Fifty Words, Media, Music, Radio, Songs, The Baboon Congress, Uncategorized, Weather

Keeping Warm

82 Comments

Photo from IMBd.

I’m not sure why but the cold weather this week found me yearning for our old Monday morning song by the Sons of the Pioneers. Luckily you can find this kind of thing on the internet.  I’ve played it several times over the past few days.  It doesn’t warm me up physically, but gives me an inside warmth that comes with good memories.

Here’s another:

Just one more:

What warms your heart?

82 thoughts on “Keeping Warm”

    2. I consider the Easter Island Head my signature emoji and I use it on most of my texts. I feel it’s a vastly underused symbol and I’m trying to help it get the recognition it deserves. We have friends who went to Turkey one year over Thanksgiving, they said they went to Turkey for turkey day; I’ve tried ever since to convince them to go to Easter Island for Easter, but they continue to ignore my suggestion. 🗿

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      1. I had a colleague who collected all kinds of Easter Island Head stuff. It was always fun to go over to her desk and look at all of her trinkets.

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        1. My daughter and sister bought an EIH necklace fr me at the fair. When granddaughter saw it, she immediately said, “Oh, you must be giving that to Bocker, it’s her favorite emoji!” I can never go back now; EIH is mine forever.

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  5. The Blizzard by Jim Reeves
    “They found him there at dawn. He’d a made it but he just couldn’t leave Cold Dan. Yes they found him there on the plains his hands froze to the reins. He was just a hundred yards from Mary Ann.” My ex hated that song. Dying for a horse now warms my heart.

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      1. No they’re not. Jay Peterson just arrived there a few days ago from here. He wrote on Facebook that he has survivor’s guilt as it was 32º F there when the temp here had plunged to -25º F.

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  8. It is tolerable here this morning and will get to 30°. Husband’s truck started just fine up at the rez. Very few people here have block heaters for their vehicles. Why is that? Did engine design change or something?

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    1. The fuel injection most vehicles have these days does make a difference. I was thinking that too; neither of our cars has an engine heater.
      Even if they would start, being warm would make them start easier and all that.
      The tractor I use in the winter has been plugged in for the last two weeks. It starts right up, but it still takes a few minutes for all the hydraulic oil to warm up and move. It takes a while for the steering to work and the loader and bucket to move or the rear blade to move at normal speed.

      And of course you still need a good battery. That hasn’t changed.
      Car manufacturers (or maybe it’s the designers) have gotten very creative at hiding the battery.
      Son had a Buick LeSabre and the battery was under the back seat. My Grand Cherokee it is, evidently, under the passenger seat. I haven’t looked for it yet.
      At least they put positive and negative lugs under the hood so you could jump start it or other cars.

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        2. That’s one way to think of it, Steve. Here’s another. It’s a long-time marriage that has lost some of its luster, sure. That’s evident from several lines in the song. They’re sitting in opposite ends of the couch, it’s been a while since they have done anything frivolous, and he declines her offer of a glass of wine. She’s a romantic and he’s more practically inclined, but they know and care about each other. “You hate a cold house, the same as me,” he offers as an explanation to why he’s insisting on oak. She knows she’s not going to win this one, so she quickly changes gears. She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it.

          You look tired, she says, go to bed, I’ll take care of the wood tonight. He departs with a last admonition of “oak,” and she reassures him by repeating it. She listens as he climbs the stairs, and then she springs into action. She puts on a sweater, fetches some birch logs, and pours herself a glass of wine. As the fire springs back to life, she dances in the glow of the warm fire that she knows won’t last long.

          The last line of the song is so poignant I think: “She thought of heat, she thought of time, she called it an even trade.” I think that’s how most long relationships work. There’s a time of wild passion and extravagant displays of love, and then, gradually, most couples (I think!) settle into a reasonably comfortable everyday reality with lots of compromises on both sides. Not without love, joy or satisfaction, but without the intensity or fluctuations that characterize new relationships. That’s how I think of it, anyway.

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    1. I attended a performance many, many years ago at the World Theater in St. Paul where McFerrin, with help from a great audience, performed this along with a lot of other stuff. It was truly amazing, and a very fun evening.

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  22. Something odd happened here last night. Here in SE Michigan we have been in the same arctic vortex, although our temps didn’t fall quite as low as they did in Minnesota. My daughter and her husband were asleep last night when their phones each began shrieking with a loud alarm. They jumped up and read the message, which was from the local power company. A substation had suffered an outage. Because everyone in the area was running furnaces in a desperate effort to keep warm, the local power grid was in danger of system failure. All homeowners were asked to dial their thermostats down to 65 degrees or cooler. Enough people complied to save the grid, and now all is normal again.

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    1. I was just wondering about Joanne and her family, and how they fared in Big Lake. There was a shortage of natural gas, and the power company is gradually restoring gas to homes in her area.

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      1. Also there were 5000 households in south Minneapolis, and 1000 in West St. Paul, who were without power. I was wondering whether any baboons were affected?

        We’ve made it through unscathed, so far. Glad our snow emergency was a day before the temps plunged. We’re up to -6º F at the moment, so I hope we’re out of the woods.

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        1. my daughter with her baby called me tuesday night to ask what to do
          i told her to turn on the gas oven and blow the heat down the hall of their apartment
          with a fan
          she said across the street in minneapolis they all had power
          her side was back for a couple hours but came back on before it got critical

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    2. I was at our electric coop today for a meeting. The CEO was talking about how Dairyland Power had asked people to turn down their heat and how even some business’ voluntarily shut down to save energy. The Coop is expecting this cold stretch to serve as both an exercise and example of showing how there is a finite amount of electricity and how conservation is really needed at times.

      We are on the ‘dual fuel’ system so our heat has been off for a few hours every night. It’s not a problem with the radiant heater in the dining room and a blanket on the couch. But sure glad I’m not living in a wood shack out on the prairie.

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  28. Sherrilee:
    Thanks for the welcome. I have been lurking for years and meaning to post to commend you and all the Congress on keeping the spirit of the LGMS alive for us. The daily essays are a fabulous surrogate for the warmth and intelligence of the LGMS that used to kickstart my days!

    I am curious to know if I am alone, or if others have created playlists on their computers/music players that contain those tunes (more than just the Keepers CDs) that enriched our lives for so many years. Radio Heartland just doesn’t give me enough of the quirkiness!

    BTW, any rendition of the Holy Lake Baikal is great, but I believe this is the one most commonly played by the boys back in the day:

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    1. Welcome, Jeff. So was it the polar vortex and the resulting brain freeze that pushed you over the edge and prodded you to pipe up? Whatever it was, we’re glad you did.

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    2. Hey Jeff… not sure who has playlists that they’re keeping, although it’s clear from the Trail yesterday that we all are finding access to the songs we love. I can say that a few years back, those of us in the Twin Cities pooled our Keepers CDs and made copies, so that a good handful of us now have the full set!

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    4. I, for one, have an iTunes playlist called Morning Show Favorites. I think my playlists got scrambled in a system upgrade a couple of years ago, but the tunes are still there.

      One I haven’t been able to find anywhere, in any form, though, is Little Bit of Cucumber. Would love to hear it again.

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        1. A fine version – the original, I think? – but the one that Dale and Jim Ed played was by John Roberts and Tony Barrand. It’s on an album called An Evening At the English Music Hall, which came out in the 1980’s and seldom comes up for sale. (I have it wantlisted on a site that specializes in obscure stuff like this.)

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        2. Linda-
          I knew it didn’t sound quite right – a little too fast, perhaps? Please let us know if you ever track it down!

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