I Love My Home In NoMi--!

Photo By John Hoff

I've often thought I should write more about my house in the Hawthorne Neighborhood, the one I bought for a mere $17,900 or something like that. All my friends tell me how lucky I was, how fortunate, to be able to make my move in the housing market and buy a home outright; a house that once had an assessed value of, like, $180,000? Something like that.

And it will probably have a value that high once again.

But, of course, I'm well aware that my blog has a tendency to upset some people (no, really, I've heard that!) and so I sometimes hesitate to share details about my beautiful home...how much I enjoy being a home owner in Minneapolis...and the work which gets done on the place, little by little, to make it not only a home but a base for world-changing activism involving (for example) freeganism.

Lately, though, I've been thinking, "Gee, really, I'm not hard to find if somebody is determined to find me--especially with mouthy, implacable enemies like the T.J. Waconia fraudsters (Jon Helgason and Tom Balko) and their little greased-up prison errand-boy, Jim Watkins of Plano, Texas, a.k.a. "The DFW Mentor."

(Oh, yeah, I've got something special for Jim Watkins, by and by, when I'm not too busy galavanting all over the nation seeing, for example, Apache Indian reservations. So cool)

All of this is just my tangential way of saying...I might be writing about my home more, the same home with a "We Watch, We Call" sign out front. After all, if JOHNNY NORTHSIDE is afraid to write about his own house, others may feel afraid as well. I see it as my job to be unafraid.

So let me tell you about my new oven--! A few months ago I...

...replaced the old, "grody to the max" oven (which came with the house) and replaced it with a newer, considerably less grody oven which still cost nothing, because I'm frugal-as-all-get-out and, well, it's not hard to score an oven. Somebody is always pleasing their woman with a sparkly new oven, which means the old oven has to go SOMEWHERE; probably to some divorced guy paying child support.

Anyway--!

So I got this new oven, pictured above, and celebrated with a friend of mine by cooking up a kettle of corn on the cob. I had briefly considered having a LIVE LOBSTER with corn on the cob, but then I thought, well, who wants to eat a live lobster? If I bite into it while it's alive, won't it scream? Won't that be profoundly disturbing? Live oysters are different...you eat them and they don't make any noise at all, but I've heard lobsters scream.

But seriously...lobster? During a recession?

I decided to just go with corn on the cob. The picture, above, shows my friend and I cooking up the corn on the surface of the new oven. And, yes, this was a few months ago. Why am I writing about it now? Because the photos were in my camera, and I had to leave for, like, a month to drive a truck all over this great country. Yes, I'll be blogging about those adventures by and by, but for now I just wanted to say...

Corn on the cob...cooked on a new oven...in my wonderful home, which I own outright.

I've often blogged about trying to transform NoMi into "urban utopia." Well, sometimes I realize we already experience moments of pure utopia, such as the famous backyard bonfires slash policy discussions, or walks with a dog around Jordan Pond during weekend visitation with my son. We just need to make the moments of utopia last longer, unbroken by crime and thuggery.

These are the things I think about while eating corn on the cob. Though sometimes I just think...

More salt. More butter!

(Addendum, Thanksgiving Day, 2009: DFW Mentor Jim Watkins claims he no longer lives in Plano, Texas. He did not specifically deny the allegation that he is a "greased up prison errand boy," however)