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Year 2012

Entries 5 Total

Just My Luck

Aug 23, ’12 5:39 AM

Maybe I was 18 and I got a scratch ticket for my birthday, but I can’t remember the last time I gambled. I would have dropped a nickle in a slot machine while in Reno, NV but they only take cards. Maybe that trip to Reno loosened me up though. We were eating dinner in a big old air conditioned restaurant on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota looking at the weekly specials. There was something about something called pop-tabs. I’d never heard about that before so I asked the waitress, “what’s this about pop-tabs?”

Turns out we were in a restaurant with a lottery booth where you could buy little cardboard lottery tickets. There are three little perforated doors on each ticket that you can open up and see if you’ve won. I bought five.

I had the lady that sold ’em to me show me how to do it and explain the whole thing for me. Then brought the other four back to the table and passed them out to try our luck.

Chris won $2 on his ticket and Bannack won $202, that’s the jackpot for pop-tabs! Of course he’s not allowed to gamble until he’s 18, so I claimed his winnings and paid for our dinner and beers. When he’s old I’ll pay him back and tell him why it’s a terrible idea to gamble. But until then I’ll keep my winning streak alive by never gambling again.

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Rest Stop Wibaux

Aug 18, ’12 8:10 AM

We rolled through 615 miles this first day, from breakfast at the No Sweat Cafe to the less than succinctly named Best Western Plus Ramkota Hotel Bismark here in North Dakota. Sara, Chris and Bannack are heading home to New York City and I’m along for the ride.

This trip seems like an extension of my recent trip to the Italian consulate in San Francisco. When I count it all together my summer road trip miles will have reached over 4500 when I arrive in New York. That’s 77 hours of car time according to Google Maps. As you can imagine, rest stops are precious.

Bannack and I were both in the same kind of stir-crazy mood when we got to Wibaux, Montana. The empty deck at the brewery wasn’t a perfect playground but it meant running, airplane rides, bull fighting, getting thrown in the air, Tootsie Rolls, and donkey kicking. We visited Wibaux’s real playground too, but it was the empty kind with painful spiky grass, swings that pinch, and those metal horses on springs that look like they should be really fun but still aren’t.

Sunday we’ll be in Chicago for a night or two, Wednesday night we’ll arrive in New York, and I’m looking forward to every rest stop along the way.

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From the Archives: A New Place to Live

Aug 15, ’12 9:15 PM

On this day in 2004:

cuuuuuuuuute.
posted by matt at August 18, 2004 09:23 PM

Fantastic photos Kev. I especially like the movie. Just know though, that if you get too settled and don’t go to N. Z’ed I’ll have to move into your living room next August… Keep that in mind
posted by Sara at August 18, 2004 10:49 PM

well, as it is it isn’t very comfortable. there is no carpet, i pulled that up with my sister’s help yesterday. now there is just tile made of “a material that may contain asbestos.” I haven’t moved in yet, but as soon as the carpet comes…
posted by kevin at August 19, 2004 07:53 AM

kev, I can’t wait to come visit you in your new apartment. As long as it’s not a crazy bachelor pad full of beer and your delinquent friends. Except Matt, of course.
posted by sara at August 20, 2004 07:12 AM

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George Carl, Vaudeville Clown

Aug 14, ’12 8:01 PM
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Throwing a Rock

Aug 10, ’12 12:37 AM

Last week I returned to the Italian consulate in San Francisco to get a student visa for my upcoming year at Helikos. I’ve been through the process before but like most people, I get edgy around that level of bureaucracy. It’s the feeling of border crossings, TSA screenings, CTBS testing. Anywhere where you are required to be interviewed by someone whose job it is to say no to you.

Here are some of the requirements of a successful visa application:

  1. completed application form
  2. one recent passport photograph
  3. original passport
  4. photocopy of passport
  5. original driver’s license
  6. photocopy of driver license
  7. original letter in Italian an accredited Italian Academic Institution
  8. proof of funds: a minimum of $900.00 per each month of stay is required.
  9. proof of adequate lodgings available for the entire stay
  10. round-trip flight reservations
It’s certainly not impossible to get it all together, really it’s a simple thing. But I still get completely nervous that they will find something missing or fibbed or wrong and bar me from ever entering Europe again. I imagine the big red stamp, written in block letters: DO NOT LET HIM IN.
All that scrutiny got me thinking of an improvisation class from the first year at the school I’ll be returning to Florence for. The exercise is simple: throw a stone. You turn to the audience and you’re alone on a pebbly beach in front of a vast ocean. You pick up a stone and toss it in the water, watch it splash and that’s all, the end. Dead simple right? It’s certainly not impossible to mime such a simple scene. What is difficult is to tell only the story of the neutral actor, the pebble and the beach. Much harder.
Take this video as an example of how seeing someone perform a seemingly a simple task—in this case throwing a stone with your non-dominate arm—reveals something very funny about human beings.
Submitting my visa application definitely feels like throwing the stone with my non-dominate arm. I performed the simple task but I also did a lot of unnecessary movement, stiff forgetfulness and the gyration of worry, before I lobbed that sheaf of papers over the desk of the consulate and said Grazie mille! when they were accepted.
Even after the application was accepted, the consular website urges me to remember: All visa applications are subject to further review. Applications do NOT guarantee issuance of visas. If an application is rejected, the applicant will be contacted and the passport will be returned along with an explanation for the rejection.
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