Long Weekend - The Claw

My weekend can be summed up simply as "the shed". I spent Friday evening ripping shingles off the shed at the duplex. I spent all day Saturday finishing ripping off shingles, throwing away old construction debris in the shed, and putting down paper and a few rows of shingles. I spent all day Sunday finishing up putting all the shingles in place, except for the caps, and helping Pooteewheet finish staining the deck she had cleaned on Friday and Saturday (also at the duplex/rental property). Very very tired and sporting a few new bruises. For anyone who thinks Minnesotans make up all those stories about the weather here. On Saturday it was so hot that I couldn't sit down on the shed roof in a pair of jeans and had to slather myself in SPF 30. On Sunday it was so cold I could see my breath.

Here's a picture of me on the shed. It looks deceptively small because I am big and that's a short side. It's really the size of a large room, so it's like a mini-house as far as shingling. It took a lot of shingles.

Here's a picture of me on the shed, but wearing a Green Bay Packers hat one of the renters loaned me so I wouldn't burn my bald spot. I've never worn a Packers hat before. I was impressed that something could make me feel dirtier than being covered in shingle dust and tar.

I did get a break on Saturday night to go see The Baron at the History Theatre in St. Paul with Dan and Kyle. Quite simply, it's a play about Baron Von Raschke, a.k.a. "The Claw", and his family and fellow wrestlers in the A.W.A., including Mad Dog Vachon and Reggie "The Crusher" Lisowski. Jim Raschke played himself. As did another actor (who played him as his younger self). Snot of Puke n' Snot (if you've been to the Minnesota Renaissance festival, you know who that is) played most of the other wrestlers. The play was hilarious, particularly the parts about how crazy Vachon was (i.e. once opened a door on a moving airplane because it was nice outside and once came to after being knocked out in a car accident to see several midget wrestlers standing over him whom he thought were angels). This wasn't a play about the W.W.E. some of you may be familiar with. The A.W.A. was old-school, Minnesota wrestling, and if you had a dad or grandfather you hung out with in the 80s, you probably got to watch a bit of Saturday Night Wrestling. The audience was obviously full of people who had grown up watching The Baron, Vachon and Andre the Giant.

We did misplace the History Theatre on our way there. For some reason, there was a consensus that it might be at the History Museum. That was a mistake. Instead we ended up at a wedding reception with a lot of young Asian women. If Dan and I hadn't been in shorts and I had been carrying a picture of my sister, it might have been worth trying to mingle.

After the show we went to Half Time Rec for some bocce ball and Guiness. It had been a while since any of us had been there, and the crowd was very different from the pre-smoking ban days, consisting primarily of 22-24 year old kids instead of grizzled Celtic music veterans. A good time was had, nonetheless, and Dan was given a good ribbing about a young woman in a blue tank top who was dancing provocatively near him (settle down Cookie Queen, as Kyle pointed out to Dan, she was rubbing her breasts on a guy at her table, so Dan wasn't in danger of being hit on). Kyle was disturbed that she had an Alton Brown haircut. He was a little worried about being turned on in the future during Iron Chef America.

A trip to Perkins rounded out the evening at about 1:30 a.m. That is a late night for me nowadays, particularly when I have to work on a shed in the morning.