting to come together.  Just as I get them all in the frame and I am about to snap the picture, suddenly two things happen simultaneously while I’m looking through the view-finder:

1)      They all start waving their arms and yelling and several of them rush me.

2)      I smell the nasty, acrid odor of burning hair.

In my effort to fit the whole family in the picture, I had backed up so far that I was up against the mantle above the fireplace where several small candles were burning and I had set my long hair ablaze.  Like I said several of them had rushed me and I put down the camera as they took turns beating me about the head to put out the flames.  So damn embarrassing, but they all had a good laugh once they got the flames out and for some reason I think that won them over as I eventually married into the family.

The next time I set myself on fire was on April 13^th, 1988 in the parking lot of the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, IL.  I was there with friends for the first night of a 3-night run of Grateful Dead shows, closing out their 1988 spring tour.  It was a cold, gray, blustery day out in the lot and I was taking a break from selling tie-dyed tee-shirts to have a beer and hang with some friends.  I had long since quit smoking pot by then, but I had no trouble being in a circle while bowls were being passed.  I would just say no thanks, and pass it on.

So I was in the circle, wearing a big, warm, Guatemalan poncho with large, loose sleeves.  Someone on my left passed me a pipe and I took it and offered it to the guy on my right, but he declined and said just to hold it for a bit.  So I held on to the pipe and we all chatted for a couple of minutes till the guy on my right was ready and I handed it to him.  He tried to take a hit but there was nothing left in the bowl.  Just then he pointed to my right arm and said:  “Dude, you’re on fire.”

The burning ember from the pipe had blown out of the bowl into the bottom of my poncho sleeve.  The ember had smoldered for awhile and eventually caught the fabric on fire.  As I looked down I saw the thick white smoke billowing out of my right sleeve and felt the flames burning my arm hairs.  Then I saw that the flames had made their way through the sleeve and were licking up the outside of my poncho arm.  I had seen enough, so I whipped the poncho up over my head, threw it on the ground and stomped out the flames while patting out the last of the little fires on my arm hairs.  Again, slightly embarrassing but we all had a good laugh once I got the flames out.

Slightly interesting sidenote:  After being on fire that day, I thought it would be a cool coincidence if the Dead played ‘Fire On The Mountain’ in concert that night (in it’s usual place in the 2^nd set).  Well they did not play it that night, but on the final night there in Chicago on 4/15/88 they opened the 1^st set with the ‘Scarlet Begonias/Fire On The Mountain’ medley, which was extremely rare and cool for it to be in the 1^st set.  Another slightly interesting sidenote now that we’re on the subject of April 15th:  As it was the final day of the tour, I was done selling my tee-shirts and just wanted to relax and take in the parking lot scene full of traveling hippies selling their wares.  We found a dude selling $1 beers and settled in for a long afternoon of hanging out and having fun with my friends.  After a few hours I suddenly I remembered the tax forms that I had hurriedly shoved into the glove compartment before I left Minneapolis for the tour.  Dammit!  I stumbled over to my car, pulled out all the paperwork, squinted hard, and set about the task of doing my taxes while inebriated in the front seat of a car in a parking lot in Chicago on April 15^th.  I got ‘em done…but then had to find a place to mail them.  Nothing for miles around except warehouses, 10-lane freeways and O’Hare airport.  I couldn’t drive, so I set out walking and after about an hour of wandering around I found a dude at some building who said he would mail them for me.  I ended up getting a $43,000 refund that year so I must have done something right!  Just kidding.

Okay, I digress.  My third brush with flame was a couple of months later in the summer of 1988 on my front porch in Minneapolis.  Me and about 10 other people lived in the old Pillsbury mansion just off 4^th street a few blocks west of Dinkytown.  A cool friend of mine from California named Pete Rhoads was in town living in his VW bus and needed a place to park it for the summer, so I said he could park out in front of the mansion.  He could ‘live/sleep’ in the bus, but come inside when he wanted to eat, shower or hang out.  Pete happened to have access to large tanks of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) so for ‘rent’ he would make sure that there was always a tank set up for us on our front porch for the summer. 

So one afternoon we were sitting around the tank giggling like crazy when I came up with a brilliant idea.  People like marijuana smoke, and people like nitrous oxide gas…so why not combine the two?  Like I said I had quit smoking pot a few years earlier, but I decided for the sake of science it would be okay for me to go with it just this once to see if my ingenious idea would work.  So one of my friends got a metal pot pipe going, screwed a metal cap with a screened hole on it, and then I quickly attached the rubber hose from the nitrous tank to the cap of the bowl.  Do you see where I am going with this?  Then I put the mouthpiece of the bowl to my lips and instructed somebody to turn on the gas.  My theory was that the gas would push the pot smoke through the bowl, into my mouth, and I would get a nice combination of pot smoke and nitrous…two great tastes that taste great together!

Sadly, my 4 years in college had failed me miserably as I stupidly forgot how highly combustible gases are.  So when my friend released the friendly gas it hit the burning marijuana embers in the bowl, ignited, and instantly caused a not-so-friendly explosion in the pipe.  The exhaust from the blast had nowhere to go but up into my mouth, causing my cheeks to expand to Dizzy Gillespie-like proportions before rocking my head back.  I spent the next few anxious moments spitting out chunks of red-hot pot embers and a white-hot screen that were burning my tongue, throat and roof of my mouth.  Again, slightly embarrassing and quite shocking but we all had a good laugh once I got all the fire out of my mouth. 

Lessons learned?  None really on the first two incidents.  My hair grew back, both on my head and my arm.  With the third incident my cheeks hurt for a few days but shrunk back to normal size fairly quickly and I have never since tried to combine fire and gas except in the grill on my back porch.  So I guess, basically…I learned that when it comes to catching on fire, it’s better not to.  Oh yeah, and don’t put off doing your taxes till the last day.

Another Reason Why You Shouldn't Warm Up Your Car...

Well it is currently 6 degrees Fahrenheit here tonight in beautiful Minneapolis, MN.  I am looking at the 5-day forecast and I see that it is supposed to get down to -6 degrees tomorrow and then a high of 7 degrees on Thursday.  It sucks when Mother Nature is actually trying to kill you.  This reminds me of last winter when my friend Farah Manning and I were at work debating the merits of warming up your car in the winter.

I was adamant that you should do it for at least a few minutes before driving off because back in my high school days I had destroyed my dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett hatchback by not warming it up.  It was a sweet little lime-green German car that was destined to be mine someday until I ruined it.  It was 1982 and I was 16 years old working the closing shift at McDonald’s.  It was a brutally cold night in Waukesha, WI with the temperature way below zero degrees Fahrenheit.  My dad had always stressed the importance of warming up the car so I knew better, but when I got out to the car late that night after work and started her up I was freezing cold and just wanted to go home.  I only waited maybe 30 seconds and then took off.  The car was groaning and protesting and hitching and acting funny until maybe a mile down the road it had enough and died.  I'd killed the poor thing.  I had to find a phone, call my dad up and ask him crawl out of his nice warm bed into the mercilessly cold outdoors to come pick up me up.  The first thing he said was:  “Did you warm up the car first?!”  “Yes, of course I warmed it up!  I don’t know why it died!”  It was dumb and I’m pretty sure he knew I was lying, but he was fairly cool about it and I felt bad...sorry Dad.

(Hmm, since you’re probably reading this Dad and I am too old for you to ground me, I might as well come clean about another driving ‘incident’.  Remember that time that my friend Mark Smith and I were driving your 1982 blue Pontiac Bonneville station wagon and I t-boned that other car that had pulled out in front of me at an intersection and it was raining out and you asked me if I had pumped the brakes to try and stop the car because everybody knows that if you don’t have anti-lock brakes and you want to stop a high speed car it’s better to pump the brakes rather than just slamming on the brakes, and I said “Of course I pumped the brakes but there wasn’t enough to time to stop before hitting the other car.”?  Well…I don’t know if there was enough time to stop the car or not, but I definitely did not pump the brakes.  I was 17 years old, inexperienced, and when faced with that car suddenly in my path I just slammed on the brakes as hard as I could and slid in to the guy…pumping the brakes never even entered my mind.  Sorry Dad.)

So anyways, I relayed my Opel-ruining story to Farah, but she told me that she checked with her mechanic and was told that with these modern fuel-injected engines and better high viscosity engine oils and such that it really is not necessary to warm up your car more than 30 seconds or so.  I was dubious, but I checked online and by god she was right.  According to the experts, if it’s above zero degrees Fahrenheit then you should only let it run for 30 to 60 seconds to get all the fluids moving, and then drive off gently.  If it’s below zero, maybe 3 or 4 minutes.  Anything more than that and you're really just wasting gas and polluting the air.

But about a week after our talk it became really cold…like there were several days in a row when the high was maybe zero or 3 degrees or something miserable like that.  When it’s that cold I still like to warm the car up for at least a couple of minutes, if anything just for my own comfort when I get in and so I won’t fog up the windows.  So about 5 minutes before it was time to leave work I went out and started my car and came back in.  I was parked facing the building, about 5 or 6 cars down to the right of the door.  When I went back out a couple minutes later to leave, I opened the building door and looked to my right and all I could see was nothing but empty space between the two cars where I used be parked.  Huh?  Suddenly I see the back of my car slowly emerging out between the two cars!  What the hell??  Somebody is f*cking stealing my car?!  I simply could not fathom that this was actually happening.  Why anybody would want to steal a rusty old 1997 Honda Accord with billions of miles on it was beyond me, but all I knew was that I had left it running and now some b*stard was stealing it!  So I broke into a run down the sidewalk and got to the space where my car was all ready to rip this guy out of the driver seat and…yep…there was nobody driving.

When I had started my stick-shift car I had neglected to put the emergency brake on.  Our parking lot is on a very slight gradual slope that you can barely even notice.  So…although it took 5 minutes, it had eventually started rolling by itself and was now impatiently leaving work without me.  It was picking up speed but I ran to the driver door, jumped in and slammed (not pumped) on the brakes just before it was about to hit one of the cars parked 15 feet behind it in the next row.  Luckily I had come out just in time before the damn thing hit anybody else in an embarrassing low-speed collision.  Lesson learned?  Fathers (and Farah’s mechanic) know best:  If your car is from the 70’s, warm it up for a good long while…if not, don’t.

Getting Crunched

Well the abbreviated 2011/12 NBA basketball season recently got underway over the Christmas weekend.  After being a season ticket holder for 12 years I did not renew my season tickets this year for my local team the Minnesota Timberwolves, however I am finally a bit excited about our team and have some hope of success for them.  We have acquired some new young players with huge potential, a new coach with a plan, and have a renewed sense that we could be good again.  While watching the game on TV a few nights ago it got me thinking about the last time I was actually at a Timberwolves game two full years ago.

As usual I had season tickets last year, but with a 1-year old daughter at home and a son due last August I ended up selling every single one of my tickets.  So I have not been to see a game in person for two years, with the last one being a game against the Boston Celtics.  The Timberwolves have been a horrible team for the last 6 years or so, especially after they traded away Kevin Garnett to the Celtics in the summer of 2007.  Their hopelessness as a team however is actually both bad and good for people going to see the games in person.  On the one hand it is sad to have to pay to see a team suck so bad, but on the other hand they suck so bad that hardly anyone ever goes to the games so you can sit wherever you want to in the arena.  It's fun!  My motto the last few years has been:  "If a team sucks but nobody is there to see them, do they really suck?"

Okay I hope my Timberwolves rep is not reading this but my season tickets have always been the cheap $5 nosebleed upper deck seats...and since nobody ever attends the games I would usually just waltz right down to the lower deck and sit in the $100 seats, and occasionally when it’s really empty sit near the court in the $200 seats.  In fact at one game my friend Mike Spicoli and I were 1st row off the court, dead center behind the scoreboard table.  I knew the game was televised so I called my wife Nadia and told her to tune in so that I could wave to her on TV.  Unfortunately though she tuned in to the game just in time to see us being kicked out of our seats as the real owners of the seats decided to show up a half hour into the game.

So anyways, the Wolves were so bad two years ago that even with Garnett and the Celtics in town I still found a great aisle seat in the lower deck about 15 rows up from the court.  I could not find anybody who wanted to go to the game with me however, so I gave my extra ticket to a bum and settled in to my great seat by myself to watch what I though would be the Celtics beating up the Timberwolves.  It actually turned out to be a great game though and surprisingly close.  The Timberwolves lost of course but they fought the Celtics right down to the end and made it interesting.  The only problem that night really was the douchebag Celtic fan sitting in the seat directly behind me.

He was your typical visiting-team fan doing his best to be a douchebag.  A loud obnoxious male in his 20’s, fully decked out in Celtics jersey, Celtics hat and drunk.  As I said I had an aisle seat and he had the aisle seat directly behind me.  Every time the Celtics would score he would stand up, yell, spill his beer, point to his jersey, and take his hat off and wave it around showing it to everyone around him.  I would have been embarrassed for him if I didn't loathe him so much.  I am a peaceful guy, but he was so damn annoying that I just wanted to turn around and donkey-punch him right in the throat.  His friend sitting next to him was relatively quiet and obviously embarrassed by his friend's antics, but he made no attempt to quiet him so I consider him a 'douchebag-by-acquaintance'.

So after putting up with this jerk for the entire the first half, we get into the 3^rd quarter and things get a little hairy.  If any of you have been to a Timberwolves game you know that their mascot is a guy in a big furry wolf outfit named ‘Crunch’.  He runs around entertaining the crowd and does all the typical mascot things like messing with the referees and goofing around with the kids and doing massive trampoline slam dunks at half-time.  One of the bits that he does once a game during a time out is they roll out a long carpet in an aisle on the lower level from the top of the stairs all the way down to the court below.  Then Crunch gets on a plastic slide at the top and slides all the way down to the arena floor.  It’s fun and a big crowd-pleaser. 

I have seen it many times but never in my aisle, and sure enough midway through the 3^rd quarter the security guys roll the long black carpet down the stairs past me to the floor below.  I look back and Crunch is behind me at the top of the stairs holding on to his sled and urging the crowd to cheer him on.  Everyone in the arena is looking at him and clapping and cheering and he’s about to jump on the sled and slide down the stairs when suddenly the jerk behind me jumps into the middle of the aisle and blocks Crunch from going down while waving his stupid hat around and yelling and pointing to his Celtics jersey!

Well one of the angry security guys with his walkie-talkie (they're always angry about something, I think they were born that way) comes running up the stairs and forces the guy back in his seat.  So then Crunch gets the crowd going again and is just about to slide down when the jerk jumps back up into the aisle and blocks his way again!  The security guy comes flying back up the aisle, screaming into his walkie-talkie and freaking out now he’s so pissed off and he forces the guy back into his seat.  You can tell Crunch is getting pissed now too, but he waits patiently while they sit the jerk back down.  He’s finally about to slide down and...yep...the guy jumps back into the aisle and blocks his way for the third time.

By now I’d had enough so I jump out of my seat into the aisle and grab the guy around the waist and start wrestling with him.  He had been jumping up and down waving his hat around, but now he’s got me wrapped around his waist and I’m trying to haul him back into his seat.  While wrestling with him I happened to look up and realize that we are on the arena's big jumbo-tron screen, which is weird because it's one thing to wrestle with a dude but it's another thing entirely to see yourself wrestling with a dude on the jumbo-tron.  In addition, the entire arena crowd is watching and they are all clapping and cheering me on.  The guy was young, big and strong though and I was struggling mightily with him when the insanely pissed of security guard comes running up the stairs for the 3rd time and helps me put this f*cker back in his seat.

A time-out is only a minute or two at most, so now this guy had taken up so much time blocking the stairway that the time-out was over.  They were about to re-start the game so they had to roll up the carpet and Crunch never got to slide down the stairs.  The bit was ruined.  The entire arena booed and booed while this guy just sat in his chair laughing and nodding his head like he was the sh*t.  I looked up and we were still on the big screen and he was just eating it up, laughing and gloating for the cameras that were trained on him.  It was so annoying and I kept wishing they had just kicked this guy out.  About 15 minutes later though I happened to look back and there was Crunch coming down the stairs towards us holding a huge bunch of helium balloons tied to a string with a black clip on the end.  He had his finger to his lips up shushing me and the crowd so as not to give him way, and he sneaks up, grabs the jerk's precious hat, clips it to the balloons and throws it up into the sky. 

The stunned guy jumps out of his chair and while Crunch is waving bye-bye to the hat floating up towards the arena rafters, the guy runs up the stairs after it frantically jumping up and down trying to grab it.  But it is too late now as the hat is out of reach nearing the upper deck and gone for good.  He comes back to his seat behind me and plops down, swearing under his breath.  He just sat there pouting for the rest of the game.  We are on the big screen again and the entire crowd is now clapping and jeering.  The cameras go back to him several times during the game when the Wolves would score and he just sat there stewing in his seat.  It was perfect...almost too perfect.  Sometimes I wonder if the entire thing was staged but I don't think so...at least I hope it wasn't because it was awesome.  The only way the night could have been better would be if the Wolves had won.  Ah well, it was a fun night anyways.

Air Mishap #4

As you may know from my previous ‘mishaps’, I have my private pilots license.  So one night while still in training in the early 1990’s, me and my flight instructor Blaine went out to practice night flying.  Among many other requirements, you have to have a certain amount of hours of night flight before you can get your license.  Well it was a nice clear evening and we flew out of my hometown of Madison, WI down to the airport in Rockford, IL to do some touch-and-goes and other air-work in the area.

After a couple hours it was time to head back to Madison.  The airport there is a Class C airport, meaning it is relatively large, it has a tower, and you have to get permission to enter the airspace.  Once you tell them your intentions (to land in our case) the tower directs you on where to go, how fast, etc.  Well like at any large airport there are always several planes wanting to land at any given time, so it is the tower’s job to keep the planes away from each other and in line to land with enough separation so there are no mishaps and they can all get down in a safe, orderly fashion. 

So we get our instructions to enter the airspace, go on a certain heading, follow a certain plane in the pattern and we will be #2 for landing behind that plane.  We are following the assigned airplane and eventually he lands and then it is our turn and we are on the final to land.  This is probably my 5^th flight ever at most so I am still pretty green and did not know this fairly large airport that well yet.  Also, we are a very small plane in a sea of planes ranging from 2-seaters like ours all the way up to jumbo jets flying in from all over the country.

So we’re drifting over the runway and I am lining it up as best as I can and I cut the power and get her on the ground with an okay landing.  I am proudly rolling down the runway when all of a sudden all hell breaks loose!  I did not slow the plane down fast enough in time to get off the runway and on to the normal taxiway to the right that all the small private planes use, so there I was still on the main runway with a HUGE Northwest airliner right on my ass!  Blaine had assumed I was turning off on that taxiway so when I rolled past it he just said:  “Uh oh.” 

Our entire plane was enshrouded in an impossibly blinding white light that seemed like the bright lights from heaven itself as the jumbo jet that was landing right behind us was on us.  Luckily the pilot realized in time that we were still on the runway and he aborted their landing and pulled up before hitting us.  All the while this was happening the tower was frantically screaming through the radio at us to “Get off the runway!!”.

I looked back and in the middle of all that bright light I saw the wheels of the jet lifting up behind us as the plane swooped up and over us and took off again into the night.  I almost caused a major airline disaster and definitely caused a lot of confused people on the plane to be wondering what the hell was happening.  In addition to the scare, they were going to be late as they had to take off again, go around, re-enter the flight pattern and then land which can take 15 minutes for a large airplane.

Well, we got off on the next taxiway and headed back to our little hanger as it was dawning on me what had just happened.  As me and Homer Simpson are apt to do, I cannot help but believe that it was everybody else’s fault but mine.  The tower never should have left that small of a window for a little plane like ours to land in with that large plane right behind us…there should have been more separation.  And my instructor should have been more aware of my inexperience and should have made sure our plane was braking enough (there are dual foot pedals on each side of the plane as well as dual steering wheels) so that we could have gotten off the runway in time.  How was I to know we had to get off on that taxiway?  Seriously though I was the pilot so of course it was my fault.  But it was a lesson well learned…no jacking around, get off the runway as soon as possible. 

Surgery follow-up note...

Well as of last night it had been 10 days since the nose surgery and things were going well.  The pain was reduced to just that numb feeling you get when you inadvertently try and open a door with your nose or get punched right square in the schnozz.  Both of which suck, but you know it’s going to get better and does not require any medical attention.  So my nose was still swollen and will be for a month, but on the mend, looking nice and straight, and the crusty flow of dried blood and crud was starting to diminish with each daily Q-tip swabbing of peroxide.  My only complaint was the stitches left behind.  When I went in a week after the surgery for the follow-up appointment I was told that they would slowly dissolve over time, and to just ignore them. 

That is much easier said then done.  There is like a mile of stitching up in there and as it decays and comes loose in your nose it tickles and is constantly making me sneeze.  Not to mention the smell.  As the stitching thread that looks like fishing monofilament decays, it is coated with dried blood and slime and it just reeks.  It kind of smells like a very old damp washcloth that has been sitting in the bottom of a mop bucket for a few weeks.  With every inhale I can smell it and it’s hard to ignore.  

So as you can imagine, with both the tickling and the smell there is a huge urge to pick at this stuff and try to ‘help’ it the f*ck out of my nose.  All week little pieces ranging from a millimeter to a centimeter long have been showing themselves within reach, and despite warnings not to from my doctor I have been yanking them out.  Well last night I was going to bed and I felt the damn tickling and looked in the mirror and sure enough there was a thread hanging in there.  So I gave it a little tug and it came loose, but in doing so it pulled another long thread out.  One end was hanging about a centimeter out of my nose, and who knows how far up the other end was.

I gave it a little tug…nothing.  So I closed my eyes and gave a huge tug.  OUCH!!  It didn’t come free, but my eyes stung with tears, blood started pouring out of my nose, and I must have yanked a nerve because it hurt from way in the back of my nose all the way down through the roof of my mouth to my front top teeth.  Goddammit!  First I stuffed a bunch of tissue up there and eventually got the blood to stop.  Then I took a scissors and cut the part of the thread off that I could see hanging out.  Then I took some acetaphetamine and tried to go to sleep, but the pain was intense.

I was worried that I had done some permanent damage or ruined the surgery, so I called this morning and made an emergency appointment.  When I got there I told the doctor what I had done and he just shook his head, chuckled, and said he was sure that I didn’t do anything serious but he would take a look.  He poked around, removed a bunch of dried blood and more stitching, gave me another prescription of vicodin for the pain (my two front teeth are still numb), and told me there was no real damage done but to not do that again.  Lesson learned:  no matter what you do, do not yank at stuff hanging out of your nose that a doctor put there because I guess it’s there for a reason.

Why you shouldn't try to talk in the recovery room after surgery...

I have played soccer for much of my life, from a little kid growing up in upstate New York all the way up into my 30's when I moved back to Minneapolis, MN.  I eventually forced myself to quit however as soccer took it's toll on just about every part of my body from the waist down:  arthritis in my left ankle from spraining it countless times, bone spur in my right foot, torn meniscus in my right knee, ruptured hamstring, torn labrum in my right hip, vericose veins...and yes one of my top two 'getting-nailed-in-the junk' stories of all-time.  I was at soccer practice and turned around just in time to catch a direct high-speed shot from a fellow team-mate right to the groin.  I layed there gasping for air and writhing in pain for about 5 minutes, trying to decide if this one was worse than the time I was on my 10-speed bike, going down a huge hill on my paper-route peddling as fast as I could when suddenly the chain came off and I fell flush on the crossbar at high-speed.  I could not seem to regain the peddles, and so just riding on my nuts I guided the bike into the ditch in front of a house, tipped over and layed there moaning until eventually a lady came out of the house and offered her assistance.  I told her I just wanted to lay there for a few more minutes and then I would be on my way.

I digress...painfully.  But anyways, out of all of my soccer injuries probably the most dramatic one took place above the waist.  I was in 10th grade playing for a city-league team in Waukesha, WI when I went up for a header along with a guy from the other team named 'Tank'.  I got to the ball first and sent it flying at the same time that he got to my nose and sent it flying, moving it an inch or two to my right while it exploded with blood.  Ever since then I have had a hard time breathing out of my right nostril, but I just ignored it until it seemed to have gotten worse in the last year or so and my poor wife Nadia was complaining of the snoring.

I never go to the doctor, but since we were going to meet our massive insurance deductible this year anyways with the birth of our son Jack in August, I decided to get the nose taken care of.  I had deviated septum surgery last March, but it didn't work.  The right side was still slightly collapsed and not getting in nearly as much air as the other side.  Upon their suggestion I waited and waited to see if it would finish healing and correct itself over time, but it didn't.  So I went to another specialist, a Dr. Peter Hilger who is supposed to be 'The Best'.  In addition to being a professor at the University of Minnesota, he is a plastic surgeon that people fly in from all over the country to see.  We met, he took a look and recommended I have further surgery to fix it for good.  He told me I needed Septoplasty, Vestibular Stenosis repair, and possible ear cart graft or a graft from a cadaver.

Yep, there was a good chance he was going to have to either take a chunk out of my ear to rebuild my septum, or a chunk from a dead guy.  I told him I liked my ear just the way it was and that I would prefer he use the dead guy, so he said he would try and accomodate me.  As it turned out, in the end he did not need to do either as there was enough junk left in my nose to rebuild it with that, so that was cool.  But one of the things he did do though was slit the thin part of the nose between the two nostrils, and then pull the outside part of my nose up and over the inside part so that he could expose and get at the insides...yikes.

So yeah Nadia took me to the surgery center this past Monday to get my nose hopefully fixed once and for all.  Part of the pre-op procedure is to meet with the anesthesiologist.  He comes in, smiles, shakes your hand and tells you all the things he is going to give to you to make it painless.  Seems like a cool job and I wished I had it.  My oldest friend Cire Wonhsak is an anesthesiologist and he loves it.  Anyways, besides the general anesthesia he informs me that they will be using cocaine topically in my nose.  Really??  That seemed ironic to me, as I mention to him that I bet a few of their nose patients are coming in for specifally that reason -- to undue the damage that cocaine can do to a nose.

So a few hours later after the surgery (it is a 2 1/2 hour procedure) I find myself in the recovery room blind.  What's happening?  Why can't I see?  Nadia is there and she tells me I have ice packs over my eyes and nose.  Oh, okay.  I am extremely groggy and I do not remember much, but Nadia filled in the blanks later.  Apparently the nurse and her were going over my follow-up medications...the antibiotics and painkillers I would need and I was laying there listening.  Nadia tells me that at this point I decided to try and be funny and I asked the nurse if they were going to be prescribing me some follow-up cocaine.  "Wait, what?  No?  Why not, is that still illegal in this state?"  The lady sighed and Nadia laughed nervously as she tried to shut me up, but I persisted:  "Are you sure, because I think I know a guy who might know a guy...his name is Bob, the second guy, and I could probably get the first guy to try and track him down if you think it would be helpful."

Nadia finally got me to shut up and I barely remember any of that, but she told me about it later while rolling her eyes.  In reality, I do not even know any drug dealers named Bob.  So if there are any of you out there, I am sorry.  I might have implicated you to the staff at the surgery center in Edina, so you may want to lay low for a few days.  And I learned my lesson -- do not say anything you don't have to in the recovery room and for godsakes do not try and be funny.

Go Pack Go...away please

Okay, I am going to preface this story with the fact that I am a Minnesota Viking season ticket holder and I love the Vikes.  I was born in Minnesota, have been a Viking fan since birth, and therefore despise their state border-rivals the Green Bay Packers.  I always have, always will.  In addition, my beautiful wife Nadia is perfect in every respect EXCEPT she has one glaring flaw:  she is a huge Green Bay Packer fan.  Ouch.  It sucks, but what can you do?  I will tell you what I can do...I can try and steer my 2 year old daughter Autumn and my 3 month old son Jack away from the dark side and ensure that they become Viking fans.  I have no doubt that I will succeed as failure is not an option, but the very notion that either one of them could ever turn out to be a Packer fan gnaws at the back of my brain like an insidious parasite and occasionally keeps me awake at night.

Anyways, it has been so hectic around here lately with a newborn and a toddler that I have not even had time to think about what to get Nadia for Christmas this year.  So yesterday I happen to hear about the Green Bay Packer public “stock” offering.  For the 5th time in this football team's history since 1923 the Packers are offering up public stock in the team.  A quarter of a million shares this time, as they are trying to raise money for stadium renovations.  I do a little research.  It is not real stock.  It is basically just a souvenir item.  A stupid 8x12 inch piece of green paper that says “Green Bay Packers” on it.  It can’t be traded, can’t be transferred, can’t be sold.  Completely utterly worthless.  But Nadia will love it.   So I check the price.  $250 plus a $25 handling fee.  Are you f*cking kidding me?  I am not spending that kind of cash on a piece of paper.  Then I think about it.  I love her...I have no other good ideas at the moment...it will get me huge points...and I can easily spend $275 a month on groceries, and/or beer for myself if I put my mind to it, so I suppose I can spring that amount of dough for her Christmas present no matter how silly I may think it is.  I bust out the credit card and buy her the damn Packer stock.

Then a few hours later on the way home from work she happily tells me:  “Guess what?  Me and Laura (her sister) bought each other Packer stock today for our Christmas present to each other!”

The Sneaky Sweets household now owns $550 worth of Packer “stock”.  This can’t be happening.  So I spent an hour on the phone on hold last night trying to return the one I bought.  The whole time while on hold having to listen to Packer play-by-play highlights of last year’s Super Bowl victory, in between bouts of that goddamn “Go Pack Go!” chant they do at their stadium.  (Yes, I have been to Lambeau Field...past Christmas presents have been Packer tickets.)  Eventually some Green Bay chick gets on the line, listens to my story, and tells me to hold please.  Ten more minutes of Packer highlights and chanting.  Finally she comes back and tells me she will have her supervisor call me back in exactly 2 hours.  Then she actually says to me:  “Go Pack go!” and hangs up.  It is 7pm.  I wait till 9pm...nothing.

So I call the b*stards back this morning and sit on hold again with the “Go Pack Go!” chant incessantly permeating my skull until another Green Bay chick comes on the line.  She listens to my story and tells me to hold please while she consults with her supervisor.  I wait the mandatory 10 minutes while pounding the phone on my forehead.  Then she comes back and tells me she will send the information on to another department.  What does that mean?  Is this really going to happen?  Will I get some kind of confirmation#?  An email?  A phone call to let me know my order was cancelled?  She tells me to hold please while she checks on this with her imaginary supervisor.

Ten minutes later she returns to tell me they do not have the authority to cancel it in her department, but she will send it to the department that does and they should be able to cancel it.  Again, how will I know if this is really going to happen?  She tells me I have to wait and to watch my credit card statements to see if the refund goes through.  There will be no confirmation email.  No phone calls.  No promises.  I just have to hope it happens.  But then before she hangs up she too says to me:  “Go Pack go!”  So I have that goin' for me, which is nice.