Writers, I mean. One of the perks of living in a smaller, more isolated community is that we get to know about the lives of people we wouldn’t necessarily get to know about in a big city. It goes both ways, though, and people get to know about us, too.
Husband and I usually purchase wine at the liquor store attached to our biggest grocery store. The liquor establishments have to be separate entities in ND, and grocery stores can’t sell liquor in the grocery store proper. We have come to know one of the liqour store clerks fairly well, and he always tells us about his day and recent life events, and he asks us about ours. He is a military veteran in his late 40’s. He knows we are both psychologists.
Yesterday while he was checking us out he stopped and grabbed a notebook and hurriedly wrote something down. He told us it was a for a scene in a novel he was writing about PTSD in military veterans and if he didn’t write it down he would forget it. He then shyly asked us if we had ever worked with veterans, and I was able to relate some of my experiences working in a VA hospital with Vietnam and Gulf War veterans some 30 years ago. He made it clear he didn’t have combat related PTSD, but he felt a need to write about it for those who did. At that point another customer came into the store and we had to end our conversation.
I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that he is writing a book, and it was just delightful to hear about his ideas. It made me wonder how many other aspiring writers are lurking behind cash registers and counters in town.
What would you write about if you were to write a book? How many published authors do you know? Have any favorite store clerks?
The first car that I owned was a 1968 Datsun 510. I bought it used when I lived in Northfield – in 1977 – for a whooping $400. It had some rust but ran pretty well. The owner wouldn’t sell it to me until we test drove it; I don’t think he believed I could drive a stick.
Back then inexpensive cars didn’t do anything special for you. No pings to tell you that you haven’t turned off the lights, no messages that your oil life is down to 15%, no back-up cameras, no seat warmers, and certainly no notifications that your tire air pressure is getting low.
Even though my current car is 11 years old, I bought it new from a dealership so I can still take it in when the air pressure light goes on, usually after the first cold snap of each fall/winter. They check the tires and fill any that are low. No charge for this. A couple of years ago, a new warning blinked at me, on a cold cold morning in January – a TPMS warning. I looked it up in the manual and online – Tire Pressure Monitoring System. Didn’t I already have that?
When I had the car’s check-up in April (right before I drove to Indy for the eclipse), I asked the mechanics to look at it – they said they took care of it. Unfortunately, when the got cold in December, the light came back on. I ignored it for a couple of weeks, it warmed up and the light turned off. When I had the oil changed in January, I asked them to look at it again. Turns out there are FOUR of these sensors and they not only go wonky fairly often but they run on batteries, so eventually the batteries run down. They had fixed one of these sensors in April, but now there were two more sensors acting up. The reality is that they are actually a built-in redundancy, a back-up to the main system, which works just fine. If the light was bothering me, I could cough up $120 each to have them adjusted and get new batteries for them. If I wait until the next time I need new tires, it will be a lot less. So, since the warning isn’t even accurate, I decided to ignore it. Then when it warmed up… the light went off again. Sigh.
Hopefully it won’t come on again until it gets really cold again.
It was bound to happen. The postal tide has turned.
As a working young adult, YA now gets a chunk of mail. Lots of credit card offers, lots of requests from charities. Stuff from her healthcare folks, catalogs for trendy clothes. Very little useful stuff at all and almost all of it ends up in the trash. But it occurred to me today when I was sorting our letters, all of which went into one pile for her, that she gets more mail than I do these days.
Unfortunately the mail I do get is mostly the bills.
You get anything interesting in the mail these days?
These days I rarely stop at coffee shops. Mostly I’m just too cheap when I can make my own coffee or tea at home for a fraction of the cost. But every couple of months, YA and I will make a stop at a Caribou if we are out and about.
In early days, when there was a Caribou two blocks from house, I will admit I was more of a regular. But in keeping with my “like it cheaper” gene, I purchased myself a mug that I could use whenever I stopped by. Saved a bit of money and saved yet another coffee cup in the trash. Even though this mug is close to 25 years old, it’s in pristine shape – it doesn’t get used that often and I wash it by hand instead of throwing it in the dishwasher. When we lost our little Caribou (first the big Lyndale closing and then the Minnehaha Creek bridge re-build), my use of my mug plummeted.
When I dragged it out to the car with me yesterday, it was probably the first time in a year that it had gotten any use. The young man behind the counter was astonished to see it. He picked it up, turned it around, looked at the bottom then called over co-workers to look at it. The big draw turned out to be the logo, which apparently was “updated” back in 2010. If you had asked me, I would not have been able to tell you what the new logo looks like:
Guess I’m just oblivious. But it turned out OK… they were all so enamored of my antique mug that they gave me my decaf for free!
Do you have a favorite cup/mug for your coffee or tea?
I’m reading a memoir right now (Thirty Rooms to Hide In by Luke Sullivan). In the early pages, the author paints a picture of his life growing up with his five brothers in Rochester in the fifties. Here is an interesting passage on bedtime:
“Bedtime was indeed death. Even the rituals were the same: the preparing of the body (the solemn washing of teeth, the funereal donning of pajamas), the readings, the occasional prayer, and finally the inevitable darkness. All that was missing were Hallmark sympathy cards arriving in the mail.”
I never really thought about bedtime in terms of rituals but in my world, it’s probably the most consistent rituals that I have. Teeth, pajamas, highlighting items done from my to-do list, making a list for the next day, med/vitamins, daily entry in my “good things” journal. Once I’m actually settling in, there is the arranging of Nimue’s blanket on my side of the bed; her ritual is to settle in for about ten minutes, knead a few biscuits, purr while getting some scritches and then heading to her favorite bed on top of the radiator.
Almost forgot the “bang” treat for Guinevere and the yummies for Nimue… this usually happens between teeth and jammies.
On Sunday, Kelly and I did our usual gator farm tour. This week we went down in the pasture and down to the creek, which was still frozen over, walked around down there for a bit.
The next day I took the truck to Plainview, which meant I have the dogs with me, and after we picked up daughter, they all walked home.
Dealing with mud again, which is never my favorite. And it’s gonna get cold, and it’s gonna snow, and then it’s gonna get muddy again, so we’ll have to do this cycle a few times. Just something else to get through.
I took the anhydrous applicator up to an auction in Plainview. It’s an implement I use in the spring to apply nitrogen to the corn ground. Nitrogen in the form of anhydrous ammonia. I pull those white tanks behind it. The last year that I used it was 2021, and since 2022 I’ve had the co-op applying nitrogen in the form of urea, which is a granular product.
When I was working with my dad, the story was he had gotten a heavy whiff of the ammonia quite a few years ago and he never liked it and couldn’t stand being around it anymore. So I’ve been applying the anhydrous probably since I was 18 years old. We used to rent a smaller machine to do it, and then as the tractor‘s got bigger I could rent a little bit bigger applicator bar. And when the co-op stopped renting that equipment and they sold them off, I bought this one. I don’t remember the price anymore, it was probably 10 or 15 years ago.
This is also the machine that I had a little incident with back in 2018.
Anhydrous can be really nasty stuff; it can kill you, it can burn you, it’s gotta be treated with respect and handled carefully. And I have always been careful, making sure I’m parking into the wind, working up wind, wearing heavy gloves, and a face shield.
So this one day the hose was dragging on the ground between the wagon and the applicator.
I stopped, I closed the valves, I started to disconnect the hose, and the valve did not seal properly. I remember that it was very difficult to open, it had been really cranked shut. So it made sense that it was leaking a bit now. There was very little breeze that day, next to nothing, so I couldn’t get up wind of it. I debated what to do. I debated just holding my breath and rushing in there to crank it shut. And finally thought, I just need somebody with a respirator, it’s not an emergency, I just need somebody that can get this closed. So I called the nonemergency number for the fire department and explained the situation. Well, when the first of three firetrucks showed up, and I was still sitting in the tractor waiting for them, they parked a half mile up the road and suited up and a guy in full gear walked down to me. I’m sure they were all bent out of shape that I was still hanging out down there. All they were told was that there was an anhydrous leak.
It turned into a whole big thing. Ambulance, incident command vehicle, and a sheriff deputy, all out on the highway, and the three firetrucks were on our road.
I had to call a chemical spill hotline who thought I had lost the entire tank of 5000 gallons. No, it’s just a few drips and a very minor vapor leak. But, it was good training for the fire department: they went down with a wet towel, sampled the air, wrapped a towel around the valve and was able to get it turned off tight using a pipe wrench so that I could then disconnect the hose. Always glad to help them out, I said. They even gave me a bottle of Gatorade.
I had to attend a safety workshop, and I had to replace the hoses that are only good for 10 years and of course mine were out of date by a few years because it’s expensive and nobody pays any attention to the replacement date. I think it cost me $1500 for new hoses and a valve.
And now it’s 2025, stamped on the hose it says ‘replace before 2025’, and I took it to the auction and it’s not my problem anymore. When I pulled it out of storage, one of the tires was low. Not flat, just low so I pumped it back up. Pulled it the 20 miles to Plainview, and as I walked into the office I could hear a hiss and air leaking from this tire. Well, not my circus, not my monkey anymore.
The dogs all got pup cups at the Dairy Queen and I had a blizzard.
WHATS YOUR FAVORITE CLEANING PRODUCT? ANY MONKEY STORIES?
Trail Baboon 