First Monday of Summer Burnt Toast and Coffee Time

Feels like 42 of the 52 Mondays in any year except warmer. How was your Fathers Day?

When I bought this house, one of the first things I did was to plant Concord grapes beside the garage. I did this because my Dad always had grapes where he lived. I don’t remember getting too many grapes off these vines before my neighbor, not my neighbor now, but the one she bought the house from, built a chain link fence along the lot line to keep his collies in the yard. Well, there’s about 18 inches between the side of my garage and the lot line, a testament to 1920’s engineering. This means that there’s little room to do anything with the grapes, so I finally gave up and cut all the vines back just to the main trunk. Plus, she or her significant other pray the fence line with a defoliant so the vines have nowhere to grow.

Still, it seems that each Father’s Day, I go to the side of the garage and clear the grasses growing there around the trunk. It occurred to me that what I was doing was much like visiting his grave. So I was depressed for the rest of the day because I missed my Dad, depressed because of the insensitivity of my neighbor (though I never said anything to either neighbor about the grapes)  and depressed because I couldn’t have any grapes. I hate Hallmark holidays.

• Before you go out the door today: Major mosquito outbreak this morning, which I guess is to be expected considering the amount of rain we’ve had recently. Think of them as nature’s way of getting you to welcome the first frost.
• More details on the stabbing in town. I guess when you compare it to a typical summer weekend in Milwaukee, one murder in a year is relatively not bad.
• Arguably the best basketball coach in Waukesha County over the past two decades has been Dave Schultz. He lead Waukesha West to state in that school’s infancy and lately has brought Carroll University’s program out of obscurity. This morning’s Freeman is reporting that Schultz is resigning at Carroll to re-take the vacant Waukesha West head coaching job.
• In the early Friday Police Blotter, a guy reports that someone who looked like Jesus got out his whoopin’ stick. Maybe it was a message, like, “Jesus says, nothing good happens after midnight. Stay home.” (Whap!)
• New life at a great location. The owners of Divino Gelato are going to try a  50’s style ice cream parlor on the Five Points. In 1963-64, Ma ran a gift shop at that location, btw.
• A 50’s style drive -in Oconomowoc is an area treasure. Who hasn’t been to the Kiltie?
• I told you the Brewers were going to get swept. Write this down: You can lie with statistics but career baseball statistics don’t lie. Bush and Looper were pitching over their heads for the  first two months of the season and now they’re settling back to what they should be. By the end of the season, they will be right around their career stats and that’s not good news for the Brewers. Why is it that the Brewers can’t pummel minor leaguers making their first start? The Tigers pull some guy out of AA ball and he shuts the Brewers down. Remember losing to Boof Bonser? Remember losing to Anthony Swarzak? Meanwhile the Brewers have not one pitcher in the minor leagues (including Manny Parra) who can pitch in the majors. Even the guys they’ve brought up this year aren’t trusted to pitch in anything but blow-outs. I expect, barring injury, that the pitcher from Indiana they just drafted first will be pitching for the major league team in less than two years.
• Lots of storms over the weekend but I managed to get my grass cut!
• I thought the Zach was on Sunday.
• I haven’t been to Summerfest in four years and I doubt I’ll go this year. $4-6 for coffee drinks and slushies and the food is equally as expensive. I can do better elsewhere. The State Fair has cows.
• La Crosse is running out of room in their cemeteries.
• I was listening to WTMJ this morning and they were reporting that the new Miss Wisconsin was from Madison. She’s not.
• Hillbilly neighbors who set off one bottle rocket every 21.5 seconds for 3 straight hours, two weeks before the 4th are at the high end of the annoying scale.
• The next block had a party in the street yesterday. They had a live band. I’m sure they were better up close but from a block away they sounded like either the worst  polka band or worst mariachi band ever.
• And another thing: I was looking at the TV listings for Sunday night and one “show” was called “Obese and Pregnant”. Who on God’s green Earth would watch this crépe? Probably the same people who enjoyed this movie.
• Sometimes I think I’d be happy in a cabin 50 miles from the nearest human being but then I realize that there are probably no such places where it’s warm out all year.
• Fiesta Waukesha gets a mention in the Journal Sentinel.