The Name Game and Travel Drain

Moonshot is in her final days of roadworthiness. As Pumkin continues to grow, her bladder is shrinking, along with her desire to sit for long periods of time. This is a concern for two people who spend as much time on America’s interstates as we do. So, we’re getting a lot of travel out of the way now.

This weekend we headed north to visit friends and family who are currently speaking of Spring as a distant event…friends who were using their snow blowers last week while we used our lawn mower…friends in the still-white state of Minnesota. These friends do not have nicknames at this point in the narrative, so I am unable to refer to them as anything other than “my Twin Cities friends.” Rather than risk awkward linguistic somersaults, I’ll just stop talking about them and move the story along so we can hurry to the part where they get names. This will be much easier for me to write once they have names.

Moonshot, Arlo, and I left Thursday evening and drove the four and a half hours to our layover point with Moonshot’s parents, Husker and Panache. Usually we brave the full 10 hour drive to the Twin Cities in one go, but Moonshot was afraid the bladder-bashing Pumkin would make that difficult. And besides, we hadn’t seen Husker and Panache since they visited us before Christmas…it was time to see them anyway. They live in a quiet old Iowa farmhouse about a half-hour outside of Iowa City. Their two-acre square of property is surrounded on all sides by working corn and soybean farms. This gives them beautiful views of rolling fields without the work on managing said rolling fields. It also means that Panache’s sweet corn is germinated by all those well-tended cornfields. And THAT means our deep freeze stays well stocked with amazingly good sweet corn (Thanks, Panache!) At any rate, we rolled in around 10:30 or 11 and stumbled like zombies into their living room.

Ever since Moonshot started growing our child, she’s been crawling into bed earlier and earlier. And since I lack the force of will to go be productive while she rests, I usually find myself in bed beside her. Currently, we snuggle in for the night around 9:30. She falls to sleep pretty quickly, and I lay in bed watching The Daily Show and the Colbert Report with an Adult Swim commercial back up. Occasionally I convince myself to read something…but even that is too taxing of late. So, our 10:30 arrival at Moonshot’s parents was well past our bedtime…our conversation skills suffered as a result.

We were more prepared to be social in the morning. We played with their dog, Hobbes and gave them last minute advice on taking care of Arlo, in our absence. In the past, Arlo has traveled to Minneapolis with us, but we thought it would be nice to take a break for a while. Husker and Panache were overjoyed to spend some time with their grandpuppy. Besides, it seemed like good practice for everyone for the day we let them take care of Pumkin for a weekend.

Around noon on Friday we continued our northward expedition. We crossed into Minnesota around 5 PM to find that the state line was literally marked by the beginning of snow-covered fields. In Iowa, you could find tiny patches of white hiding from the lukewarm sun in the occasional shadow. But the “Welcome to Minnesota” sign on I-35 was set against a backdrop of solid white. We filed that away as ammo with which to razz our “Twin Cities friends”.

We arrived at our “Twin Cities Friends’” house, dropped off our luggage and immediately set out for a local Mexican restaurant. It was over chips and salsa that we began discussing my new attempt to fold my life into an easily digestible web format. I asked them what nicknames they’d like.

You see, some of the friends you’ll meet here had obvious nicknames. I’d either played enough Halo with them to know what nicknames they self-applied or I knew some relevant detail about them that made their nickname perfectly clear. Husker literally raises a Nebraska Cornhusker flag on every game day…I think he’ll be thrilled to be called “Husker.” Our “Twin Cities Friends” were more difficult. Moonshot and I had brainstormed many ideas. Moonshot tended toward cute couple names that would make them sound appropriately connected. But that always ended up forcing one or the other of them into a nickname more related to his or her partner than to themselves. Yes, Mr. Twin Cities had a resemblance to J.K. Rawling’s Hagrid before he cut his hair and shaved his beard, but Ms. Twin Cities didn’t’ really fit into the Harry Potter world. And besides, the Hagrid resemblance had never seemed to over joy Mr. Twin Cities when we mentioned in the past. The one time we played Halo he had referred to himself as JNerd and I was fine with using that…but as a self-deprecating nickname, it needed to be double-checked to make sure it was ok for me to use.

Mr. Twin Cities suggested that he often called Ms. Twin Cities “Nutty Brown.” I stalled for a moment and finally told him that while Nutty Brown was catchy…it made me think of poop.

“That’s what I always tell him!” cried Ms. Twin Cities.

“No,” replied Mr. Twin Cities, “it’s just cuz she’s nutty…and she has brown hair.”

Maybe…but I secretly believe he just likes innocently referring to his partner as feces. Ms. Twin Cities suggested giving her beau an accurately descriptive nickname in the Native American style. She thought for a moment and rattled off, “Takes a Long Time to Take a Picture.” Having vacationed with him in Greece, I can say that Mr. Twin Cities, an amateur photographer, does in deed take a long time to take a picture. The results are usually worth the wait, but the moniker still applies.

“I like it,” I told her, “but remember, I have to use this in a sentence.”

She responded instantly, “Just make it an acronym. Let’s see, what does that spell. T…A...L…T...T…T...A.…P”

I was stunned. “You just rattled off that many words and you accidentally ended up with a pronounceable acronym? I mean…you spread out your vowels and everything.”

She shrugged innocently.

In the end, I’ve decided to drop two of the “t”s just to make it look better on the page, but I’m still pretty impressed that she fired that off so quickly. So now I can stop writing “Mr. Twin Cities” and start using “Taltap”. It’s much easier on my fingers.

We didn’t quite arrive at a suitable name for Ms. Twin Cities over dinner, but she said she was fine with anything. And since she’s been content to be called Nutty Brown for God knows how long…I’m no longer worried about offending her with a nickname. So, she will henceforth be called Elsa in this blog. It’s a reworking of the initials for “English As a Second Language” which is her career. I don’t think she’ll complain, but if she does, I’ll sleep well knowing she had her chance

Maybe in the future I’ll ask partners and spouses for nickname suggestions instead of going straight to the subject themselves…it’s much more interesting.

Dinner finished, we returned to the home of the newly christened Taltap and Elsa to play some Guitar Hero. And if you haven’t played this game…by all means, do so with all possible haste. Of all the silly game peripherals to come out, this is arguably the silliest. And yet, it’s also one of the best. It’s basically Dance, Dance Revolution with an undersized plastic guitar instead of a dance pad. If asked last week I would have told you it had failure written all over it. Today, I say that every PS2 owner should have this silly, undersized, plastic guitar in their home…it’s just that fun.

Saturday found us at the Como Zoo and Conservatory. Taltap let us know that the warm spring air (??) had him in the mood to see the flowers at the conservatory. My narrative will breeze past the flowers and move on to the zoo. This is not because the flowers were unpleasant. Quite the contrary. They were beautiful and fragrant and the conversation continued to be delightful. However, my feeble descriptive abilities are not up to the task of making a pleasant stroll through a botanical garden anything other than unreadable. So, just trust me when I say that I learned much about ferns and bromeliads, enjoyed the spring tulip display and came to the conclusion with Taltap that Jack White and Jack Black need to form a band called The Monochrome Jacks. Other than that…fill in your own images of pleasant garden strolls.

However, the zoo deserves just a small bit of detail if only because I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I say this because while the conservatory was tropically warm under its Taj Mahal glass, the zoo was predominantly an outdoor event and I was unsure how exciting a zoo would be in the cold. I was willing to go since the company would be enjoyable one way or the other, but shivering watching animals shiver didn’t sound all that appealing. What I learned, however, is that all the really cool animals are better when it’s cold. For instance, I love the big cats. I always rush to the big cats at the St. Louis Zoo. But, basically the big cats just hide in the shade and pant during our summer visits. With a light snow cover on the ground though…the big cats get downright lively. The tiger had a lengthy conversation with passersby, and the cougar was interested enough in we spectators to stick her face right up to the metal mesh to inspect us more fully. Had I been willing to ignore the signs encouraging me not to reach through the mesh…I could have petted me a cougar. Moonshot thought the sign was a wise suggestion, so I refrained from making a new friend. I had to content myself with the new trinket it information that brisk air seems to agree with many of the zoos inhabitants.

That evening we went out to dinner with four more friends at a wonderful vegetarian Indian restaurant called Udopi. These other friends are all college friends of Moonshot who ended up in Minneapolis together. I’m not sure how often they’ll come up in my stories, so I’m going to cop out on their nicknames and just call one couple Cheryl and Matt and the other couple Josh and Gail. I shall call them this because these really are their names. Matt is a hard working professional type whose career forever eludes my memory no matter how often I ask and Cheryl is an eerily driven grad student. They are pleasant people and warm hearted, but the type of people you are loath to make a good fart joke around. Josh and Gail are members of a Christian rock band and had to leave early since Josh had to fly to Mexico in the morning for a house building mission trip. He is soft-spoken and kind and sang at our wedding. Gail is the wonderfully exuberant type of person who during dinner, made a good fart joke around Matt and Cheryl and was the first to loudly guess “you got a ski enema” when Moonshot was reluctant to disclose the exact reason she didn’t like water skiing. Hats off to Gail!

After dinner the groups (sans Josh and Gail) went to the Wild Roast coffee shop at Cheryl’s suggestion. We ate desert and drank strong coffee while discussing nostalgic films of our youth that sadly did not stand the test of time. Cheryl and Matt disagreed on whether or not The Last Unicorn fell in this category. Cheryl was sure it was still a classic. Upon hearing that no one else had seen it, she launched into a fifteen minute point by point retelling of the plot with Matt shaking his head sadly beside her in an attempt to distance himself from the story. At the time, I was bewildered and uncomfortable by her conviction to tell the full story in all its detail. However, in retrospect I have to admire her tenacity. And any film that inspires such devotion deserves a spot on my Netflix queue.

Sunday brought us back to Husker and Panache. Our puppy was happy to see us, but sad to leave since he had learned that Panache hands out treats like a vending machine. I have to assume this is a pattern that will be repeated once Pumkin is old enough to be spoiled by the grandparents. We were slightly more sociable this time since we arrived earlier in the evening but were still not quite up to our jovial best due to travel drain.

And today found us back home by 6 or so…just in time for Moonshot to teach her piano lessons and for me to retreat to my office to write this long-winded retelling.