5 June 2004

There are unexpected benefits to making friends with people who have small children, in addition to the expected benefits of small children to borrow. One of them is that people with small children are often awakened at ungodly hours of the morning and are thus willing to do stuff with people like me early in the morning. So we're heading up to St. Anthony to wander around an arts and crafts fair and a library book sale with Stella and Roo and maybe Mike, I don't know. (There was a rumor that Mike had softball practice today, but it might have all been a vicious lie. Or it might just have been at a different time of day.) We will have lunch. We will probably not have mini-donuts, but we will be able.

I had mini-donuts yesterday. Mini-donuts. I am over being a spazz about it for now, but: mini-donuts. The guy at the stand said he was not surprised we couldn't get them in California, because Californians don't understand them and won't buy them. In fact, he said, they're really an upper midwestern thing: mostly Minnesota, plus the near parts of the Dakotas and Iowa. I think maybe the near parts of Wisconsin, too, and I know I've gotten them in Nebraska at the State Fair and the like. But that may just be northerners trying to make a buck. (And the food at the Nebraska State Fair is so far inferior to that of the Minnesota State Fair that it's not even comparable. Advanced onna-stick technology apparently has not reached the land of my childhood. You pretty much have to have mini-donuts, because they don't have the other things. Except, as I recall, ice Matt Egger will throw at you, but perhaps I'm too strongly associating with high school here. Perhaps one is not issued a Matt Egger at the gate for the purposes of having ice cubes chucked at one. It's entirely possible.)

So, to keep you busy while I'm off having fun with Stella, here are some pictures from Milwaukee. And if you wrote me e-mail in the second half of yesterday and haven't gotten a response, can you please re-send it? Our stupid hosting company was down, and I don't know how much of the bounced stuff will get through gradually today.

Okay then.

Mark's parents have a little waterfall in their backyard. It has koi in the summer. The neighborhood raccoons desperately want some of the koi.

Here's the Milwaukee River nearing flood levels.

Mark and Matt and their parents at the river.

And here's me with the in-laws, all of us wondering what the heck Mark is doing when we've all recognized that it's time to get back to the car and go home.