I’ve gotten interested in the trials and tribulations of former Twin Cities auto king Denny Hecker. By sifting through many media sites, I have compiled the following time line detailing the rise and fall of The Heck. This time line is a living thing… new information comes in daily and I’m sure there are also errors or improperly worded points. If you have some major Hecker news or corrections to add, please let me know via comments. I’ll be updating it as new info becomes available. Without further ado…

Laughing In The Face Of Fate:
The Denny Hecker Story

1950s-1970s
Denny Hecker is born in 1952 and raised in North Minneapolis.

1970: Hecker graduates from Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis and marries his first wife, Judith Martin, the following fall. They stay married for less than two years. He does a brief stint in college and then drops out to sell cars at a local dealership. Cars, it seems, were his destiny.

1973: Hecker marries Sandra Storm (who may or may not be a comic book heroine). They remain married for ten years and have two daughters.

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Keith and I were having a discussion yesterday about our dog, Freja, being “a dog’s dog.” What this means, we decided, is that she’s loved by dogs and humans alike just for her very unfussy, no-holds-barred “dogginess.” This stems from another ongoing discussion between us about being a “Gentleman’s Gentleman.” Just what is a Gentleman’s Gentleman? With kind regards to Mr. Grant Weeks (truly in the running to be a GG), here are some pointers Keith and I came up with.

1. Have a flask on your person as often as possible. The flask must be filled with good liquor, no rotgut. Whiskey is preferred but not required. A true Gentleman’s Gentleman would have an engraved flask, possibly with a picture of a bulldog.

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Best Experiences
Every day spent with Keith but especially the small things: cooking dinner, making fun of TV news, walking, bike riding
Isla Mujeres, Mexico
Tuscany
The dog beach at Afton State Park on a beautiful summer day
Biking anywhere, even to work

Best Purchases
A Roku!!
Flat, black leather boots by daniblack
Yet another pair of Isotoner mittens (probably the 20th pair of my adult life since I lose them constantly) because I hate gloves!
Olive oil from the Fubbiano Winery in Tuscany
Recycled plastic colander (brightly colored enameled colanders are a rusty lie!) Sometimes it’s the little things.

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Like this little guy? He’s a cheese curd from the folks over at Eat Curds.com. Curds are just one thing I ate in 2009 that I liked. I like to eat and I like to make lists so here’s my look back on the year in food that was as I gear up for the Year That Will Be. I’ve compiled this list of amazing things consumed in the past year (uh, amazing to me. I’m not one of those Adventure Eaters scouring the globe for jam made from the thoraxes of sweet beetles), all of them worth the calories. While making this list I realized that I’m incredibly Minneapolis-centric when it comes to eating… unless I’m on vacation. Here’s to branching out to eat in other cities and suburbs in 2010. But first, here’s to some of the best things I ate in 2009.

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I’ve had a lot of bosses because I’ve had a lot of jobs. So there have been many “incidents,” as I like to call them, throughout the years that don’t seem to add up to much until, well, maybe they do…

1. The Dead-Bird-In-the-Tissue-Box Incident – I had a boss no one liked very much but particularly one co-worker who was older than my boss and had been there longer and was having some, shall we say, negative feelings about reporting to someone younger. The two of them would either be screaming at each other in my boss’s office or exchanging passive aggressive remarks in staff meetings. This was at a Catholic school for girls (so don’t let religious people try to fool you about how harmonious and understanding they are – both these women had attended the school as teens and went on to work there, so they’d been in the environment a long time and both behaved like infants). Things came to a head right around Easter vacation. My boss took the week off to go someplace (maybe Sante Fe – she was always going on about Sante Fe) and I stayed there for most of the time but then was off for the long weekend.

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Sometimes it’s good to share a list of the strange things you’ve read. You never know what might inspire someone else.

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Sometimes I think summer might be the saddest season of the year. Yes, the weather is great and life is easier. But it’s also the time when we become nostalgic about summers past and spend a lot of time trying too hard to have fun and recapture past glory. People tend to organize a lot of silly events to make people feel young again, get families to spend time with one another or invoke town pride.

So this week I present: The Saddest & Lamest Events of Summer 2009 (in the Twin Cities area)

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Every summer I create a list of books to read that stretches to about 25 and then I read about 4 of them, what with distractions from new books coming out or just discovered, magazines (which take up more of my reading time than I like to admit) and nice weather that demands going outside and being active, for Pete’s sake, before the hammer of fall hits.

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