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Life is weirder than I thought. Take, for example, my new polyfiber leopard-skin car seat covers—a gift from my teenage almost-step-daughter, Britta, and her boyfriend, Ben. They thought themselves pretty clever with this bit of cheer (although they did very considerately leave behind the gift receipt “just in case,” ha, ha). But I’m not one to return a gift.

I admit that at first I didn’t think the leopard skin was me. But then I thought, Hey, what the heck, just because I’m a prim elementary school teacher with three kids and three unofficial step kids and a hamster and a guinea pig who pees on me every time I hold him—does this mean I can’t drive around on fur seats? The truth is, I sort of relish the quizzical looks I get from friends and colleagues. A fellow shopper at the co-op recently glanced in my car window, gestured at the upholstery, and guffawed out loud—and she didn’t even know me. Who foresaw what adventure a little leopard skin could inspire?

I’m even wondering if my bolder, wilder new image was behind a snap decision to book a trip to Florida to see my dad over the upcoming school break. You see, if you’re flexible and a little crazy, you can buy dirt-cheap flights online to Orlando. Mickey’s hometown is only an hour and a half from Apollo Beach, where my dad lives, and rental cars go for less than $30 a day in mouseland. All of which adds up to a low-budget chance to do what my dad has been asking me to do for the last two years: bring the kids to see him. But of course, the whole transaction required a little courage, a dose of optimism, and a Zen-like acceptance of the unknown.

First of all, the web site informed me that the name of the airline and flight times would remain a mystery until, if, and when I made a final purchase. So what the heck, I said, as I typed in a credit card number and hit “send.” My kids haven’t seen their grandpa for four years—our last visit with him was amid the flurry of a cousin’s Detroit wedding. And while I’ve carried the burden of personal responsibility for this hole in my kids’ lives, it wasn’t until recently, when my son wept over “missing” the grandpa he doesn’t really know, that I decided maybe there are three better reasons to visit my dad than my own guilt: Sophie, Max, and Lillie.

Well, my own guilt is pretty potent too, considering I haven’t made the trek to Florida for eight years, despite my dad’s frightening quadruple by-pass two years ago in December. I felt sick over being absent then, being the only child not standing by for his surgery, but it’s more complicated than it seems. At the time, my hair was on fire from the hell of my divorce, and I was careening around like a madwoman trying to put it out. Meanwhile my car didn’t have heat or an engine that started predictably, and drives to work were half-blind endeavors with frost growing on the inside of the windshield as fast as Sophie could scrape it off. I didn’t have the nickels and dimes to fix my car, let alone fly my flaming head to Florida.

I think my dad understood my predicament, although he sounded tight and scared on the phone during those days leading up to the operation. I was scared too. I’d never really gotten to know my dad—not really—and now his mortality was breathing down my neck. I was afraid, too, of burdening him, afraid of the possibility that he might think my frost-bitten forest-fire of a life was a disaster beyond redemption, a failure, a father’s greatest disappointment. This was my fear, never mind the fact that the reason I don’t know my dad much better than Max does is because he and my mom split up when I was two years old and we have spent only a handful of years living in the same state.

All this distance and unfamiliarity made the talks we had in the weeks following my dad’s surgery that much more tender. Having his chest pried apart left him more open, as if all those stitches couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty all the way back together again.

Suddenly we were talking once or twice a week instead of once or twice a year, and when I told him I’d been worried about disappointing him, he gave a small, sad laugh and told me that was the silliest thing he’d ever heard. This was enough bonding to make us both cry before we slid back into our usual awkward passion of weather analysis.

Which, by the way, is colder than usual in Florida at the moment, but he promises that’ll improve with my arrival. And I’m thinking ever since my leopard-skin seat covers, anything’s possible.

Members of the baby boom generation may not be getting the hover cars or personal helicopters that the futurists of their youth forecasted, but it appears they will have a self-balancing, battery-powered two-wheel scooter. As the focus of one of the biggest hype campaigns in recent memory, the Segway scooter is slowly being rolled out to U.S. consumers at $5,000 a pop.

The Twin Cities’ first Segway was sold and delivered in January to young urbanites Tod Lane and Nell Rueckl after Tod entered an essay contest for the privilege of being an “early adopter.” The two also received a Willie Wonkaesque tour of inventor Dean Kamen’s factory in New Hampshire. The Whittier couple are exactly the kind of product evangelists that marketers dream about: Tod reeled off statistics and facts about the machine’s masterful engineering, and Nell, who uses the Segway to commute to her Northeast Minneapolis massage studio, talked about how graceful she feels, whirring quietly down Nicollet Mall.

Its quiet efficiency may be the Segway’s undoing. For safety concerns, San Francisco has banned the two-wheeler from its sidewalks even before the device really arrived there. “Ever since that came out about San Francisco, I’ve been stressed out, thinking, ‘Oh no, I need to make friends on the sidewalk, and on the street, be nice to them,’” said Nell. “I don’t want to be zooming around and scaring people.”

Although the Segway can go as fast as 12 miles per hour, Tod said that some of the safety concerns about the Segway on sidewalks are misguided, because unlike bikes, which are already banned from most walks, the Segway doesn’t need to be moving forward to balance upright. “You can ride this thing more slowly than you could comfortably walk, or you can easily ride alongside someone who is walking and carry on a conversation,” he said.

Despite this tag-team sales job, The Rake was still skeptical, until we had a chance to try it out. There is just no getting around it: This thing is cool! You step up on the footpad (“Aircraft-grade aluminum,” said Tod), hang on to the handlebars, and the thing balances itself. A slight lean forward and the Segway begins to creep ahead; stand up straight, and it stops. Turn the grip on the left handlebar and the thing spins around. It’s like you’re standing atop Harry Potter’s magic lawn fertilizer. Four stars—our highest recommenda-tion!—Dan Gilchrist

Local paint companies will tell you that business has been booming for a couple years now. Crazy times bring out the nesting instinct in people, and when that happens, they notice how badly the walls could use a fresh coat. When they reach for a gallon of flat interior latex, they typically don’t reach for “blue.” They reach for “Mountain Mist” or “Riviera.”

I too recently found myself wandering the netherland between a paint color and its name, the little chapbook of samples fanned out against my walls. I am both seduced and vexed by “Zuni Gold” and “Montana Agate.” As I stare at my white walls (“Washed Sand”?), eyeballing little swatches of increasingly deeper shades with the most achingly beautiful names, my imagination begins to fatigue from overuse. Is it “Warm Sienna” I like, or the image the words conjure of me hanging out in some sun-drenched Tuscan villa? I’m not sure how I feel about “Fresh Clay.” “Passion Blue?” Not in my experience. And why am I drawn so powerfully to “Cherry Wine”?

To soothe my overwrought gray matter (“Dove”?) I approached Tami Ridgway, a pragmatic “Cool Hand Blue” kind of person. Ridgway is a stylist at Valspar Corporation. She and a crew of other marketing folk write the poetry of paint names. “We receive colors in a palette, from 30 to 250 colors to a palette,” she explained. “We’re influenced by social, fashion, and lifestyle trends. We hope to evoke a positive response from the name, and at the same time prompt a mental image that will help the consumer remember the color. This isn’t usually a planned strategy. Of course some of the palettes have themes—historic, natural, or global—so that gives us a direction.” Sounds easy, until you fetch up against 137 variations of white that all need a catchy handle.

What do the bards of Valspar do when they hit that inevitable patch of writer’s block? Ridgway said, “Whatever it takes. Books, magazines, maps. Sometimes one of us has just returned from vacation (‘Rice Field Green’). Sometimes names come from our different backgrounds.” She said their diverse interests—there’s a musician, an engineer, and a diver on the crew—all contribute to the process.

Bonnie Rohow, a color consultant with Abbott Paint and Carpet in St. Paul, informed me that there are 10 million colors (registered, with a specific recipe) and thus 10 million distinct color names. I imagine this massive opus locked away in a vault. “Color names are never repeated. They are sometimes changed, though,” she said, hinting that changing times sometimes require it. “‘Indian Red’ and ‘Tobacco Brown’ both became variations of chestnut.”

While there have been a few like these that have fallen from grace, color names in general are a huge boon to the consumer paint industry. Rohow remembered that Benjamin Moore paints used to be identified by numbers. Sales increased dramatically when they started using evocative, descriptive names. (I tested Rohow’s expertise by asking her to guess what color “Crazy For You” might be. She thought for a moment, and speculated “a sugary pink,” which was dead right.)

The tried-and-true approach is to look to food for inspiration. Ridgway said this is often the easiest way, because of the powerful sensory associations people have, courtesy of their taste buds. “That, or we were hungry that day,” she said. “I’m actually tired of food-related names.” A quick survey of the major paint stores in the area showed there is still a heaping helping of food-inspired names. In fact, Benjamin Moore’s 2003 calendar serves up paint in various table settings—fried eggs with yolks made of “Sunny Side Up” yellow, a south-of-the-border spread with a bowl of “Guacamole” green, and a tall “Milk Shake,” an off-white dribble tracing down the side of the fluted glass.

I tried a few color names out on Tami Ridgway—names inspired by my own recent experiences: “Crashing Computer Screen Blue,” “Boxed Wine,” and “Serious Frostbite.” These met with a tepid (“Dishwater”?) response from Ridgway. “We try to be positive,” she said with a smile. —Sarah Barker

In between the yarn-stuffed aisles there were a half-dozen customers fretting over supplies for their projects. Mostly, they were exactly the kind of people you would expect to see at Depth of Field, a Minneapolis knitting store: older women choosing needles for baby blankets and rifling through patterns for cardigans. And then there was Anne Kimball. Kimball, who is young and urban and kind of punky, does not seem like the kind of person who would be buying supplies in a knitting store. She seems like the kind of person who would be buying Camus instead of cashmere.

Kimball is 28. She started knitting five years ago when she found some yarn and needles at her mom’s house. She’s been hooked ever since, and she teaches her friends the craft whenever she has a chance. “I know a lot of people who do it as a stress reliever, but I have one friend who started knitting because she was trying to quit smoking,” she said. “It gave her something to do with her hands.”

Kimball and her friends aren’t freaks. Knitting has suddenly and unexpectedly become cool. According to the Craft Yarn Council of America, more than three million people began knitting or crocheting between 1994 and 2000. More than half of them were under the age of 35.

Doris Wickstrom, a staff member at Depth of Field who teaches a beginning knitting class, isn’t surprised. “We had a big group of students from St. Thomas, and it went through the dorms at Augsburg,” she said. While most young knitters favor traditional projects like hats, scarves, and sweaters, Wickstrom said that updated patterns and novelty yarns keep young knitters coming back. “People like it because it’s so portable,” Wickstrom pointed out. “They can be working on a project on the bus, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or in front of the TV.”

The trend isn’t limited to young women. Increasing numbers of men are also taking up the needles. Chris Wernimont, who teaches math at Anwatin Middle School in Minneapolis, began knitting in 1996, when he was 20. He thinks it’s catching because it’s both creative and relatively easy. “Knitting is accessible—it doesn’t require a lot of skill or many tools, but people can still make something.”

Kimball has a more complex theory about knitting’s appeal. “I think that, as everything becomes more mass-merchandised, people want something that’s unique,” she said. “It’s a way for people to make something by hand—and even design it themselves—so they can feel like it’s really their own.” That may not qualify as a revolutionary act against commercialism and anomie, she conceded. Then again, maybe it does. She ran her hand sensuously over a shelf of earth-toned skeins. Revolution, they say, starts at home.—Erin Peterson

Last fall, when I signed my daughter up for a season in St. Louis Park’s Mite league, one of the many expenses was a $200 check, above and beyond the association fees and equipment rental. It was a security deposit against the volunteer hours required of every parent with a child in the hockey program. Some lucky parent might get to run the association website. Some might coach or manage a team. Most will do their time in the venerable concession stand.

Hockey is expensive. Year-round indoor ice costs a pretty penny. Decent helmets can run a C-note, good skates even more. Pneumatic goalie pads go for $600 plus. A magistrate who works several counties in southern Minnesota recently noted that hockey fees have become a hotly contested line item in many divorce settlements.

To keep a lid on costs and preserve access for families left out of the Bush tax cut, most youth hockey associations depend on cash flow from the concession stand. So when the Gastronomer returned to work in food service, a field in which he had not been employed since the late 80s, it was with charitable motives.

In fact, youth hockey is a charity. Most hockey associations are organized as non-profits. Might a shift behind the counter be approached with the Christian humility of, say, serving Thanksgiving dinner at the homeless shelter? No comparison. The average hockey player smells far worse and demands much more than the average panhandler. And parent volunteers have been known to combine the roles of benefactor and beneficiary. The concession stand at Columbia Arena in Fridley (of Mighty Ducks fame) took $11,000 in shrink last year, according to a worker there. Arena staff have now taken over most operations.

Even so, concession workers in St. Louis Park have it pretty good. The rinks are in a separate part of the Rec Center, and the stand is in the heated section of the building. What little breezer skank does waft in can be easily overpowered by running a few orders of chicken strips through the deep fryer. Kids as young as 15 are allowed to work the stand, so St. Louis Park has invested in a low-liability deep fryer minus the wire baskets in open pools of boiling oil. It faintly resembles a small front-loading washer, with a little hinged drawer on the front to deposit frozen food. Set the timer and hot, crispy stuff comes down a chute on the side, ready to serve. Low prices bring a steady demand to the counter during games and practices: hot dog $1.50, chips $.75, slapshot special (hot dog, chips, and soda) $2.50. And it’s easy to work the till, with the 501(c)3 status ending every transaction in round, tax-free numbers.

The other night, the fryer stopped working. It accepted deposits of new food, but released only partial orders, and then none at all. I turned the heater off and gave it some time to cool down. When I opened the access door to take a look . . . well, this is a family magazine, so I just can’t tell you what I found.

“We’re out of fried food,” I informed the cashier. “The morning shift is gonna have to clean this thing.”—Joe Pastoor

Mark Backman is an infuriatingly calm 25-year-old whose life has direction, financial stability, and purpose. Yet he has no home, nor does he have any idea where he’s going to be next February. His line of work can be dangerous and frequently takes him to distant states and lands. He embarks on fascinating adventures and then maddeningly downplays them, even dismissing construction work in Antarctica as merely a job. When his interviewer detects enthusiasm toward any particular topic, a follow-up question quickly kills any potential lead. You can take the northern Minnesota boy out of northern Minnesota, but you’ll never get him to stop punctuating every sentence with “I guess” or the even vaguer “I s’pose.”

Backman, as he’ll tell you, is just a blue-collar guy. He dropped out of the University of Minnesota after a year, when the fix-it genes inherited on the paternal side insisted he was better suited to heavy work than head work. He enrolled in the College of Oceaneering in California and graduated at the top of his class with a degree in commercial diving, completed his apprenticeship in New Orleans, and dove everywhere else. He was almost killed when a mudslide buried him during a routine dredging of a riverboat casino in Missouri. He was nearly sucked down a drain in New Mexico, when the plug came out of a 3.5 million gallon underground reservoir he was helping repair. When his life flashes before his eyes, Backman does all he can to survive and then, misfortune averted, simply returns to work.

Mishaps aside, Backman likes underwater welding. Yet he despises politics of any kind, and underwater welders, who have a closely-knit association of just 5,000 members nationwide, can be as catty as an old ladies’ social club. So he retired. He moved into construction, and what better place to avoid the rat race and the bickering old crew than Antarctica?

What is it like building a science station on the polar cap during the southern hemisphere’s brutal winter? When the average daily temp is around 40 below, but can dip as low as 140 degrees below zero? Not so bad, Backman insists. A few extra layers is all anyone needs, and if the chill gets to be too much, the thought of the $2 drinks at the camp’s one-and-only local will keep a person moving. Until, that is, you find yourself falling into the ultimately unavoidable lethargy that encroaches when a person never sees the sun. When that happens, Backman says, all plans are abandoned. The predicted 15 pounds creep on. You dream of leaving and never returning. The mind erases the memories of the despised rat race and its incessant politics.

Until you return to them. Which is why Backman is seriously considering heading south to Antarctica for a second year. After that, it might be hard for him to ever go north again. “Veteran South Pole construction workers say you do the first year for the experience and the second year for the money,” he says, his green eyes showing a hint of the slow smile spreading across his face. “After that it’s because you don’t fit in anywhere else.” —Katie Quirk