A prom story

Darn you, Beth-Anne Lapsley. If I'd had even 1/10th less of a crush on you in 1987, I could have actually asked you to the prom, and I wouldn't be stuck telling the same damn story every spring.

I didn't go to the prom my senior year of high school. Or my freshman, sophomore, or junior years, either, but that seems to be less of a big deal.

And really, it's not that big a deal anyway, except that over the past 19 years, talk at this time of year always comes back around to prom season. It was still a little raw while I was in college, so I used to mutter my no-prom story through clenched teeth and duck out of the room to go watch the Stanley Cup playoffs.

The past 15 years in the news business, proms frequently end up the topic of potential-news-story conversations, like "How much are kids spending on limousines these days?" and "Can you believe how much kids are spending on limousines these days?" and even "When I went to prom, it was in my mother's 1984 Ford Escort, not one of those dang limousines". Nobody says reporters are always a creative bunch.

And my story now ends up as comic relief. I spent much of my prom night in my car in a Wendy's parking lot with Jonathan Blatt, with both of us complaining about how we couldn't get dates. (It might have been his car, now that I think of it. On the other hand, I believe they were both Ford Fairmonts, so the mental image is pretty similar). Then he went off to another friend's house to complain about the same thing, basically, while I went home and watched the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Of course, what never got said in the car was that it was my own fault I didn't have a date. I had wanted - planned - to ask Beth-Anne to the prom for roughly 786 weeks. I got to six out of the seven digits in her phone number several times before chickening out.

(It was that kind of crush. And yes, I did that enough that I still have the phone number rattling around in my memory instead of somewhat more useful information like my daughter's social security number.)

So, a couple weeks before Prom Ground Zero, I finally arrived at a plan that would involve my asking her in the hallway in between lunch and jazz band class (Do I miss high school? I do not.). And that plan was instantaneously dashed two classes before lunch, when Jeff Cohen mentioned he had asked Beth-Anne to the prom the night before - just as friends.

I spent most of lunch, if memory serves, slamming my forehead into my locker, which may account for my hairline today, or at least my inability to remember my daughter's social security number.

And I'm sure they had a fine time. I stayed friends with both of them afterwards, and my romantic life continued on that same trajectory for a while longer, as I also managed to not ask Beth-Anne to dinner or to the movies.

So Beth-Anne, I'm sorry. I still wish I'd managed to ask you to the prom. Not because I imagine my life would have turned out differently in any major way - I have a wonderful wife, the cutest little daughter on the planet, and an amusing story to tell every spring. And not because I'd rather tell a story about an actual prom experience, rather than a Wendy's parking lot story. ("...the cheeseburgers were terrific.")

I just think we might have had a nice time.

Getting out of touch with my inner Grammar Snob

First off, as I pop another Junior Mint in my mouth, I'd like to thank the people at Junior Mints for finally explaining the name of their candy right there on the box, even though their explanation doesn't, technically, make sense:

Over Fifty years ago, a new "Star" was born. Given Junior Mints' popularity at the movies it comes as no surprise that the brand was named after a top Broadway play in 1949: "Junior Miss"!

I'll note only that I'm not sure why the fact that the candy is popular at the movies has anything to do with the fact that it was named after a Broadway play. If movies hadn't existed in 1949, maybe I'd be ready to make the cross-cultural leap. Or if they had referenced the candy's popularity at "the theater", I'd be with them.

Regardless, that's the only point I'll make about this particular piece of copy writing, and so I'll refrain from pointing out the random capitalizations, odd use of quotation marks and dubious exclamation point. That's because I'm trying - really trying - to avoid being pigeon-holed as a Grammar Snob.

Back here in 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, I conducted an interview this morning with one June Casagrande, author of the very funny "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies", which takes to task people who derive an unnatural amount of pleasure from catching the grammar mistakes of others.

I was a little concerned as I began reading her 194-page screed. First, I find myself using words like "screed" that no normal, Vanilla Coke-drinking person would work into casual speech. (Second, I drink Vanilla Coke.) And I have a long history of nailing people for errors in print.

My first college, for instance, asked me to remove myself, Felix Unger-like, from my place of residence (college, that is), ostensibly because my GPA couldn't be spotted with an electron microscope, but really because - as managing editor of the campus newspaper - I spent hours (and hours) finding every conceivable error. And then printing out the correction, cutting it out, coating it with hot wax, hunting for where I dropped it on the floor, finding it again, and sticking it on the galley. Needless to say, this left me with little time for what some people liked to call "classes".

A year-and-a-half and two colleges later, the editor-in-chief asked me to stop helping out at her paper, because I was spotting too many mistakes.

"We're not trying to be a Nobel Prize-winning newspaper," she said.

"You mean a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper," I replied.

"I think you should leave," she concluded.

Around the same time, I found a typo on the beautifully caligraphed marriage license my aunt and uncle had commissioned for their wedding. Even I cringed a little when I pointed that out.

And more recently, regular readers of this fine feature (or fine readers of this regular feature) will recall that I took the late Fred Rogers to task for naming his program "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", rather than "Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood", which "The Elements of Style" dictates.

As June Casagrande pointed out in her interview this morning, Mr. Rogers may well have been following the AP Stylebook when he named his program, so I hereby retract my complaint, and will continue to (try to) relinquish most of my worst Grammar Snob impulses.

I will, however, continue to wonder where Mr. Rogers was coming from at the beginning of his show, and where he was going at the end.

Clearing out the backblog, vol. 1

Here at the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, we've been hip-deep in the reality that is being the executive producer of a daily interview program. This should mean nothing to you, the 19 Minutes reading faithful, except that it's been hard to post regular updates - especially this week, as we've also been filling in as the host of the show.

The upside is that our brain's memory cache has been filling up with column material. The downside is that as new stuff shows up in our mind, some of the old stuff finds itself filed in our brain's recycling bin. (We'll stop the extended Windows metaphor any minute now.)

So we're left with a bunch of stuff that could best be labeled "quick hits" - stuff that could be worth 750 words, but will end up being represented by two or three fascinating paragraphs. At the very least, they'll be easier to print out and post on your refrigerator, should you happen to want to post any of them to your refrigerator, which you probably don't.

(On a related note, who decided that refrigerators were the kitchen appliance of choice for posting shopping lists, artwork de les enfants, or tickets to upcoming baseball games? Why aren't we posting these things on our dishwashers? I can understand why they don't end up on our waffle irons, but the side of an electric can opener is just wasted space at this point.)

Anyway, this is the freshest material we have to work with.

A hypothetical: Let's say you're a guy. (Actually, for the 19 Minutes staff, this isn't really a hypothetical.) When you're a boy, say, nine years old, and you're at a sporting event, you spend roughly one-eighth of your time watching the game, one-eighth of the time dripping hot dog mustard on your t-shirt, and three-quarters of your time trying to con the players, coaches, umpires, linesmen, bat boys, the old guys sitting in the right field corner who scoop up the foul balls, groundskeepers, and photographers in the camera bays to throw you a ball, puck, batting glove, cracked bat, broken stick, pine tar rag, sweat-soaked towel, or empty bag of sunflower seeds.

This almost never comes to fruition, since a) you're not being very polite about it, b) there's no compelling reason for any of these people to throw you anything since as a nine-year old, your bribery options are somewhat limited ("Come on, I'll trade you the Pog chip that's in my pocket..."), and c) there are roughly 650 other nine-year old boys crowded around you trying to accomplish exactly the same thing.

So every once in a great while, the bullpen catcher or the backup goalie will toss a batting practice baseball or a warm-up puck into the crowd, purely for the amusement of watching 650 nine-year old boys attempt to kill each other to take possession of this sacred talisman of sports fandom worth $.49 to the team in question.

Having just packed a household and moved it across the country, I recently came across one of the few such treasures I collected in my youth - a baseball rolled across the dugout to me at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore by vaunted-yet-obscure Red Sox pitcher Allen Ripley on May 23, 1979. I know these facts surrounding this baseball, because written on it, in green ballpoint 10-year old handwriting, is the inscription: "Rolled across the dugout at Memorial Stadium by vaunted-yet-obscure Red Sox pitcher Allen Ripley - May 23, 1979." Okay, so I've added the "vaunted-yet-obscure" business 27 years later. Also, my handwriting has improved. Or at least changed.

Now let's go to another hypothetical. You're a girl. Specifically, you're a 22-month old girl at Game 1 of the first round of the AHL's Calder Cup playoffs - Milwaukee versus Iowa. You're wearing your Ottawa Senators jersey, in part because it makes your dad pleased, and in part because it's the only hockey attire you own, save for the paper hockey helmet obtained from the Frozen Four Skills Challenge a couple weeks ago.

You spend roughly half your time pointing and/or waving cheerfully at the hockey players who are busy slamming each other violently into the dasherboards, a quarter of your time eating Wheat Thins, and a quarter of your time walking back and forth in front of the three seats you and your parents occupy in the second row behind the visitor's bench and trying to get at the old french fries under the seats. In short, you are not requesting anything at all from the players, referees, equipment managers, ushers, or your fellow fans.

This means, naturally, that after the horn goes off at the end of the second period, a referee hands off the game puck to a fan sitting nearby, who of course tosses the puck to you. And it means that after the game, when you - at 2-feet-5 - want to walk through the crowd on the concourse towards the escalators roughly a half-mile away, the crowd parts to watch this miniature person wearing a hockey sweater making her way towards the exits. And then another girl - probably around 10-years old - walks over and offers you her inflatable 'cheer sticks'. And so now you're walking through the concourse, holding two inflatable sticks almost as tall as you are, oblivious to the fact that even more people are now charting your progress, watching you like the citizens of Boston in "Make Way for Ducklings". (Only instead of the man who sweeps the streets saying, "Now, ain't that nice," it's a guy in a Milwaukee Admirals jersey, holding a beer, saying "I think that's the smallest person I've ever seen.")

And so, of course, a woman wearing an Admirals staff nametag stops by and hands you a foam rubber puck, telling your parents not to worry because you can't hurt herself with this one. And so you set down one of your cheersticks and cheerfully carry the puck for a while until you hand it off to mom and re-collect your second cheerstick.

On you march, the crowd continuing to part, and cute college girls bending over to pinch your nose. And then another Admirals staffer walks up, and says, "Ah... I was looking for someone to give this puck to..." and you wind up with a brand-new game puck, too.

Again, let me stress that this 22-month old did nothing to solicit any of these items, except to look heartbreakingly cute as she went about her business at the Bradley Center.

And you know what? You are pretty darn cute.

We're Number 16! Rah!

A little insight into Milwaukee’s current sports psyche…

Yesterday morning, I walked over to the Bradley Center box office to buy tickets to the Milwaukee Admirals’ (yes, that'd be minor-league hockey) playoff game tonight against Iowa. It was 11:20, and there were about 10 people in line. It dawned on me that Bucks’ NBA playoff tickets were also on sale, which probably accounted for the brisk business on a Thursday morning. Of the 10 people in line, it turns out six of us were buying Admirals tickets, two were going to some circus that was actually going on that morning, and two were buying Bucks tickets.

Headline in today’s Journal-Sentinel sports section:

Not Much Expected of Bucks

Nice to see rampant optimism infusing a city…

(Of course, this may also have had something to do with the fact that 4th-row seats at the Admirals game cost me $9.00 each, while 4th-row seats for the Bucks-Pistons would cost $115. If they were available. Which they aren't.)

Taking a shot at sports photography

I’m going to a hockey game this evening. The Milwaukee Admirals are playing the Chicago Wolves – a game that, if it weren’t an actual minor-league match, would sound like a made-up event from an episode of MacGyver. (After which the players would kick back and take a swig out of a bottle labeled “Cola”, or perhaps “Beer”.)

But it’s a real game, and to prove it, I’m planning on bringing my camera. I’ve taken a lot of sports pictures in my life. I have no idea why. It was a habit that I thought began when started lugging my Nikon EM to Red Sox games when I was a teenager. But when we were packing things up to move to Wisconsin, I discovered a bunch of pictures from a Baltimore Orioles game in the late 70s (I’m assuming they were playing the Red Sox). They were taken from the upper deck of Memorial Stadium, using a Kodak Instamatic and its classic 126 film, which means you need a magnifying glass to verify that, the people in the 3X3" pictures are, in fact, baseball players.

The problem is – starting with the aforementioned Kodak Instamatic, I’ve never really had the right camera for shooting sports. I’ve had decent zoom lenses, but never the variety that allow for close-ups that convey any kind of emotion, the way a Sports Illustrated picture does. So what I’m left with are basically sports landscapes – nice shots of the ball in motion as the batter begins his swing, or of the football kicker just after he’s lofted the extra-point over the offensive line, or hockey players about to take a face-off. I get Lens Envy whenever I run into a professional photographer at games.

My wife and I made it to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City – an opportunity for us to practice our skills at shooting pictures of bobsledding. As it turns out, it was nearly impossible to take digital pictures of a bobsled roaring by at 85 mph, since our 2001 digital camera had a maddening delay between the time you pressed the shutter and the time the camera actually took the picture. So, until we got wise and went to the end of the run (where the bobsledders actually stopped), we got a lot of inspriring pictures of empty bobsled track. (Thrill of victory, indeed.)

So I’ve discovered that the best places to take sports pictures are at exhibition events – such as last weekend’s “Frozen Four Skills Challenge”, which showcased the talents of the best men’s and women’s college hockey players in the country. That’s because everything happens eight or nine times in a row – each competitor skates around the same cones, sprints around the same track, and shoots at the same goal. So after taking more pictures of empty ice, I could adjust my technique and gradually work my way to pictures of a skater’s heel, and finally on to the point where there was a real-live person in the frame. (The women hockey players – such as North Dakota’s Devon Fingland (above left) – who were a step or two slower than the men, were easier to capture.)

Anyway, I’ll probably take my camera to the Admirals game tonight. We’re in the upper deck, which will pose some challenges, even with my 2005 digital camera and its 10x optical zoom. So maybe I’ll see if I can dig out that old Kodak Instamatic.

You otter be doing something else

A news update, from the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters: As of Friday afternoon at 3:00 pm CDT, a full 29 percent of the hits this feature has received in the last month were from people looking for pictures of river otters. To date, we've never run a picture of a river otter (which makes this fact all the more astounding).

So to avoid any further disappointment by people who have reached this page looking for pictures of river otters, here's the best we could muster from our trip to the San Diego Zoo last fall:

And, just in case there's anyone out there using the search term "drowsy hippopotamus", here's a special Friday afternoon bonus:

A request, though -- for anyone who starts a garage band and calls it "Drowsy Hippopotamus", I'd like a credit in the liner notes.

Guardedly optimistic about DST

The 19 Minutes staff has called the Milwaukee area home for around six weeks, and we continue to marvel at quite a few things we experience every day. Daylight Saving Time, for starters. After seven years in Arizona, Daylight Saving Time took me by surprise.

Not the setting-the-clocks forward part, of course. You have to have live in a Habitrail, turned away from all forms of media, to miss the helpful reminders to set your clocks forward. I believe even Iron Chef Chinese, Chen Kenichi, took a few seconds out of the Rutabaga Battle to remind Americans to set their clocks an hour ahead.

The aspect that threw me was the part where it actually stays light later in the evening. For the first week after we sprang forward, I was continually confused by the visual cues around me – convinced it was earlier than the clock claimed. But after getting used to it, I have to give it a pretty favorable review. Not only is it nice to get home from work in daylight, but I could now get things done in the garden, should I suddenly develop an affinity for gardening.

The Milwaukee area also continues to dazzle me by its amazing proliferation of crossing guards. There are probably half a dozen schools between my house and the park-and-ride lot, and each of them has a platoon of crossing guards at the intersections nearby. These are adults wearing bright orange jackets or vests, and who carry hand-held stop signs to let children get to school more quickly and safely.

Or you would imagine that is their charge. The reality is that Milwaukee-area crossing guards are a little scattershot. Maybe it’s their training program. When I was a crossing guard, at Glenallan Elementary School (the crossing guard program against which all others are judged), Officer Barnes instructed us to wait until a group of children had reached the curb before having them all cross at once (perhaps to ratchet up the body count in the event of an accident).

The local crossing guard establishment favors a policy wherein they walk out and stop traffic to let one child cross, then head back, only to stop half-way to the curb as another child approaches, after which they stay out in the middle of the street to let a parent – fresh from dropping his child off at school – cross in the other direction. All this does wonders for the blood pressure of Milwaukee-area drivers, which is perhaps why the crossing guards want to keep any potential body counts low.

The crossing guards also are deployed at traffic lights, which seems like an interesting use of resources, considering there are already crossing guards at those intersections, in the form of blinking white guys and orange guys.

Our immediate neighborhood also features a guard known to all as “The Waving Crossing Guard”, who – not surprisingly – stands at her corner and waves at every single passing vehicle, which seems like an oddly distracting activity for a crossing guard to engage in.

And finally, this update on the "Woman Who Probably Has Her Hair Done Very Nicely, Only She Wears a Knit Hat On Top of It Somewhat Precariously, So We Never Actually See What It Looks Like", who often rides our bus, but whom we had lost track of: She has returned to our Freeway Flyer bus, and with the temperature reaching the upper 60s, has - in fact - dispensed with her hat. As it turns out, she sports a simple pony tail. So much for the mystique. We'll now have to scan the bus for another Mystery of the Ages. Stay tuned.

Some kind of harmonic convergence or something

So the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters has relocated to downtown Milwaukee, within a few blocks of a variety of performance venues - among them, The Bradley Center, the U.S. Cellular Arena, the Pabst Theater, and the Riverside Theater. The last of these is worth noting because there's an alternative rock band called "Train" playing a concert there this evening.

I know nothing about this band, except that on a walk back to my office this afternoon (from the Bradley Center, no less), I passed the group's bus, parked across the street from the theater.

No sooner did I start thinking about the irony of a group called "Train" traveling by bus than a city bus came barreling by, with this sign above the windshield:

TRAINING BUS

That's all. Feel free to go back to your lives.

A bonsai buckeroo

You're driving down, say, Oklahoma Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on some Tuesday evening. You pass, roughly 173 taverns, 24 bowling alleys, and 5 Lutheran churches (hey, sometimes stereotypes are accurate). The last of these Lutheran churches is Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the parking lot is filled to capacity. You figure, "Maybe a youth group. Maybe choir practice. Maybe they're making lemon bars."

You'd be wrong.

I've recently come from an assignment at the aforementioned Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, where some 60 tiny tree enthusiasts were plying their trade. The Milwaukee Bonsai Society was hosting its annual "Group Slash" competition, and I was along for the ride.

Me, I always thought of bonsai trees as little junipers that city apartment-dwellers placed on their window panes when they got tired of looking at the little cactus garden they bought at Safeway.

Turns out that hundreds of people in the Milwaukee area alone are really into these things, and in a way that seems healthier than that whole Star Trek fancier phenomenon. Some of these folks have been working on the same tree for decades. The way the bonsai aficionados see it, their trees tell a story - a story that they've crafted by making it look as though the tree was hit by lightning, weathered by mountain winds, clear-cut by a paper company, etc.

But there was little time in the "Group Slash" for telling too complex a story. Teams of three or four (or more) people ganged up on the little trees and tried to turn them into something interesting in the span of an hour. College students, day laborers and senior citizens pulled, snipped, and wired their small plants into position. One participant was a middle school teacher whose 6th and 7th graders will hold a day-long bonsai workshop later this spring.

Some of them looked like high-elevation bristlecone pines, gnarled by years of harsh weather. Some of them looked like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, scarred (physically and mentally) by poor application of pruning shears. But in a room saturated with the heavy, sweet aroma of juniper, the enthusiasm was infectious. And the lemon bars were tasty, too.

Considering the number of plants that have come and gone from my household, it's probably a good thing I wasn't tasked to judge the evening's results. But in the end, no one got hurt and a good time was had by all.

And I got a pretty good radio piece out of the hour, which should make it to air in a couple of weeks.

First pitch of the season

Before we get on with the ceremonial first pitch, a post-script to our "Thoughts on the bus" feature: We've already lost track of the "Woman Who Probably Has Her Hair Done Very Nicely, Only She Wears a Knit Hat On Top of It Somewhat Precariously, So We Never Actually See What It Looks Like", which means one of two things - either she's stopped taking the bus (after, perhaps, being directed to this column); or she's actually still riding the bus, only she's stopped wearing her hat, and we really don't know what she looks like.

Anyway, as you would know if you drove by Miller Park this afternoon (which you probably didn't), baseball season is underway. It's a different experience in the northern tier of the country, this opening day business. All that rhapsodic talk in baseball literature about the start of the season being tantamount to the planet's yearly rebirth is somewhat more pertinent in a place that's not green year-round.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed watching baseball for the last seven years in Arizona. There was something equally satisfying about buying sunscreen in late February and thinking about snow piling up on the pitcher's mound in Cleveland. And going to a game here in Milwaukee - in a domed stadium as we're planning to do this Saturday, will probably seem as unnatural as going to an August ballgame in Phoenix. Or an April hockey game in Phoenix. Or any hockey game in Phoenix. Or a Pesäpallo game in Michigan. (You can look that one up.)

But their shared artificialities aside, there are some key differences between the Arizona and Milwaukee baseball experiences that I'm looking forward to:

Tailgating. Driving by Miller Park this afternoon, you could smell the brats grilling in the parking lot. From the Interstate. Inside a bus. What I like about tailgating is that it gives the baseball game a more momentous feel - like an actual event, rather than a two hour TV show you're attending. When I landed my first radio job, I timed my drive from Maryland to Iowa so that I could go to an Indians-Yankees game at Cleveland's old Municipal Stadium. Eight thousand fans in a park that held 80,000.

The forlorn gravel parking lot was easily the size of Rhode Island, and as I pulled up - with a carful of worldly possessions - a minivan with West Virginia plates pulled in next to me, and a bunch good ol' Mountaineers hopped out and proceeded to assemble a phalanx of hibachis. (A side note: I believe 19 Minutes Past the Hour has just made history by being the only weblog in history to use the term "phalanx of hibachis". And you were here to witness it.) It turned out to be a group of four friends on their yearly trip to see the Indians, and they thought my need to see an Indians game on my move was so cool, they added another couple of Italian sausages to the grill and dealt me in. So I like tailgating. On the other hand, I can't fault Arizona Diamondbacks fans for foregoing the tailgating tradition. For one thing, grilling out loses some of its appeal when the pavement is hotter than your charcoal. For another, management frowns on grilling out in a parking garage, anyway.

The other aspect of Milwaukee baseball that I think will appeal to me is the team's desire to have me attend its games. We attended a lot of Diamondbacks games the first few years we lived in Arizona - which was saying something, considering it was a two hour drive from Flagstaff to the Stadium Formerly Known as Bank One Ballpark. The team was good, the ticket prices reasonable, and the seats were typically 2/3-to-3/4 full. Then the Dbacks started losing. And people stopped showing up. To which the Diamondbacks responded by first, increasing ticket prices. Then, they created a multi-tiered pricing system, which included something called "Marquee Games", meaning they jacked up prices some more for games that anyone wanted to go to (which included, if memory serves, an exciting interleague series against the Tigers). Our last season in Arizona, we made it to one game.

Flash forward to last Friday. It's raining. It's 40 degrees. It's windy. I stop at Miller Park on my drive home from work - it's about 8 minutes from my house. I drag my bedraggled self to the ticket window and remark that the experience is a little different than buying tickets in my former Arizona home. The vendor replies, "Well, for people who have just moved to Milwaukee from Arizona, we have a special deal - half-price on any seats in the house."

It turns out that he was being the slightest bit theatrical - the Brewers have a special deal on at the beginning of the season, offering half-price tickets to everyone in the five counties in the metro area. But they actually seem to understand that they'll do better in the long run if they draw 35,000 fans a game paying half-price than if they draw 11,000 fans a game, and most of them sit in the bleachers. The fans might even come back again, and pay full price.

So we're going to the Brewers game this Saturday. They're playing the Diamondbacks.

Thoughts on the bus

Reason #907 why I hope my 21-month old doesn't grow up too fast: She thinks it's really, really cool that I ride the bus to work. Sylvi loves buses. The "Hippopotamuses of the Vehicle World", she'd call them, if she could manage the verbiage. She can't quite manage that, though, so she's content to point out the car window and exclaim, "Bus! Bus!" whenever a bus goes by (or a garbage truck, for that matter).

So I'm riding the bus to work - or, rather, two buses. There's the humble, regular old surface street bus (the Number 76, to use the hepcat bus lingo), which connects me to the "Freeway Flyer", which looks suspiciously like the humble regular old surface street bus, only it goes on the freeway and takes me downtown.

The whole bus concept has taken a little getting used to. I'm not a complete novice to public transportation - I did ride Metro, the Washington, DC, subway system quite a bit growing up. But on the subway, you at least have the ability to figure out where the next stop is going to be. And it's not up to the riders to determine whether the train is going to actually stop. So at least until I got used to where the heck I was going (and more importantly, what that place looked like), I would perch over the "stop" cord for the last 10 minutes of my trip, certain I was going to miss my stop. Even then, someone else always beat me to the cord-pulling thing, blocks before we actually reached my destination.

Besides that, it took me weeks to figure out when to actually show up at the bus stop. The bus schedules in Milwaukee - as in most large cities, I'd imagine - don't actually list all the stops. Rather, they tell you when the bus will be at a few noteworthy stops, and it's up to you to extrapolate when you need to show up by the side of the road. This, of course, requires you to know at least a little about where the stops are, and what the traffic is like at a given hour. For a few days, I was varying the time I'd leave home. As it turns out, if I leave my house at 6:55 am, I get to work at 7:35. If I leave at 7:02, I get to work at 8:25. If I leave at 8:00, I also get there at 8:25, but only because it means I've missed my last bus and I've gone home and talked my wife out of the car for the day.

But riding the bus has also posed some other local adjustment questions, like: How long do you ride the same bus every day before you start to acknowledge the other people who also ride the same bus every day? People like the Guy With the Grey Hair and the Dark Moustache, who appears to teach at one of the colleges; the Woman With the Grey Overcoat; and the Woman Who Probably Has Her Hair Done Very Nicely, Only She Wears a Knit Hat On Top of It Somewhat Precariously, So We Never Actually See What It Looks Like. There aren't a lot of great conversation starters on the Freeway Flyer (provided, like me, you refuse to start yammering about the weather), so I'm inclined to wait until something unusual happens ("Hey, Guy With Grey Hair and Dark Moustache! I see the Woman Who Probably Has Her Hair Done Nicely has apparently purchased a new hat...")

I'm also interested in another phenomenon that's appeared on Milwaukee buses: Transit TV. A TV network even more inane than the CNN Airport Network. It's an interesting concept, though - TV monitors in buses, showing weather forecasts, recipes, commercials for predatory loan places, roundtable discussions of what the Woman Who Probably Has Her Hair Done Nicely's hair actually looks like - but the execution is pretty weird. On one hand, they show word puzzles of the "Wheel of Fortune" variety, with challenging answers like "Spatula". Then, they hit riders with a movie trivia question about "Monty Python's Life of Brian", followed by a 'Who Am I?' puzzle about Guglielmo Marconi. All this leads me to wonder: Who do the programmers think is riding Milwaukee buses? Are the people getting the Marconi question really going to head out to the car title loan place? Are the kids causing trouble on the buses going to stop what they're doing when they figure out the answer to _PAT_LA?

Maybe I'll bounce these questions off the Woman in the Grey Overcoat.

Home is where the house is

Author's note: The following was jotted down Sunday night on the back of a random sheet of paper I found in my blazer, composed after my seatback was up, and my tray table in its fully upright and locked position. It turns out the other side of the paper contained my notes from introducing the Capitol Steps when they performed in northern Arizona last year. That fact has no bearing on anything that follows.

I'm at 28,000 feet, in a Midwest Airlines Boeing 717. Nice spanking new airplane with big leather seats, free chocolate chip cookies, the whole works. It's a nice evening for flying. A little rough air (that proverbial "light chop" the pilots are always referring to, but not a cloud in the sky between northern Virginia and southeastern Wisconsin. And even though it's too dark to make out any landmarks, the spiderweb pattern of each set of city lights is distinct enough that I can figure out where we are - and right now, that place is just past Detroit.

I'm flying home to Milwaukee, which is odd, given that I've just left Washington, DC, which was my home for the better part of two decades. Odd, too, because the Milwaukee area has been home for the better part of four weeks. I have to consciously remind myself that I'm at the end of the trip, not the beginning.

The pilot's just come across the PA system, noting we're over central Michigan. He points out - marvels, really -- that it's such a clear night that we're still some distance from Lake Michigan, but he can already see the lights of Milwaukee, far on the other shore. My seatmate and I are looking out the right side of the plane, but it's not hard to imagine the skyline of Milwaukee, reflected in the calming evening water of Lake Michigan.

This is my first trip "home" since moving to Wisconsin last month. And though I'm not there yet, I'm thinking the landing at General Mitchell International Airport won't have the same level of intimacy flying back to some previous homes had. Flagstaff, Arizona, and Massena, New York are about as spiritually different as you can imagine, but their airports had two key similarities - parking lots that were a) free; and b) small enough that you could spot your car as you came in for a landing, thus saving you the trouble of trying to remember where you'd parked a week ago.

I had a love-hate relationship with Flagstaff, but it was home for the past seven years. When my wife and I moved there in 1999, it took almost no time to feel like a comfortable pair of jeans, already broken in. The problem was - like a pair of jeans - over time, it got small. Not claustrophobia-inducing, just small enough that it was harder to hide the imperfections. Bad Chinese food, an overbearing landlady, no place to buy decent donuts - and that's before you include an underfunded education system and 95 freight trains blasting through downtown every day and night.

But it was hard to pick up and move away from clean air, clean water, 310 days of sunshine a year, and a six-minute commute to work -- and that's before you include terrific friends, a terrific job, and even a terrific pediatrician. And the comfort of returning home to a too-small apartment with a too-large (and too-ugly) couch, where the two loves of my life sat watching "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood".

The couch is still in Flagstaff. The loves of my life have moved on to a new couch and, truth be told, a new TV show of choice. But the new couch is in a new house, in the city that's reflected tonight in Lake Michigan.

So, Milwaukee. It's nice to be home.

Finding Cortez

First of all, an apology from the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, where we experienced the joy of an electrical system in an 81-year old house. We experienced plenty of windstorms back in Flagstaff - sometimes with 50 mph winds. None of them ever resulted in a power outage, nor affected our computer in any way. Meanwhile, back in Wauwatosa, we had 25 mph winds the other day, which not only knocked out our phone, cable, and internet service, but also zapped our power, and fried our hard drive. Two days and plenty of IT support later, we're back.

Onward.

There's an interesting magazine/website that focuses on pieces of writing on scraps of paper people have picked up off the streets. (So, in a sense, the wind is really a friend to undiscovered writers.) The concept is that there's a lot of unintentional-yet-authentic prose floating around in the ether.

I discovered that a while ago in a stint in the adminstrative assisting arts I pulled in between college and my first reporting gig. I started as a one-day temp in an obscure office at Georgetown University - until the person for whom I was filling in never bothered showing up again. That left me to comb through her computer files to finish the variety of projects she had left undone. That was when I discovered a treasure trove of heartfelt letters she had written to a relative, detailing a heartbreaking variety of medical concerns and relationship issues involving her family, all written in the style of Appalachia. It was as though I had stumbled onto the draft manuscript of an unpublished Lee Smith novel.

(Naturally, I took it upon myself to archive all of the letters, including a few unfinished works. I'd do something more with them, but tragically, I don't have access to a computer with either a 5 1/4" floppy drive, or that's still running WordStar IV.

So when the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters moved into its vintage bungalow, I had high hopes for what we might find. Immediate rewards came in the form of a box in the garage with a bunch of VHS videos from the previous homeowners' collection - though my excitment was tempered a little by the sketchy taste they displayed ("For Love or Money"? Really? Someone bought that?)

Running shorts left in the laundry chute weren't much of an addition, nor the several dozen cans of paint in the work room, even though many appear unopened. I was rummaging around, looking for hooks in the work room, when I discovered an even less-promising archive of broken pieces of window glass and mirror. It was under that collection that I discovered the one piece of leftover prose: A sheet of notebook paper, with adult handwriting. It starts with this fascinating insight:

5. Cortez Watcher of the skies

It goes on to pose an obvious follow-up:

1. A person who discovers the soldier
What's wrong/why is he there?

But from this somewhat unpromising start, it builds to a rousing conclusion, which could have been copied from the files of a former Georgetown employee:

She tempted and misled him, made him think she loved him. Then she left him in his sleep. That the lady [of] his affection has made him powerless towards her, but her merciless nature ensures that she will abandon him.

Very dark, for a piece of notebook paper found underneath shard of glass. It's enough to lead the 19 Minutes staff to wonder about the circumstances surrounding the departure of the previous owners. If nothing else, it might explain the athletic shorts left in the laundry chute.

A scoop almost on par with mint chocolate chip

The radio show I produce is not really in the business of getting scoops, unless you count the odd trip to the ice cream place two floors above. We're an interview show, sort of a Milwaukee version of NPR's Fresh Air (and yes, I'm aware that sounds vaguely implausible). Our role is generally to put the day's news in context in a thoughtful and expansive way.

That said, we're not above the notion that it's exciting to be ahead of the curve. Our interview with Danielle Trussoni ran this morning, just as the news was going out that her book, "Falling Through the Earth", was destined for the front page of this Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

What the Times review won't say (because, hey, it's not a radio program) is that for someone who lived as tumultuous a childhood as one could imagine, Trussoni is startlingly... normal. Smart. Articulate. Introspective. Candid. And an engaging interview - especially for someone who had never given a radio interview before.

Anyway, the At Ten interview is archived here.

And tomorrow, I'll be back to writing about pizza and comically bad press releases.

Before it falls through the cracks...

...a plug for an upcoming interview:

Sometime ago in this space, I noted one of my favorite aspects to life in Public Radioland - interviewing people with something to say. I've also noted my least favorite aspects, such as interviewing musicians who manage, despite my best interviewing efforts, to segue the conversation from harmonica technique to the Zapruder film. Since those posting, the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters has taken up residence in the offices of Milwaukee Public Radio, where I'm now the executive producer of a program that exists basically to interview people with something to say. Sometimes I get to do the interviews, such as one that'll air on Friday.

If you haven't heard of Danielle Trussoni's book, "Falling Through the Earth" yet, you will soon. (Come to think of it, you did just now.) It's a compelling memoir of a childhood turned on its end by her father's experience as a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War. The book is at times heartbreaking, and at other times bitingly funny.

Trussoni, who survived an existence that could easily have crushed her, went on to an academic career at the University of Wisconsin and at the Iowa Writers Workshop. And then visited Vietnam, where her seminal experience in the same tunnels her dad explored 30 years before eventually led to the memoir - and led to her eloquent appearance in the Milwaukee Public Radio studios (where, let's face it, all roads eventually lead to).

It's a book worth reading, especially in a climate in which thousands of Americans are returning from war. And hopefully, an interview worth streaming. Stay tuned.

The final DVD in the Tosa Move set

(By the fifth installment in the mini-series, even the most dedicated 19 Minutes readers are tired of the recaps at the start of each episode. We'll keep this one short: Left Flagstaff. Car broke down. Got ear infection. Car towed, fixed. Ate sweet rolls in Albuquerque. Had uneventful trip through Bible Belt. Watched plenty of late night Olympics coverage. Reached Wisconsin. Successfully bought house. Received free candle, plus 12 copies of mortgage officer's business card, in case we suddenly make a lot of friends in the area who also want to buy houses.)

Onward. Or, forward, as the Wisconsin state motto would note.

Thursday, February 23rd, 1:45 p.m. For my 37th birthday, not only do I get a house with beautiful hardwood floors, but all our possessions show up. Well, all of them except for our framed ketubah, which is a Jewish marriage certificate - or in our case, a Jewish-Lutheran marriage certificate, signed by the Unitarian minister who performed our ceremony. Our mover thinks he accidentally left it in Flagstaff with (really) a group of wardrobe boxes. He promises to replace it if he can't find it, and I imagine the ordeal of sending it around the country, so each of the people who signed it can re-create their signatures.

8:30 p.m. We return from our dinner out, put the car in our very own garage and go inside.

8:45 p.m. I head back out to the garage to bring a few things in, only to discover that the garage door opener no longer, well, opens the garage door. It does make a fine little humming noise, however. I enlist the services of my father-in-law to try to get into the garage.

10:00 p.m. Our breaking-and-entering attempt stretches into its second hour. There's no door to the garage, so we're trying to go through a window. After several hundred exhaustive attempts to hook the latch with a wire inserted behind the jamb, we meet with success. Our exuberance is tempered somewhat when the window moves only around an inch or two, revealing that it's also secured with a chain lock. The maximum security leads me to conclude the previous owners either used the garage to store a jaguar, as a meth lab, or to shoot porn movies. I recollect the story the next morning at work and a co-worker suggests the owners were probably concerned about the safety of a snowblower. Anyway, judicious use of a screwdriver gets us into the garage a few minutes later. I retrieve my toothbrush from the car and go back inside.

Friday, 7:30 a.m. The exhaust fan in the bathroom does an uncanny imitation of the humming noise made by the garage door. I celebrate my new status as a homeowner by going to work.

6:00 p.m. Our mover calls from the road to report our "Kabbalah" has turned up back in Flagstaff.

Saturday, March 4, 10:30 a.m. The 19 Minutes staff gets set to spend its first unstructured weekend in the Milwaukee area with some unpacking, some shopping for a new sofa, and perhaps a trip to the Children's Museum. We settle for Children's Hospital, as 20-month old Sylvi breaks her leg enjoying the wonder of our beautiful hardwood floors. She spends the weekend in traction before getting her cast on Monday morning. We'd heard good things about Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, but hadn't necessarily planned to investigate the place so quickly.

The negative aspect to the leg situation is that it's a big bummer for the next five weeks.

The positive aspect - aside from giving us a chance to catch up on our episodes of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and "The Backyardigans" - is that an immobile 20-month old is a 20-month old that isn't getting into the semi-unpacked boxes of cleaning chemicals, crystal bowls, and razor blades that are all over the place. And she'll stay away from that garage door.

[Roll credits. Preview tonight's "Late Show". Insert half-screen shot of TV anchor telling us what fires or car accidents we'll learn about on the evening news. Cut to loud commercial for furniture store promising No Payments Until 2018. Fade to black. Exit stage left.]

The Tosa Move wraps up, almost

Regular readers of this feature (and the five of you know who you are) will recall that the 19 Minutes household departed Flagstaff, Arizona, bound for a new home in the Milwaukee area a couple of weeks ago. Even casual readers (the other 17 of you) will likely remember that the 19 Minutes car broke down less than three hours and 150 miles after leaving, adding an unscheduled three-day, two-day stay in scenic Gallup, New Mexico (a prize that, to my knowledge, hasn't ever been offered on "Wheel of Fortune"), and yielding an enjoyable opportunity to meet two tow truck drivers, the repair staff at University Motors VW in Albuquerque. Concurrently, we (by which I mean "I") came down with an ear infection. Back on the road, we survived our stops in Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and Cedar Rapids, and pulled into Brookfield, Wisconsin on Wednesday afternoon.

Onward.

Thursday, February 23rd, 9:00 a.m. Our credit union's website in Arizona claimed that the credit union was a member of a network of credit unions, meaning any of the members could access our account and cut us a cashier's check. In theory, this was a great concept, since that meant not having to physically carry the downpayment on our house (a gazillion jillion dollars, to be exact) with us across the country. I was a little leery, though, since our credit union tended to be the kind of place where policies differed depending on which teller you saw (there was the teller, for example, who insisted that there was a 7-day waiting period before any deposited check was available for withdrawal. This of course means that in Arizona, it's easier to get a gun than it is to withdraw money from the bank, which I guess is not really a surprise. But I digress.)

Anyhow, still (for some reason) the optimists, we trooped over to the nearby credit union, where we figured out immediately that we were no longer in Arizona. Not only were we the only people in line, but the tellers knew exactly how to accomplish the transaction, and got us our check expediently, which was relatively important, since we were scheduled to close on the house in approximately two hours.

10:45 a.m. Unload the hotel room and repack the roof carrier one more damn time.

11:00 a.m. Arrive at the nondescript, modern office park where the title company, or closing service, or whatever the random financial people call it, plans to situate us in a nondescript, modern conference room with a healthy supply of ballpoint pens and Pepsi products. Fortunately, the conference room looks out on a big atrium with a fountain, which means that 20-month old Sylvi can run around outside the with Grandpa Gary (who's come out for just this occasion) while being able to peer through the window, and possibly see her dad pass out.

11:45 a.m. We'd heard a lot about closings (see, for example Dave Barry's "The Ritual Closing Ceremony" from the book "Homes and Other Black Holes), and were prepared for an inscrutable and never-ending stream of documents to be set in front of us for our signatures. As it turns out, the most complicated form is the one in which we have to provide our signatures for each rendition of our names. This is disconcerting, because I've never signed "Mitchell Teich" without my middle initial, and I've never, ever signed "Mitch C. Teich". I consider asking for a blank sheet of paper to practice, but decide that might sound a little fishy. We survive this form and the others and are done within a half-hour. It takes a little longer to finish because the previous owners of the house, sequestered in an adjacent conference room, have to run out to the bank. We consider suggesting the credit union in Flagstaff.

12:00 noon. We meet the previous owners of the house, who are a little low-key about the whole experience, but seem like nice enough people. We exchange awkward handshakes, and they turn over 32 random keys and the Three Ring Binder of House Information, which includes the newspaper ad from when they bought the house. They head back to their conference room, and my wife chases them to find out what all they keys go to. We call our mover, who has been hanging out with friends in the area, and he reports he can be at our house in 90 minutes. Our mortgage officer gives us a commemorative candle, which is a decent trade for us handing over a check for a gazillion jillion dollars.

Also, I suppose, we get a house.

Be sure to stay tuned for the final installment in "The Tosa Move". Which key appliances will cease working within 8 hours of our moving in? Did the previous owners have decent taste, or are there rooms covered in paint that appears to have been sneezed out of an alien being known as the Great Green Arkleseizure? And will the 19 Minutes staff get to spend an entire weekend at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin within 10 days of moving here?

Be sure to set your Tivos for the ultimate episode of The Tosa Move.

Now, back to our program

Previously on "The Tosa Move":

The 19 Minutes household steals out of Flagstaff, Arizona in the dead of mid-afternoon on a Thursday. Not that dramatic, but with 310 days of sunshine a year, Flagstaff's not that dramatic a place.

Three hours later, the wheels come off the move - metaphorically speaking, anyway - as we break down in Gallup, New Mexico, home of not one, not two, but zero Volkswagen repair shops. Our car is subsequently towed to Albuquerque, and we follow a day or so later. The Jetta wagon makes plenty of noise as it's winched aboard the tow truck, but I don't notice as my right ear has blown its alternator, too, or at least become infected.

The car is fixed by mid-day Saturday and Sunday, we're on our way across eastern New Mexico and into Texas, concurrently crossing into the Central Time Zone, otherwise known as "The Land Where the Daily Show Is On at 10 pm." We'll be back with tonight's program after these words from Mounds and Almond Joy:

[We'll pause while you hit 'fast-forward' on your Tivos.]

Sunday, 3:00 p.m. The western part of the Texas panhandle looks a lot like the eastern part of New Mexico, except for two things: There are vast ranches with nothing on them in Texas, whereas in New Mexico there were just vast areas of nothing at all; and the Texas panhandle also features an enormous cross in the town of Groom, which -- depending on whom you believe - is either the largest or second-largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. It's definitely the largest cross in Groom, Texas, and seems to broadcast a message like: There might not be much else here, but at least we gave you something to look at for the past 8 miles, which is more than we can say for Vega, Texas..."

Sunday, 3:25 p.m. We're all getting most peckish. Amarillo looms in the distance. The promise of 72-ounce steaks, or at least a Quizno's beckons. We're two miles from town, and more than four hours out of Albuquerque. Check the back seat. Sylvi has just fallen asleep. Opt for the Arby's drive-thru, and keep heading for Oklahoma City.

Sunday, 5:00 p.m. We're into Oklahoma. Last time we drove through the state, it was on the way out to Arizona, on a hot and humid afternoon in early May when the air seemed improbably thick - almost chowder-like. Our first thought was, "Gee, it'd be hard to imagine tornados coming through this part of the country." Hours later, we were in Albuquerque and a slew of F5 tornados tore through Oklahoma. We decide to keep our weather thoughts to ourselves this time.

Sunday, 6:30 p.m. It doesn't work, as the first (and, as it turns out, only) crappy weather of the trip greets us a half-hour or so outside Oklahoma City. It's spitting snow and sleet. The roads are merely wet, so the driving conditions wouldn't normally have been too bad, but unbeknownst to us, we're arriving just in time for the annual convention of Tractor Trailer Drivers Who Have Never Seen Snow, and so we barrel into Oklahoma City, slowing down for the trucks that are doing 9 m.p.h. in the left lane, and trying to get out of the way of the other trucks, which are doing 130 m.ph. in the right lane, or perhaps in the shoulder.

Sunday, 7:30 p.m. We arrive at the Crowne Plaza in Oklahoma City, thanking our lucky stars that we Pricelined a room off the beaten path of the 18-wheelers. It's roughly 7 degrees out, and the parking lot is full of slush and ice. We ask the desk clerk when it stopped snowing and she replies, "Oh, Friday morning, I think." The room is exactly what we needed after eight hours in the car - a comfortable bed and plenty of room for Sylvi to bounce off the walls. By this, her fourth straight night in a hotel, she's named an honorary member of The Who for her ability to trash a hotel room within 45 seconds of arriving.

Sunday, 8:00 p.m. We're hungry again. Within shouting distance of our hotel are two options: Hooters, which sort of appealed to me in a humorously surreal way (I mean hey, four days of melodramatically horrible moving experiences followed by dinner at the Oklahoma City Hooters -- come on, that's beautiful) and which Gretchen nixes immediately; and Sonic, which would normally be okay, except the last thing you really want to do after eight hours in the car is eat in your car. So we ask the desk clerk what the bext pizza delivery place in the area is. "Domino's," she replies. You only live once. We call Domino's and prepare for dining thrills.

Sunday, 8:45 p.m. Much to our surprise, the local Domino's isn't half bad. Sylvi scarfs down almost three full-size slices herself, which is less of a surprise considering the calories she's burned tearing up the hotel room for the past hour.

Monday, 2:35 a.m. Sylvi barfs up nearly three full slices of Domino's Pizza. We enjoy the comfort of the Crowne Plaza's bed by sitting up until 3:30 watching the Sesame Street 25th Anniversary Special on DVD. And nothing says 3:12 a.m. in Oklahoma City like "Happy Tapping with Elmo".

At this rate, the story will never make it to Wisconsin, so I'll note there wasn't much of interest on our trip from Oklahoma City to Kansas City - except for gas prices under $2.00 and a rest area with picnic shelters shaped like teepees (something that probably wouldn't fly back in northern Arizona). There also wasn't much to report from our Kansas City-to-Cedar Rapids drive or, for that matter, the Cedar Rapids-to-Milwaukee leg.

So when we return, we'll flash forward to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin: Will the local credit union, as claimed, be able to access our account in Arizona and cut us a check for a zillion dollars in time for the closing? And will our protagonist, as expected, pass out cold when the closing agent starts putting random pieces of paper in front of him for his signature? And - most importantly - what kind of swell gifts will the mortgage officer bring to the closing?

Admittedly, this isn't much to hold your attention, but tune in anyway, as we wrap this up and get back to making fun of poorly written press releases.

Moving, part 2.5

When we last left the 19 Minutes household, it was stranded in Gallup, New Mexico, at a Hampton Inn, one parking lot from a Cracker Barrel, two parking lots from an Applebee's, and four parking lots from the Wal-Mart pharmacy that dispensed our amoxicillin (there was a Home Depot three parking lots away, but as we were stranded en route to buying our house, going to Home Depot seemed to be tempting fate).

Friday, 10:00 pm. We were supposed to hear from the late shift at the VW dealer (really) as to whether our car would be finished by Saturday afternoon. We didn't. Regardless, we decided to make plans to head for Albuquerque on Saturday, under the philosophy that another day in Gallup might get us dangerously close to a level of tedium usually reserved for televised bowling or Ingmar Bergman films.

10:05 pm. The Ingmar Bergman mood is suddenly replaced by a Hallmark Hall-of-Fame moment as a friend from Flagstaff calls and volunteers to rescue us with a drive to Albuquerque in the morning, thus sparing me from the surreal experience of a three-hour Greyhound bus ride with an ear infection, followed by a drive back to Gallup, followed by another drive back to Albuquerque. As though the ear issue wasn't making me dizzy enough.

Saturday, 8:00 am. Becky, our Flagstaff friend, phones from the Arizona-New Mexico line to say she's about 20 minutes away. Some quick math reveals this means she left Flagstaff at approximately 5:15 am. She is quickly elevated to Saint status, at least whatever saint status can be bestowed by a Jewish-Lutheran couple.

9:00 am. We load the stuff into Becky's car - a Subaru Outback, which seems less full with our stuff than our car did. We consider either kidnapping Becky for the remainder of the drive, or just "accidentally" trading cars. Approximately 40 hours after leaving Flagstaff, we finally make it more than 150 miles, pulling into Albuquerque at around 11:30.

11:30 am. We meet Robert, the service guy at the VW dealer. He's not 100% sure why our alternator keeps failing, nor is he 100% sure we'll make it all the way to Wisconsin, but somehow, his self-assured Austin, Texas, drawl leaves us with some semblance of confidence, or at least more than we had in our hotel room in Gallup while we were on the phone with AAA. Robert tells us our car "is just about done."

12:30 pm. The service people pull our car out front and are just about to hand us the keys when the shop foreman takes a quick look under the hood. Halfway through the transaction, Robert says, ominously, "Um, hold on just a minute." Now, there are five mechanics gathered around the open hood of our Jetta Wagon. Robert calls me over, and I utter a quick prayer that no one asks me my opinion on anything more technical than the Olympic hockey tournament.

12:35 pm. No opinions are needed. As it turns out, the problem is a blown fuse on the top of the battery, which has charred to a cinder the wire that leads to the alternator. It's unclear whether we even needed our original alternator replaced three weeks before, and it's unclear whether we need this alternator replaced now. Robert suggests we go out to lunch, since it'll take an hour or so to put in the new fuse and wire.

1:00 pm. Lunch at my favorite restaurant on Planet Earth, The Frontier. The amoxicillin isn't doing wonders for my appetite, so I make sure to eat my sweet roll as quickly as possible, so it doesn't have time to register with my brain.

3:30 pm. Our original alternator and our original battery are returned to their rightful place under the hood of our car. It's more than the "hour or so", but they've kept the waiting area open for us, and they performed the repair under warranty, so we don't complain much. In fact, we enjoy our time in the VW service waiting area enough that we buy souvenirs, namely one VW Nalgene-style bottle, and a keychain.

4:00 pm. Check into Albuquerque Hilton. Wife, daughter and aforementioned saintly friend head off to the pool. I either nap or watch Olympic cross-country skiing - it's hard to say. Ear is still plugged but feels somewhat less like a fireplace poker is jammed into it than the previous day, which is also an improvement.

Sunday, 10:30 am. After breakfast (why not?) at The Frontier, we bid adieu to Becky, secure in the knowledge that there are probably a good five or six VW dealers between Albuquerque and Milwaukee, but also that she's less likely to rescue us if we break down in, say, Amarillo. We head east out of Albuquerque.

11:30 am. We're still in eastern New Mexico.

12:30 pm. Still in eastern New Mexico. Stop in Santa Rosa (scuba capital of New Mexico) to buy a cold beverage. I stay in the car, so we don't have to shut off the engine.

1:00 pm. Wow, eastern New Mexico goes on for a long time. I thought I was glad we were avoiding Nebraska on this drive.

2:15 pm. Cross the Texas border. Realize that Texas is in the Central Time Zone and it's suddenly later than I expected. Also, the drive from Albuquerque to Oklahoma City has suddenly become nine-and-a-half hours, rather than eight-and-a-half. I consider the concept of "time zones" for the next 100 or so miles.

Will 20-month old Sylvi stay awake long enough to eat lunch in Amarillo? And if so, will the 19 Minutes household eat at the restaurant that serves 72-ounce steaks that you get for free if you can finish it in an hour? How do Oklahoma drivers handle a half-inch of snow? And where is there to eat in northwest Oklahoma City after 9:00 pm? These, and many other remotely interesting questions will figure prominently in the third installment of the Tosa Move. Don't touch that dial.

Moving, part two

This episiode of "Moving, the made-for-TV movie" is being delayed by a rebroadcast of the US- versus-Norway Olympic women's curling match.

Actually, it's being delayed by the need to use the computer to find a primary care physician whose name isn't immediately followed by the italicized messages, "Not accepting new patients" and, if that weren't clear enough, "Established patients only", as though established patients would need to consult the physician provider directory to begin with.

Anyway, we'll pick up our story with a trip to University Motors VW in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we'll explore the concept that auto repair representatives are more believable when they speak with an Austin, Texas drawl. That's when we rejoin "Moving, the made-for-TV movie" in the morning.

And later, stay tuned for more news about ear wax (established patients only).