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Monkey and A Roast Beef Sandwich  
Yeah I might have gotten more publicity if I would have sent personalized diapers to Brad and Angelina, but I didn't. I sent them to my new favorite Chef! 
Going to ride the new bike to work!!!! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!! (It's downhill.) Edit: OK the new bike will take some getting used to. That's OK. The old trailer on the other hand BLOWS. Man I miss the Burley. The old one has a will of it's own that jerks the whole weight of the trailer backwards with each pedal rotation. SUCKS going uphill. Shit. We may not make it home tonight. I might just be lying next to Golden Valley Road. Or carrying Henry and walking the bike. So! All depressing points about it aside, I am looking for a new bike. I feel like I just went through this (oh wait I did) and I'd like to make a really good decision about it this time. It would be easiest to go to Target and buy the 26" womens Schwinn 7 speed cruiser bike that is there and that they will assemble for me, but I don't really know if that is the right way to go. How can I get a good bike that I can afford? Should I look for a used bike? If so how do I know if it's good? This is a difficult process because 1) I don't know what I am doing 2) I don't know if I made a good choice with my last bike so I still have almost no experience 3) I am still angry about my bike and trailer being stolen out of my yard so I don't really want to be doing this anyway. You know how you tell 5 people when you get good service from a place and you tell 25 when you get bad service? Well you are now part of the 25. At LEAST 25. I don't know if you've noticed, but gas prices have gotten insane. Suddenly, a few weeks ago, the stars aligned so that I could bike to work if I was able to find a bike I could afford. I remembered seeing bikes at one of the discount places I frequent and took my cousin with me to check it out. We found a 7 speed cruiser bike for $65 so I bought it immediately. It was missing a pedal and the front fender was not completely attached, but I figured I could get it fixed and still get my money's worth. I checked it out online and a similar bike by Kulana is $150.00 right now. OK cool. How to get it fixed when you're not really sure what's wrong with it? Why take it to a reputable bike shop of course! Since we are trying hard to consolidate errands we take it to Erik's Bike Shop location in St Louis Park since we are headed out that direction. Erik's has been around forever so they have to be good right? They are a Twin Cities institution so they have to be great right? WRONG. Erik's Bike shop gave me the worst customer service I have ever encountered and expected me to like it. I bring the bike in on Saturday, June 7th and fully expect it to be really busy. On the contrary they say they will have my bike done in "2 or 3 days." My estimate says my bike will be completed by Tuesday, June 10th. On Thursday, June 12th, I call up to ask when it might be done and I am told they are going to work on it that day. No problem. I can't start biking until Monday the 16th anyway so it's not a big deal. I call back on Saturday, June 14th. The person I talked to says, "I don't know why it's not done." That's it. No explanation. No apology. Just doesn't know why. So I tell them I am really disappointed, that this is my first experience with Erik's, with buying my own bike etc.etc. Still there is no apology, but he says he will try to make sure it's done on Sunday so I can pick it up Monday. I check my voice mail and caller ID at home obsessively all weekend and there's nothing. I call back, fuming, on Tuesday the 17th one week after it's supposed to be ready and spoke to the same person I talked to on Saturday. He says, "Your bike was done on Saturday. Didn't anyone call you?" So apparently no one in repair and service can operate a phone for outgoing calls. I would say there was a problem with our voice mail except Erik's never appears on our caller ID. So how was the customer service when you went to pick up the bike you may wonder. Terrible. At least they are consistent! The young man that rang up the transaction actually wanted to argue with me about the poor service. He also never apologized. He told me that this was their busy time of year so service usually takes a week and a half. I said I could understand that, but no one in the service department ever said that to me once. I told him that I called and they told me they didn't know why it wasn't done. He says, "Well at least you have the bike now." I say nothing because I am so furious at this point I can hardly see. So how is the bike NOW you may ask? Un-rideable. I bring it home and proceed to pump up the flat tires and adjust the seat (BECAUSE THEY WOULD NOT EVEN EXTEND ME THE COURTESY OF CHECKING MY TIRES LET ALONE ASK ME IF I NEEDED THE SEAT ADJUSTED) and discover that the front wheel will not spin freely. When I brought it in I said I thought there may be something wrong with the front wheel, that it may be catching on something. The guy looked at it and decided that it was catching on the front fender so once they reattached the fender it should be alright. WRONG AGAIN ERIK'S BIKE SHOP. No one bothered to see if the wheels would spin. Now I may not be a bicycle expert, but I'm pretty sure that one should be able to have moving wheels. I have since taken the bike to another shop where they are going to adjust the fender, fix the brakes (that are also rubbing against the wheels) and fix the wheels since they are out of true. Erik's charged me $28.51 to put on a new pedal and "fix" the fender. Now I have to spend another $50.00 to get the bike tuned up. Does that seem right to you? Maybe they thought they could get away with it because I brought in a cheap bike. Maybe they thought it was OK because I didn't purchase the bike there. Maybe they were annoyed with me calling in and asking when my bike would be done. Maybe they thought I was too fat to be a serious rider. Or maybe they are just completely incompetent. Thanks again to everyone that showed up to our party! Jon's graduation was awesome on Sunday. I'd post pictures, but everyone forgot their cameras!!!!! I am looking for info about the t-shirts available at the MISFITS Trivia Contest in April. Since VSP was unable to do 4 color process printing they got another printer to do those. I would like to know who that was as I would like to give their name to someone else that wants 4 color process. So I was bummed out that I tried to get into a craft show that was part of Art-A-Whirl and I never heard anything back. Suck. So I guess that means I'm not a part of the show. Wrong! I will have the artiest tees I have ever done on display at the CW building at Broadway and Stinson. They are a part of Lauren Strom's (my cousin) show. She has a series of paintings called "Bike Love" and asked me to do t-shirts to sell with her paintings. It was really fun, but a lot of work. I created artwork based on her paintings and printed them randomly on various colors of t-shirts.    Come on down Friday through Sunday! I was going to hide this in the comments of El Dogo's post about Mother's Day, but I love this poem too much. This is the best poem about motherhood that I have heard in a while. Or maybe ever since I don't know a lot of poetry. As a Mom I would say that I struggle with the concept of what to do for my mother on this day that would seem significant or original or even worthy of her. On the flip side of it what I expect, or hope for, from my own little family is a little fun, some extra sleep, maybe a nice meal, a treat. I don't know. Sure I might even hint around for a gift ("Wow. They have a 6 megapixel camera for $59.99!") but I'm not not even sure it's appropriate. What I really hope for is the chance to goof off. Not convinced I deserve that either. I was actually thinking, oddly enough, it would be fun to go to a Twins game if only Henry were a little older. Mini golf would be good too. And that's cool. Even though it would sound stupid to say, "Thanks for giving me life. Have a round of mini golf." the lanyard The other day as I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past. A past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard. A gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard. Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them. But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold facecloths on my forehead then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard. "Here are thousands of meals" she said, "and here is clothing and a good education." "And here is your lanyard," I replied, "which I made with a little help from a counselor." "Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered. "And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp." "And here," I wish to say to her now, "is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth, that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even." (billy collins) Think I'll go out and buy this for my Mom today. What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. ( The List of 106 )
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