I did get three bushels of stuff out, and then I cried no mas. It's 84 degrees and sunny today, and I'm not going to spend it laboring in a dank basement. But labor on other things I must - I have a column to write tonight, the Post piece to polish, and of course a radio show to do. Tonight I plan to announce that the land on which the Diner stands is due to be handed over to Canada on July 1, 1997, and that I will not stand for this. Canada, of course, promises to make no great changes at the Diner, with the small exception of enforcing bilingualism. Their motto: "One Diner, Two Menus." I can be sure that the majority of the audience will get the China references in about two seconds, and that the faithful callers will play along and help me defend the place. After all, Canada has announced that it will deploy 4,000 bureaucrats and a fleet of armored Zambonis. By the end of the show I will be standing in front of one of those Zambonis, daring it to run me over.

I drove a Zamboni once, for a TV program. It was like riding a metal mastodon. I had to pilot it through a low tunnel, ducking down to avoid decapitation. Once on the ice I had to point it towards the corner of the rink, then take my eyes off the road - I turned around, lowered the blade, started the water flowing, then whipped around to turn the wheel before I went through the boards into the bleachers. I got good at it after ten takes, and learned to put down a nice smooth coat. The secret is to work in overlapping ovals, you know.

Woke at 8:30 to the sound of chain saws in love; I groaned and wondered if I should get up. I thought of what breakfast cereals were available, and mentally ran down the day's schedule to see when I could arrange a long, long nap. By then I was back asleep. I had a hideous dream about the "Alien" movie, which appears frequently in my nightmares. Figures, since that movie scared me worse than any movie ever did, or has since. This installment was a cross between "Alien" and "Fargo," with the wretched beast stalking me in a dim wintry office with flickering fluorescent lights. At the end I got out and pulled around in a car - some yellow AMC model from the Carter era - and I was waiting for my comrade, when a salesman burst into the car and attempted to sell me Ronald Reagan trading cards. That's when I woke, and it was ten.

Took the daily walk around the lake, and paused when a park board groundskeeper wanted to pet Jasper. She had a biscuit for him, and he was well behaved, sitting politely with those enormous ears pointed straight up. Just about the most endearing mutt on the lake, I think, and I pass a billion every day. Tough-guy boxers with stumpy tails, delicate shelties, happy shambling labs - good dogs all, but nothing like my little coyote. Back home for the usual tasteless lunch. Whatever possessed me to buy whole-wheat hot dog buns, I don't know; they taste like a wet sermon.) Then I sat out back and read from a huge compendium of pulp fiction. A good Lawrence Block story, a lousy one by Mickey Spillane, and some bright soiled gems from utter unknowns who probably died of exploded livers twenty years ago.

Now to edit the Post piece then shop for a lonely supper; Sara is up in court in the middle of the state trying to argue that Constitutional protections against warrantless seizures do not apply to fish houses. Only in Minnesota.

Post show note: that was one for the archives. What I thought would be a running joke throughout the show became the entire show - solid calls from people wanting to defend the Diner against Canadian perfidy. Calls from Canada disavowing their government, or warning me of secret weapons. All the various bits we've invented over the months came together nicely - I mean, when I began this, I did not expect to be having a conversation about whether jalapeno-stuffed haggis violated the Geneva arms treaties, or whether Surge-injected Spam-coated Mentos would repell armored Zambonis. But I hoped I would. Perhaps the perfect moment came a few minutes before the Canadians were supposed to arrive - the lull before the battle. I mentioned that this would be a good time to pull out a harmonica, play mournful tunes and reminisce about the gals back home. Somone called and played harmonica while Jeremy and I got nostalgic.

I'm sure none of it made sense to anyone tuning in for the first time, and it was silly as hell, but my God it was fun.

One hell of a storm on the way right now. The sirens have been going on and off for forty five minutes. Used to be that meant tornadoes, but now it's any sort of weather outside of a sprinkle or a snowflurry. But this one appears siren-worthy, because if ever there was a day made for a tornado, it's this one. Hot and humid, colliding fronts, all the good ingredients for roiling disaster. I'm looking through the vines to the west, and a lurid bruise of a cloudbank is rolling our way, slow, lightning playing around its edges. The TV, of course, is playing this event as though the last trump and blown and the last seal cracked. Live shots from the perimeter, breathless warnings.

Maybe they're right, after all. It's gotten quite dark. Great streaks of lightning sluicing down from the clouds, and flashbulb bursts that illuminate everything for a blink of an eye. The lights are dimming out here. Hmm - there's a jet overhead, a big one; someone's actually trying to land in this. I also hear a lawn mower a few houses down. An odd sound, like someone whittling during an earthquake.

First few taps of rain on the porch roof now. Much darker.

When the first siren went off I did the natural thing: I backed up some work onto a Zip drive, and put it in the basement. Then I went for a walk. No one out, of course. Just that vague uneasy wind bothering the high branches, running through the low grass like platoons of fleeing mice. I just took a short circle around the creek with Jasper, the two of us in the woods. On the way back I passed a couple of mothers collecting their children, and one of the moms was so full of orders and maternal concern that she snapped at me for being outside. "Didn't you hear the sirens?" she barked.

"It's 20 minutes away," I said. "At least."

The sirens just started up again, big time; these are the ones at the end of the block.

Oh, brother. Shrapnel on the roof, big hunks of tree clattering down. Jasper has pointed his snout at the great beast above and began to howl himself, a low frightened howl, as though he could stave off the danger by joining the choir. Temp has dropped ten degrees in the last two minutes. Rain now is steady; a strange shiny metallic sound hangs in the air, the sound of a wet finger on the rim of a glass.

Siren now sags to silence; no point in warning us anymore, because it is here.

And here we go. The air now smells like fish and grass, as though the lake itself was being sucked up and dumped on our roof. I'm in the middle of the screen porch, and I'm being misted from three directions - the rain is pounding down now, and I can hear a few distant sirens struggle up to full voice. The sky is pulsing on and off, like lights in Frankenstein's lab. Can't see two feet past the porch screen. And now the real rain -

Holy Christ!

Jesus!

I can see a few trees across the alley silhouetted against the cracking lightning, and they're whipping back and forth like typhoon'd palms. The rain is an angry roar, like a jet engine a hundred times the size of the one that just passed overhead to safety.

A big tree limb just bounced off the grass. The wind isn't as bad as predicted - the lawn chair has not yet gone airborne - but the rain is deafening -

Whoa. The rain on the roof is now like horse's hooves, hundreds of hooves, and here comes the wind. The trees are now whipping side to side, and the lawn chair is clattering up and down. It gets worse and worse by the minute, louder and angrier as though venting itself only makes it more and more furious, mad that anything is still standing.

Maybe I should go inside, while there's still an inside to go to.

Later

Now that was a storm. Good God, what a storm. And a few minutes after the center passed . . . I had to go to work. Took the wifemobile, since it has a higher stance and was less likely to drown in any puddles. Decided not to go by my usual route, in case 35W was blocked off for construction. Good move: an underpass was swamped by ten feet of water, and 40 cars were playing Monitor and Merrimack in the drink. I took the Crosstown (what freeway isn't a crosstown, really?) and found traffic moving along - until I hit a lake by Cedar Av. and had to splash through deep water, threading between stalled vehicles. The radio said 35E was flooded out as well, so I switched to surface streets (and which streets aren't?) only to find myself stopped behind a convoy of cars trying to ford another impromptu stream. Back up Snelling, through dark patches with no lights, no traffic signals, nothing but sundered wood scattered on the ground. A long slow haul up to 36, and then a hideous flood at the 35E interchange, with cars bobbing in the culvert. Made it to the Diner, though. Made it.

Jeremy was in the break room with the lights turned off, wondering just when he was going to be ill. He has some sort of stomach grippe, so he wasn't up to his usual ebullient self. I did weather radio for two hours, war stories, dispatches from the front, partly to keep people from drifting off to 'CCO. Hell, on the way into work, I listened to 'CCO just to find out what was going on. I hate to cede the weather market to the competition.

Got one call from West Iowa. A fellow was disappointed that they'd missed the storm. He was so bored, he said, that "I went out and picked up sticks." That's bored.

The night flew by; used not a bit of prepared material. That's two nights in a row now. On the way home the worst was obviously past, but at the 35-94 commons traffic wasn't moving. An interminable line of red lights, a long line of the damned and the doomed heading towards the flooded road, unable to get out. The car in front of me jumped the median and waddled on to 94, with highway workers signaling it was okay. I followed suit, feeling as though desperate times required desperate measures, and took limb-strewn Lyndale home. What an adventure.

Quiet now. Nothing but the pattering of leftover rain down the spout. Tomorrow is supposed to be quite sweet.

Someone is mowing the lawn down the block. Just like last night, when someone was mowing ten minutes before the Great Storm hit. Now it's half an hour to sunset and 55 blustery degrees, and the sound of a mower seems out of place. It stops after about ten minutes. Apparently he's mowing in small increments, once a day.

Half an hour before I leave for the show. Sara had to run to the police department in St. Louis Park to pick up a tape for a trial. Just like the movies: at the last minute, the police discovered a tape that proved the defendant lied under oath. It really does happen that way.

Now someone to the north has started to mow.

I spent this windy wet day inside, working on the Lake Harriet web page, arranging all the old vintage photos of the lake and the pavillions. Should be up this weekend, if I get to shoot the streetcar Saturday. The one remaining streetcar in the city rolls past the lake on weekends, from a shed to a cemetary. Appropriate, I guess. Earlier this spring after the horrid winter had ripped up the streets, you could see not only the old paving stones beneath the asphalt, but the old bright rails of the streetcar system. People romanticize them, and I understand why, but I wonder if people remember when the electric cables were strung all over the place, and your view of the sky was scored by sagging ropes. Sometimes I look at the electrical lines strung along the streets and alleys, and it looks old and out of place; in a hundred years or less, no doubt everything will be underground, and the Age of Poles remembered as a brief ugly time, mercifully over. The birds will have to find somewhere else to sit, but they'll adapt.

Not much of note to report today. I'm both anxious for the new job to start and miserable about leaving this life, but damn, it does have its excruiating patches of arid empty time. I fill them as best as I can, but when you're not up against the clock, you have time to weigh every little decision beyond its true importance. In the grocery store today, I could not decide what to buy. Nothing appealed. I went from the frozen food to the pasta, to the meat to the frozen food, back and forth in a mobius strip, passing the same woman offering tortilla samples. I kept turning her down until she stopped asking, and then she just silently watched me pass. I couldn't make a single decision about anything. I decided to buy some bulk candy, which was a mistake, since the bins stretch the length of a football field; presented with 10 varieties of gummi bears, I nearly wept.

Took half an hour to buy milk and chicken breasts.

Well, time to assemble the notes and prepare the show. I hope Jeremy is better tonight; last night I did the show with half my brain, because I kept seeing him on the other side of the glass with his head on the board, or tilted back staring at the ceiling. He has to work tonight flu or no flu, since there's no one else to run the overnight shift. I could crash my car on the way to work, and they'd play tapes, but they need him. Thoughts like that keep one's head in the proper dimensions.

Sunday night I was wandering through the aisles at Lund's when I realized I will be taking my lunch to work this week. And the next, and the next (repeat until downsized.) I think they have a cafeteria at work, which would be cool. The office itself is located a good six blocks from the skyscraper core (a cold six blocks, in winter) so until I feel comfy enough around the place I probably won't leave the reservation for lunch. So it's small portions in plastic bags in a paper sack, the humble meal of the serf in the fields.

But, I thought, it's an excuse to buy irresistibly packaged luncheon items. Such as Lunchables: small rations of prole-chow with special-sized brand-name treats. Tiny pouches of Gray Poupon, small candy bars, drink pouches, etc. But I was stopped by four issues: the cost, the amount of packaging, the fat content, and the fact that Lunchables must really be for people who are too dim to actually construct a sandwich themselves.

I passed. Went home, had a brat from last night's repast, and washed the Defiant in the street. (It felt naughty, somehow, brazen and conspicuous; usually cars are washed in alleys, in private.) Soon I'll iron tomorrow's clothes and set them out. Nervous? Slightly, but that's natural for any new job. When I came back here I took up the same old jobs - the Pioneer Press, where I started ten years ago, and KSTP, where I started 11 years ago, and KTCA, where I started 14 years ago. I don't think I've walked into the Star Tribune building since 1983. And I haven't gone to work in a new place for seven years.

In September 1990 I walked into 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue to start my Newhouse job. I was intimidated by the whole operation a news bureau in DC, you figure, is the apex of the business - and full of nerves about the move east in the first place. I had a little veal pen with maroon walls that went up five feet, so you could have your own little domain. People talked across the top of the cubicles, looking like prairie dogs sticking their heads above ground. Mostly you kept your head down, though; I arrived at the beginning of a wholesale slaughter of the old guard, and as part of the new guard I decided that inconspicuousness would serve me well.

I expect tomorrow I will be given a low desk in an open newsroom, and a desk that abuts someone else's. I want to see how much real estate I have before bringing pictures and mugs and all the rest of the cliched junk and kitsch that ends up on my desk. It will start clean and empty, and end with coffee rings and dusty plastic statuary; the drawers will soon fill with ballpoint pen caps, loose tacks, paper clips, and a thick wad of unread memos, magazines, paycheck stubs, pink phone slips, and the rest of the flotsam that washes through every office in the land.

This will be different than Newhouse or the Pioneer Press, though. It's just plain bigger. I imagine the office will have the same sound of newspapers everywhere - the incessant distant clicking of a hundred keyboards, the sound of CNN coming from a few TVs, burbling phones. No one running or shouting or doing out of "Front Page," just the quiet work of people who would give anything for the office to resemble "Front Page" just once. Just once. After deadline of course, when their work is done.

Wonderful weekend. Friday felt like the last pure perfect summer day. I listened to "Science Friday" on NPR while walking around the lake, and when the top of the hour news announced that Pathfinder had landed and sent a beep back to Earth, I nearly did a jig right there. Went home and sat out back in the sun listening to interviews from JPL for a couple of hours. Later that night I rented "First Contact" just to see if it was as good as I recalled; it was better. A new ship on Mars. I went to sleep feeling like a kid again, looking at my Saturn V rocket on the desk in the moonlight. (In the dark you couldn't tell the decals were crooked.)

Saturday we had the Fourth cookout, one of the four porch festivals we have here at Lileks Manor. (Memorial Day, the Fourth, my birthday, Labor Day.) Sara spent the afternoon making food, and I gave the lawn more attention than it's ever going to get again this season. Edged all the walks - no small feat, given that the grass was as thick as the edger is dull. Everyone came around 6:30, and it was the usual loud meat-drenched hoo-hah it always is. Nothing makes me happier than bounding out of the back door to bring beers for guests and seeing the porch full of people. I usually drink coffee and play host for a large part of the event, so I'm way behind everyone else when I finally sit down for a drink. Managed to catch up nicely, though.

Today, sadness. Everything feels like every other summer day but it's the last of many. Until the next one, that is.

Okay. Here we go. Back to being an adult. Let's see if I still know how that works.