Interview with Jason LaPlant

Jason as Santa, Christmas '11

Over the years on RyanGlanzer.com, I conducted many interviews with dear friend Jason LaPlant, but we haven’t heard much from him lately. I can’t even write about his hijinks anymore. Luckily, I was able to land an exclusive one-time interview with Jason this week. Needless to say, Jason is a very busy man with amazingly interesting stories. Let’s see what this rapscallion is up to these days.

1. Hello Jason, how are you today?

JL: pretty good just ate some pizza and talked to a amazon worker via the telephone

 

2. Last time you were interviewed on the website was 2008.  What is the biggest change that has occurred in your life since then?

JL: not a god damn thing i keep things pretty uninteresting and that is the way i like it

 

3. When I saw you in December you were growing an amazing beard.  How long do you plan to let it go?

JL: whole foods does not care what i do with my facial hair and i intend to continue working there so it will probably get amishly long

 

4. Have you been playing any racquet sports with Nick Sandbulte lately?  If not, why not?

JL: fuck no because fuck no

 

5. You seem to have moved on from seeing movies in the theater and now are focused on all that Netflix has to offer.  What are some hidden gems you’ve run across on Netflix?

JL: yah there is so much old stuff and new stuff on netflix that i don’t go to the theater as much i keep the que consistently around 400 items adding a couple things a day i like managing the que it gives me an enormous sense of self purpose, the cruise is the first movie i would seek out as a hidden gem

 

6. Have you been eating healthier or seen your overall health improve since starting work at Whole Foods?

JL: nope i still like to get 2 packs of hot dogs every month just ask jeff

 

7. Are you up to date on Breaking Bad?  Is it the best show on TV right now?

JL: i am up to date and it s for sure my favorite drama right now and i think community is the best comedy

 

8. What do you think is the #1 thing the Twin Cities needs most?

JL: some sort of hands across america benefit where instead of holding hands everybody in the twin cities gives each other enemas, that should get some attention

 

9. What is your opinion on this mild winter?

JL: it is fine with me i feel bad for the people who like to snow mobile

 

10. Does Jeff get on your nerves having lived together for almost all of your lives?

JL: rarely i am positive i am harder to live with than he is and i love the bastard

 

11. When will you and Jeff get a pet?  I would like to see you two bicker over the responsibilities of a dog.

JL: i have zero interest in maintaining any living thing i don’t even want a plant potted or otherwise

 

12. What is the last new article of clothing you have bought?

JL: i guess socks i do not do a lot of clothes shopping

 

13. What is your favorite all-time specific movie or TV scene involving someone driving badly or dangerously?

JL: that is a good question that movie drive was fantastic i always get panicky watching people drive poorly on screen and sometimes it turns into really bad wet dreams

 

14. Do you think the world will end in December 2012 as the Mayan calendar predicts?

JL:  i hope so that would really make things neat

 

15.What do you think about Dr. Knowlton leaving DSU to take a job in the Minnesota collegiate system?

JL: we are going to be together i know it and he knows it

 

16. Would you ever go back to work at Valleyfair for a day or two?

JL: i would love to that place will always be dear to me

 

17. What is one unusual object within your current reach?

JL:  game cube

 

18. What is the biggest gust of wind you have ever encountered?

JL:  1988 auburn parade 5pm on a tuesday august 7th if memory serves

 

19. Finish this sentence: Patrick and Terry were out caroling the other day when ____________.

JL:  dad realized patrick is a terrible singer and patrick realizes my dad won’t be holding his hand crossing streets.

 

20. Are you currently holding a grudge against anyone?

JL:  yep immigrants

 

21. What is your crowning achievement in golf?

JL: i have had some very nice putts, i like a good putt

 

22. If you could be a character from the old Rudolph Christmas special for a week, who would it be?

JL:  never seen it but i will say jesus

 

23. What do you think of Tim Tebow?

JL:  i like him and it seems like i should not

 

24. What are you going to do the rest of the day?

JL:  read a book watch a movie and sleep also something kinky

 

25. Well thanks for your time today Jason. Any closing remarks?

JL: when you slide into first and you hear a nasty floosh diarea? is that how that song goes and how do you spell diahrea i wonder how much i am getting back on my taxes i wonder if stephen king has met steve martin and i wonder if i will ever get around to watching star trek the tv show and i bet i never write a will

Beagle Stories, Bizarre Coincidence, Sammy Kershaw

Beagle Update: Day 4
Baxter has had a tough week without his dear mama at home to watch after him during the day. Our strategy for the first few days had been simple: leave him out in the apartment and hope for the best. Everyone at work tells me “you need to crate him!” but it seemed so damn cruel leaving him trapped in a cage crying all day long. Technically I guess he is crate-trained; he always walks right into his crate at night for sleep with little fuss. But putting him in there in the daytime is torture for the poor pooch, so we really didn’t want to do that to him for many hours on end.

Three mornings this week I have taken Bax out for a morning run of about a mile, hoping to tire him out for the day, and it has been a massive success for both of us… for a few hours. I have come home over break every day to let him out, and every day so far he had been a perfect lil’ pup in the mornings… until today when I discovered a new pair of Lauren’s shoes destroyed and a steaming pile of crap in front of the TV. Here I thought I was being nice leaving the TV on so he could watch daytime soaps! So when I left to go back to work at 12:45 I boxed the little critter up in his crate and there he sat until 5:15. I was told by a neighbor that he heard crying constantly all day.

Friday he will finally get his big break; I am dropping him off at 7am at DogBoys, a giant 20-acre playland for pups. It’s $26 a day, so it will have to be a once-a-week kinda thing, but he desperately needs some dog-on-dog playtime. Jeez, who woulda thought taking care of a dog would be so much trouble!

Other Tidbits

• The Timberwolves seem really competitive and entertaining from the few highlights I’ve managed to catch. If there is a half-season NBA.tv package, I may have to consider. I’m sure Lauren would whole-heartedly agree.
• I stopped at Rudy’s BBQ to get some breakfast tacos this morning on the way to work. By the time I got to work and was carrying them to my desk, the delicious grease had soaked through the bag and it softly tore open, spilling my precious breakfast on the office carpet. Yes I still ate it.
• I am on a big Sammy Kershaw kick right now on Spotify. I can’t get enough of this video from 1996. Sammy is such a perv stalker at the airport, taking candid photos of fellow air travelers without their permission. But the song is fabulous. I may have to revise that stupid country countdown I did a few years ago!
• Lauren and I are still big Foursquare geeks, taking 20 seconds to “check in” every time we go anywhere, including home and work. I am still the Foursquare mayor of eight places including Microboards, Dick’s Garage, Great Hills Park, and Ray’s BBQ of Friday Night Lights fame.
• I swore I would never pick up another freelance website gig because they always end up being way more work than I envision, but Luke Katuin has hooked me up with the good folks of India Palace. Project TBD.
• Coincidence of all coincidences: Lauren’s new co-worker at WF is my old elementary school PE teacher Mrs. Meyer’s niece. How bizarre.
• Lastly, I know there are many big darts fans out there amongst my readers. I hope you all take a look at DartProLeague.com, a website operated by my UK Microboards pal Andrew Taylor, who I hear is a devil of a dart tosser.

Wee Working Wife

As Lauren mentioned over on her blog, she begins her dream job tomorrow! It’s everything she had been hoping for–everything from the company itself to the location downtown to the ability to take a bus rather than driving. I discovered the news via text message while I was at that training in Chicago. Since I assume everyone is really interested in hearing about me all the time, I had kept my co-workers very abreast of Lauren’s job search saga, and they were all excited to hear the news too.

We had been inching by on my paycheck alone, but had been unable to save any money or pay off any debt, so having that extra income is going to be the nicest part. I’m sure Lauren will be plenty relieved to get out of the apartment and stop tediously job-searching every day. Now that Lauren will be taking the bus and not driving, I will start taking the nicer car to work instead of leaving it at home for her to drive during her daily errands.

There are of course some minor downsides, like what we’ll do with poor little beagle. I sure don’t like the idea of him sitting in the house all alone from 7:30 to 5:30 every day. At the very least, I’ll have to start coming home over lunch break and taking him out, but I’m a 20-minute drive away so it’s not very convenient. Perhaps on occasion he can come to work with me, but I think the best short-term solution is to take him to a fun doggy daycare a couple times a week.

The other downside is I won’t get to come home to a delicious home-cooked meal every night.

Barring some unforeseen incident with either of our jobs, I think we can now declare the Austin relocation a total success!

Chicago

This week I went to Chicago with three Callaway colleagues for a 2-day training on a new top-secret program. I was looking at the weather forecasts beforehand and saw temps would be in the high 20s and, hoping to show off to my new southern friends who were wearing tights and multiple layers even in the Austin airport, I briefly debated whether or not to even bring a coat. I wound up bringing one, thankfully, as that whipping wind off Lake Michigan had windchills around zero. I was the only one not to bring a warm hat and had to break down and buy one. So much for showing off that ingrained northern blood!

While much of the trip was spent in a lab listening to an instructor and working along on the computer, we still had time for a wee bit o’ fun. Tuesday night we took in the Bulls game vs. the Suns. We were in literally the second-to-last row in the top level, but the tickets were free so we were happy. The next day after training we wandered around downtown and saw the artsy stuff including The Bean sculpture and an art museum, then ate at a nice restaurant for dinner and tipped back a few cocktails in one of the hotel rooms.

The last day after training, we got out a little early and the gang voted to go try an authentic Chicago pizzeria before flying out. It ended up taking us in the opposite direction of the airport and we sat in a cab in rush-hour traffic for 50 minutes afterwards. We arrived at Midway with about 45 minutes till out flight departed, and made it to the gate with mere minutes to spare. Considering that just four weeks ago I panicked when we weren’t at the airport four hours early for our flight back to Minneapolis, I am mighty impressed with myself. I may have turned a corner.

The CGI Marketing gang at Lou Malnati's in Chicago

Natalie at The Bean sculpture in Chicago

Boring Blog… I Talk About a Busy Week of Work

Damn… it was a busy, busy week at the office. As I said on Facebook, “on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being super unproductive and 10 being ultra productive, it was a pretty busy week.” Some people got the joke. In my 6+ years in the work force since college graduation, that had to have cracked the top five weeks for busiest overall. (Probably not close to evening things out though… I did have that month last February with nothing to do…)

We are re-launching our Shop website with a new look any day now, so I have been busy changing over all the existing content to match the new look. We are also about to release all the new 2012 products, and I am responsible for getting them all up on the site. Plus my day-to-day activities of preparing e-mail blasts and such… not a minute of wasted time this past week. On top of that I am still trying to catch up on all my contract work that backlogged from December. I’m trying to get everything finished before three colleagues and I take off for Chicago on Tuesday afternoon for a 2-day training. It sounds like the Bulls-Suns game is a real possibility for Tuesday night!

Outside of work, it was a busy week as well. Monday night I went with Brian to the Drafthouse to see The Artist, the new silent film that is sure to be a hit at the Oscars. Don’t let the silent part scare you away–it was a great movie. The crowd stood and applauded at the end… kinda rare for a movie theater. Wednesday there was a company dinner at a popular seafood place downtown, Eddie V’s. Great food… pricey, but I wasn’t paying. Lauren and I also blazed through a bunch of Breaking Bad episodes and finished up Season 3 on Thursday night. I used to be so mad when Bryan Cranston beat out Michael C. Hall year after year at the Emmy’s, but now I know that his wins were well-deserved.

Nothing on the slate for this weekend. After cashing in our money for a new bed with my hookup in the mattress industry, we will be keeping things low-key for a while. I plan on taking Bax out for a hike early this afternoon, and we are invited to some friends’ housewarming party tonight. Will watch a little NFL playoffs, I suppose.

Movie, Music, More

Tinker Tailor
Friday night Lauren and I went to the movies to see the new spy drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Lauren had been dying to see this for months and she ended up liking it quite a bit. For me, though, it was too confusing and it was too late (9:40 showing) to fully concentrate. I knew going in it was going to be a lot to follow, and I typically really struggle watching these types of movies, so I actually read the entire synopsis on Wikipedia three times in a row beforehand–even the ending… and I still couldn’t follow. There were so many characters introduced. It didn’t help that I fell asleep for at least 30 minutes of the movie. It reminds me a lot of the times I tried to watch Michael Clayton and The Departed and The Matrix in the theater and fell asleep multiple times.

Live Music
Saturday night, a bunch of us got together for an evening downtown. Our new friends (also newcomers from Minneapolis) Chad and Jamie organized an outing to go out to dinner and then see a band as it was a special citywide “free band week.” All told there were ten of us for the evening. Before the show, we gathered at a bar downtown called Six Lounge and were literally the only ones there. We had the entire lower level to ourselves, complete with free shuffleboard and darts and comfy couches and the NFL playoffs on TV. After a while we made our way over to Antone’s for the band, where we were standing shoulder-to-shoulder amongst 700 other people in a sweaty, loud nook in the far back of the room by the soundboard. After two songs seven of us left and went back to the quiet Six Lounge.

I am quite the downer when it comes to seeing live bands, especially considering we now live in the Live Music Capital of the World. I really only enjoy seeing certain genres (country, blues, jazz) or bands that I have heard of, or know members of. But Austin is just brimming with thousands of undiscovered up-and-comers. I wish I could get into that scene more but I can’t. The shows are always late at night and at bars where I end up spending too much money and can’t converse with friends. I’ll pretty much take the quiet Six Lounge atmosphere over a band any day.

Other

• It sounds like plans are in full swing for a visit from the Glanzers in February!
• To make room for the parents on their visit, Lauren and I are moving our bed to the guest room and going bed shopping for ourselves. I know a guy in the biz from Simmons, and he’s scoring us a great deal on a new Beautyrest mattress!
• Saturday morning we took Baxter to the Beagle Brigade Howl-iday Party (the previous attempt was rained out in December.) Baxter ran and ran his little heart out amongst the 20+ beagles in attendance. We were the bad parents who didn’t bring a gift for him to exchange and he must have felt left out.
• Later Saturday we went for a long walk through the woods, then popped out the other side and walked back through residential streets. Baxter, for the first time I can remember, was lagging behind and not leading the charge. We successfully tired the little bastard out!
• Plans are in the works to get together with old Willow Lake teachers Mr. and Mrs. Meyer, who are staying just outside Austin for the winter.
• I’ll be in Chicago next week Tuesday through Thursday for work.
• Look for a new surprise interview on the blog soon from an old familiar name!