It's that time of year again, my friends.  A time that I look forward to throughout all of the cold dark rainy (yes...rainy, we'll get to that in a bit) winter months.  It's finally here.  I made a trip to the grocery store on Sunday night and while perusing the fruit (much of which was buy-one-get-one) I saw the item I crave above all others.......the finest fruit (mayhaps the finest food substance) that nature has ever provided us............Rainier Cherries.  Grown in only one part of this vast world (one more positive stroke for the Pacific Northwest.  They have these cherries in spades for the low low market price of $2.50 a pound.  It was all I could do not to bring back 20 pounds with me from my last excursion....as it was I ended up with 5 pounds and had to eat them much more quickly than I would have liked.), these cherries are a prize to be coveted even at their $4+ a pound price.  It's the limited availability and the fact that they're so so so so superior to all others of their kind that makes them completely worth the price I have to pay and the very long wait in between.

I just spent 20 minutes eating 10 cherries (yes, I carefully ration them out every day so that I keep from eating them all at once.....I want to enjoy my $4 fruit for the maximum length of time while still getting return on my investment (i.e. before they go bad)).  For those of you doing the math at home this equals approximately 2 minutes per cherry.  No, they aren't gargantuan in size....I just firmly believe in taking as much time as possible to eat them so as to (again) maximize my length of enjoyment and treat this most superior of fruits with the respect and gratitude it deserves.  Oh, I won't say it doesn't get hard near the end to just eat them at a breakneck pace in an attempt to satisfy your tongue more and more and more and more..........it's just that I know that it will be so much more worth it in the end if I enjoy every single rare second I get to experience in food nirvana.

My posting about baseball will mostly go away.  asteroidblues37 and I have decided to start our own Twins blog.  If you're interested, you can read it.......the url is blamecuddy.blogspot.com.  Tell your friends.

Right now, pretty much the only content is stuff I've posted here, but hopefully we'll get more stuff up as I get all my photos organized from the games we've been to so far this season.  There will also be game commentary, player updates, and live blogging as well as the usual nonsense you've seen from me here except unchecked and untamed since I TRY to keep it under wraps for all y'all here.

We've been out doing all sorts of things now that it's summer, and I don't always get around to posting about them as quickly and as often as I should. I apologize that posts will tend to come in spurts due to this.

I'm going to warn you right now......I'm definitely going to make fun of people in this post. It's not malicious....it's just.....well....it's something I do for fun......which makes me sound like a bad person. It's not that I think the people themselves aren't perfectly nice people.....it's just that sometimes people make bad decisions............myself included. I'd hope that if I were doing something that made me look ridiculous in public, people would return the favor.

Regardless................................

Last Saturday, Brian and I went to the 5th Annual Barbeque and Blues Festival sponsored by Famous Dave's on Peavey Plaza right here in downtown Minneapolis. The event was free, the food was reasonably priced, and I freaking love barbeque, so I figured this was exactly the kind of event we should look into. It was pretty ok.....it was a nice day and I'd been needing to get out and see the light of day anyway, so post Twins/Cubs game we headed down. The festival itself was alright. It was pretty crowded, but we managed to snag some chairs (after snagging some BBQ Pork Sandwiches and some Sam Adams Summer Ale of course), and we settled in for background jazz, talking to each other, and watching all the people that you inevitably see at such events.

Which brings us to......some photos.....

( Cut to save space and pretention )


And.....there you have it.  Whenever you get enough people in one place, some of them are bound to look ridiculous.  I've got a TON of baseball related posting (with photos) to do, but we'll save that for another time, perhaps.  I'd hate to overload you all at once.

And laugh at all the fankids........

This requires some knowledge of the fact that I HATE HATE HATE HATE the Twilight series and everything it's done to the world in the last year and a half.  Please just understand that I think it's a scourge upon the literary universe.  I still haven't finished reading the whole series, so I'm not yet ready to make my post hashing out the reasons for it yet.  But.....I needed to post an ad for an event right here in Minneapolis that I half want to stay far far away from and half want to stand outside of and hand out literature to convention goers on why they should read books that are written by someone that knows something about literary devices and includes a list of said books.

I present you.........The BFD Twilight Convention

These people better hope they're not at CONvergence trying to tell me to come to their convention.  I'll tell them EXACTLY what I think about it.....possibly with expletives and hand gestures.

Taken from berzerker_prime .

Rules
01. Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
02. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
03. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

( Saving Space )

So......there you have it.  Brendan doing what he does best........getting dirt in his pants.  Well, ok....it's not technically getting in his pants just yet, but rest assured that it will.  The wallpaper on my phone is him mastering float.  On the off chance that anyone is interested, I'll post it.

( Also cut.....with some sadness on my part. )

And that folks, is my currently not so nerdy wallpapers.  Nevermind that my phone skin is a HOT picture of Kamui and Fuuma from the X movie........just move along and never mind that fact.

So........asteroidblues37 , a chronic misreader of things, had a bit of fun with the online preview of the Sunday Star Tribune this afternoon.  I've copied the text, and highlighted the points of reference for you.  The point here is, he tends to not read all of things and misses key parts that make things make more sense, though less hilarious.

And so.....I've included only the parts that he bothered to read.

Stories you'll find only in Sunday's Star Tribune newspaper

The Twins will be playing outdoor baseball this month -- in Chicago, Milwaukee (if the roof remains open), St. Louis and Kansas City. All cities are within an 8-hour drive, and often draw Twins fans with a hankering for baseball on real grass.

For fans thinking about taking a road trip, baseball writer Joe Christensen offers a look at what those cities and ballparks have to offer.

SUMMER FUN
RECESSION
BOATING
PROSTITUTION

Which brings us to an analysis of which of the four parks mentioned offers which of these amenities. 

SUMMER FUN:
-All these parks have the potential for outdoor baseball, so one would imagine that summer fun could be found at each.  As far as cities go, I can personally vouch for the fact that Milwaukee is the most fun it can be in the summer time.  Kansas City doesn't seem like the most fun place on earth, and when I was in St. Louis it was a bit of a ghost town, but I hear it's good for baseball.  Chicago COULD be fun, but I'm not sure you'd actually see baseball if you tried to go get tickets for Wrigley....plus you'd have to be in Illinois with the Cubs fans.  I think we're going to give Milwaukee the win in the SUMMER FUN , category, based on our extensive experiences with Milwaukee being a great city in the summertime.

RECESSION:
-I think it's clear here that Kansas City wins this category.  They've got one of the most beautiful ballparks in all of baseball (we're currently planning a trip to see it, in fact), but NO ONE is ever there.  Teams are lowering ticket prices to get folks to the ballpark, and KC seems the most likely candidate for this practice.

BOATING:
-Well, Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Louis ALL offer ample boating opportunities, but none so easy for Minnesotans to reach VIA boat as St. Louis.  New promotion......boat to the ballgame!  We like it.  St. Louis wins.

Which leaves us with....PROSTITUTION:
-The only place left here is Chicago.  So, that seems about right.  No wonder they always sell out Wrigley even when the team is terrible.

There you have it....What happens when Brian doesn't read things properly and the hilarity that ensues.   Everyone have fun in Chicago next weekend......

We've been up to many things as of late, but most recently was FINALLY going to see Star Trek.  AAAAANNNNDDDDD...........that movie was SO awesome.

Ok, I mean, I liked Wolverine....which like a lot of people hated....which I can understand.  But this movie......I loved.  And I was WAY more into X-men than Star Trek as a kid.  What made this movie great, really, was the writing.  The plot was cool, but not all that amazing when you get right down to it.  But the character portrayals are spot on and the modernization of the dialogue to 2009 standards means that pretty much everyone can watch and enjoy this movie without having to forgive it for having the cheesy dialogue of the 1960s.

It's high on action, the acting is AMAZING, and it's EXTREMELY quoteable.  Very well done.  J.J. Abrams is a great director, and I remain incredibly glad that he's a friend of Simon Pegg's because, well, I freaking love Simon Pegg.  I can imagine nothing more than Abrams giving him his script and character sheet and saying 'Have fun with it'.  Best portrayal of Scotty there will ever be in the entire history of the world.....I'm convinced of it.  He doesn't come in until like the last third of the movie, and I kept waiting for it the whole time, and it was completely and utterly worth it.

I know I haven't seen that many movies in 2009 (like 2), but this one takes the win and I think it will be hard to beat in a head-to-head competition. Especially considering the previews I saw were for Harry Potter 6 (which I imagine will be like most of the rest of the Harry Potter movies), GI Joe (just.....whatever), and Transformers (where we continue Michael Bay's love affair with The Beef....who used to be such a charmingly funny little boy actor until Michael Bay got his hands on him).

That the new Justice League show is pretty awful.  But The Flash is STILL the best character DC comics ever created.  Ever.

He's got as many one-liners as Gambit in Wolverine and The X-Men.  For instance, he just appeared hovering above an island by spinning his arms around as quickly as possible and said "Check me out, I'm like a helicopter."  Freaking great.

Seriously, he makes the show pretty close to watchable. 

That's 関西ー弁 (kansai-ben) for "insert expletive here".

So I've had this wooden clothes drying rack since I was in college. Probably since I was a freshman in college, who knows. Regardless, it's been good to me up until this point in my life, and it's technically still functional, but it's got a more pronounced lean to the left with each passing use, so I thought it was time to retire it to "backup" and get myself a new one. Since I had only recently discovered the wonders of clearance groceries at our second favorite local business, and since we also needed things like toilet paper and cat litter, we took a brief venture to the Eagan Target (we were in Eagan watching the Twins/Rays game on Brian's parents' RIDICULOUSLY GIANT television with HD cable while they were out of town) while waiting for the dryer to finish so we could pack up and head home.

After a brief detour for adventures in clearance groceries, we located the drying racks. There was a short-ish wide-ish pre-assembled aluminium variety, which was the kind I wanted to get.  There was also the "assemble it yourself" (though I didn't know I had to assemble it myself) wooden variety, which also came in aluminium.

Because it was the cheapest and because we'd had the old trusty vinyl coated wooden kind for going on 9 years now, Brian and I decided to get the wooden one.  Again, nowhere did it claim that I had to assemble it.  Though looking at the size of the box, I don't know how I didn't think I'd have to.  But we got it home, and I got the box open after wrestling with the excessive box glue for about 5 minutes, and dumped all the pieces on the floor.  At which point I realized that this rack was a "some assembly required" variety.  F.  All I wanted to do was hang up my wet sweaters.  But, with a little assistance from the cat and absolutely no assistance from the worthless package directions, I managed to get the thing assembled in about 15 minutes.  Which, considering it's a flipping clothes drying rack, seemed like an unreasonable amount of time, but whatever.  So now you know I was already going into the game angry.  Once assembled, I noted that the rack seemed about as sturdy as the one that I'd been using in it's current "leans slightly to the left" state, but I figured it was new and it knew what it was doing (plus our apartment leans slightly to the left), so I chalked it up to normalcy and proceeded to hang my clothes.

Just as I'd gotten ALL my sweaters on the rack, I noticed that the left side had sunk down even farther from it's original lean.  So, Brian came in and I pointed it out to him.  As I was trying to correct the problem, the accordion piece on the left side snapped in two, and the entire rack collapsed down........with my finger between the accordion.  I (calmly) mentioned to Brian that my finger was pinched, he extracted it and then looked at it.  It was ALSO very clearly collapsed in on itself.  I informed him that I wasn't entirely unconvinced that I hadn't broken it and then told him that it was going to be handy if I couldn't bend the middle finger on my right hand while I went back to Target to talk to the high schooler at customer service and explained to him or her why I needed to return the drying rack.  He gave me the Hello Kitty ice pack, drove me to Target to get the aluminum (already assembled) rack, bought me an Ocean Water from the Sonic, and I think I'm gonna come out of this one without having to go on the DL.

But I'm still pissed at Target's crappy drying rack.

And my finger hurts like a motherf*cker.  But not enough to stop me from typing this really long entry to tell you all about my misadventures in laundry.