All posts by reneeinnd

Art, home, Media, News, Travel, Uncategorized

Pick Your Mural

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ND Highway 22 runs through our town north and south. In the middle of town there is a very old, ugly, railroad bridge which allows trains to travel above the highway so emergency vehicles can go under the bridge from the south side of town to the north side of town when there is a train.  It is a very low underpass that invariably floods and is impassable during rain storms.

One of our friends who is a community organizer sort of person got funding for a mural to be painted on the railroad bridge. It took all sorts of Federal and State hoops to be jumped through to get the approval, and this week the mural painter arrived from California.  He has done several murals in our town and our State.  The local paper described the project thus:

The four underpass wall panels will comprise one large mural, more than 400 feet in length, celebrating North Dakota.The walls north of the underpass will depict the landscape of the Badlands.The east wall will show immigrating Ukrainians and the west wall will show cowboys, Native Americans and buffalo. South of the underpass, the west wall will depict Dickinson State University’s May Hall and the east wall will show historic downtown Dickinson and a modern pump-jack. (Dickinson Press, October 2, 2018).

The mural artist is enlisting local students and adults to assist with the painting. I think it is a wonderful project.  How often do we get to legally spray paint on bridges?!! I just hope the Czechs and Germans from Russian don’t feel slighted that he chose Ukrainians instead of them.

Where in your community would you like to see an outdoor mural, and what would you like depicted on it?

Family, pets

I Enjoy Being a Cat

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Husband and I often spend our evenings pondering deep subjects, like our cats.  Here is what we came up with last night.  We were thinking mainly about our youngest cat, Millie,  who loves her life and is so joyous.  Think I Enjoy Being a Girl.

I’m a cat and by me that is only great!  I am proud that my tail is swishy.  That I walk with a panther-like grace and charm, and my cat toys are soft and squishy.

When I have a brand new grocery bag, that I hide in and lie real flat,  Then I swipe at their feet and bite their toes.  I enjoy being a cat. 

I  sharpen my claws on Mom’s new purse, Then she tells me to run and scat. So I knock all the pens down on the floor. I enjoy being a cat.

I’m strictly a long haired tortoiseshell,  and my future I hope will be,  on a cushion upon the window seat, with some nice cat nip to smell, cat nip to chew, catnip to eat, for me. 

Who have you  known who totally enjoyed being themselves. Tell some stories about animals or people you have known.

 

gardening, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Truth in Advertising

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I am always amazed at the deceitfulness of people who sell plants through catalogs and greenhouses.   It is easy to be fooled  into buying plants that just won’t work in your climate zone  if you don’t know your flora.  The most recent scam up here is the marketing of hydrangea macrophllya,  a group of hydrangeas that just won’t grow here but are probably the prettiest ones for stunning shades  of pink and blue. They are tempting, but it is just too cold here, and unless you are prepared to mulch pretty heavily in the winter, they just won’t do much after the first year. We have tremendous luck with hydrangea arborescens (the big, white, poofy ones) and hydrangea paniculata (ones with pointy flowers that often turn pink at the end of summer).

Hybrid tea roses were marketed for years as good to zone 4, but now are sold with the disclaimer that they are only good to zone 5.  They really only do well here if you cap them with rose cones in the fall and mulch heavily. We used to have lots of tea roses, but we got pretty tired of all the fuss. We planted Morden roses from Manitoba instead.  They are very cold hardy.  We have a few hybrid teas in the yard that do well since we seem to have created a micro-climate in the yard with shrubs and fences that keeps temperatures a little warmer than in other parts of the yard.  The pictures below show a hybrid tea we never cap or mulch that comes back every year and is a really stunner.

 

A couple of years ago we bought two Morden roses that were supposed to be only four feet tall at the most.  One turned out to be a climbing rose that had multiple, six foot long branches.  It was not labeled as a climbing rose. It was in a part of the yard that wouldn’t have supported a trellis, so it  flopped around and got tangled in everything around it. It mercifully died last winter so we dug it up, providing room for one nearby that we assumed was a four feet tall rose as it had been labeled. As you can see in the next photo, it, too, is starting to act like something else.

 

It is a little hard to see, but the rose put out a couple of stems that were at least seven feet tall.  Husband cut them off after I took the photo. I hope this was just a fluke.  I just don’t know who in the plant world to trust anymore.

Who do you trust?  When have you had something that didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to? When has a plant fooled you?

Family, Food, gardening, home

Borscht Closure and Cabbage Tiffs

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We grew a short row of beets this year.  Husband started to talk about making borscht in June. He is an incredibly obsessive person who loves to compare and contrast recipes.  Borscht recipes started to appear on the lamp table near his chair in the living room, and with difficulty he finally settled on one recipe a week or so ago.  He had, of course, annotated it with suggestions from other recipes. It was a complex recipe with twenty-one steps.

Last Friday he started to make the borscht, beginning with a beef stock.  That took all Friday afternoon and evening, with Husband fussing over the vegetables and herbs  that were to go into the stock, and how long the stock was to cook.  It was finally finished at 3:00 am Saturday morning. I strained it for him later in the morning. He fussed and fussed, asking if I should skim off all that fat, was the beef tender,  and was it enough?  I reassured him it was. Then the real hysteria began, with the twenty one steps.

The vegetables had to be julienned in a specific way.  It was a clear borscht with beets, cabbage, onions, celeriac, carrots, potatoes, and our home grown fresh Vermont Cranberry beans.  Only he could assemble the soup.  I don’t quite know what the other steps were, but I went to bed at  9:00, and he finished the soup just before midnight. It made two gallons. The kitchen was in a state of continual mess and uproar the whole time the soup was in preparation. I became increasingly irritated with him. I started to argue with him over what to do with the leftover cabbage he didn’t need in the soup, a half head of  savoy cabbage we had grown last year and blanched and frozen. He was going to throw it away. When I heard myself saying  “You can’t throw out the rest of that cabbage! It worked really hard to grow for us!”  I knew I was completely around the bend. I don’t even like cabbage. Then Husband got stuck at Step 20-correct for seasoning.

He ate some of the soup for breakfast on Sunday. He was pensive and broody all morning after that.  We went to church, and as we were driving home he said we had to go to the store to get a cruet. He explained that he was disappointed in his soup because it needed more acid and herbs, and he wanted a cruet to infuse herbs and vinegar to add to the soup. No, he said, he couldn’t just use a pint jar.  After a great deal of indecision on his part, we found just the right cruet to match his expectations. We went home, and he proceeded to turn the kitchen upside down (again), chopping all these herbs and figuring  out what he wanted in his soup.

I had finally had it with all this obsession and brooding, and asked if I could taste the soup. It was wonderful. I told him that if he thought it needed more acid,  to squeeze a God damned lemon into it and just add some fresh dill, but what ever he did he needed to be done with the soup!!!  He looked stunned and seemed to come back to reality. He sheepishly agreed that I was correct, and filled up the cruet with vinegar and the herbs and put it in the fridge. I have no idea what we will do with it.

When have you got so close to something that you couldn’t see it for what it truly was anymore?  How do you choose recipes? What is your favorite beet recipe?

Family, home, Uncategorized

Happy Anniversary!

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Sept. 10 was our 35th wedding anniversary.  Husband, that romantic devil, got me exactly what I wanted: a meat saw, the one featured in the header photo.  It was even on sale!

I also splurged on new throw rugs, and a Pendleton blanket that we picked up at a Pow Wow on Sunday.  I don’t expect much in the way of romantic gifts.  Husband didn’t want anything, as he feels our trip to Tacoma in August was gift enough for him.  The meat saw looks like it will last a long time, maybe for 35 exciting more years.

Are you romantic or practical in what you like to give and what you like to receive?

home, Nature, Technology, Uncategorized, work

Unidentified Object

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Husband cleaned the garage and workbench yesterday and found this:

We don’t know what it is.  It must have belonged to my father, since neither if us remember buying it.  We inherited my father’s collection of tools and gadgets acquired over his very long life.  He loved picking up this and that,  just in case he might need them. We have several hundred drill bits, for example, not to mention many socket wrench sets.

I suppose it could be a tripod of some sort, but dad sold his camera decades ago.  I think it looks so funny. I half expect it to come to life and run across the garage. I am not even sure which end of it goes up.

Any idea what this unidentified object is? When have you found something in your house you couldn’t remember buying or couldn’t identify? What does your tool and gadget collection look like?

books, Family, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

Read!

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My daughter has been quite concerned about me because I have not been reading very much for the past several years.  She thinks  I have been depressed since my parents died. She is probably correct.

Daughter insisted that I buy at least one book on our trip to Washington. We stopped at a lovely independent bookstore in Kirkland, WA, where I purchased a murder mystery set in southwest France. Daughter chose David Sedaris’ most recent book of essays, along with four other books that I am sure she has finished by now. She insisted I take the Sedaris book home with me to read. It was very funny and poignant. He is one of her favorite authors.  (Her Grade 5 teacher was rather concerned why we allowed her to read such material after she took one of his books to school to have for free reading time.)  I like the murder mystery.  Husband is reading VS Pritchett.

It is a long weekend and I feel like reading this weekend. I wonder what the Baboons are reading now.  What will be next on your “To Read” list?

Fitness, Uncategorized, work

Enforced Activity

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Here are the facts:

I work in a six story, former men’s dormitory on the campus of a small North Dakota college.  The building was constructed in 1965. For some reason, there were a large number of men enrolling in college then.

There are two stairwells on the east and west sides of the building, and one elevator on the south side of the building.  It is an Otis elevator.

My office is on the fourth floor. My play therapy room is on the fifth floor. Our agency occupies the basement and the first five floors of the building. There is an educational training cooperative on the sixth floor.

The Otis corporation decided recently that the elevator, the 1965 original, must be completely replaced. This includes the elevator car and all the workings that pull the elevator up and down.  Doing this will take eight weeks. The educational cooperative has moved to other digs until November 1. My agency has no choice but to stay where we are and walk the stairs.

I am out of shape.  I always take the elevator. We must accompany all our clients from the first floor to our offices.

Well, we have no elevator now, and I am doing stairs like crazy. I am exhausted. We have made arrangements that the halt and the lame will receive services on first floor.  Everyone else must trudge up the stairs to where they need to go. I anticipate that my blood sugar and cholesterol  will decrease through the elevator revamp.

How do you keep in shape?

Food, gardening, Nature, Science, Travel, Uncategorized

Verisimilitude

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The 9 course meal we ate on Saturday night  was completely sourced from a 100 mile radius of the restaurant.  Given its location just east of Seattle, it was no surprise that salmon,  geoduck, mussels, and oysters were on the menu. We also ate local lamb and pork. All the veggies like turnips, carrots, greens, cabbage, potatoes, beets, and cucumber came from the restaurant farm, as did all the herbs and flowers used in the dishes.  (Day lilies, Marigolds, and Bachelor Buttons are surprisingly tasty.)  There were lovely local mushrooms. All the wines had been commissioned from local vintners by the restaurant owners last year for the meal.  Cooking fat was either butter, grape seed oil, or hazelnut oil. They grow quinoa locally, and we had that, too.

The restaurant owners went to the extreme, though, to make sure that everything we ate was from within 100 miles.  That meant that they churned their own butter from milk from local cows, and planted a couple of acres of rye and wheat to mill their own flour for the bread. They collected clean local sea water to make their own salt. We had no pepper, but there were so many farm herbs in the food that we didn’t miss it at all. Lemon verbena provided all the citrus we needed. The biggest dilemma was what to use for locally sourced leavening for the hazelnut cakes we had for dessert.

They started out last year collecting mule deer antlers from within a 100 mile radius of the farm  and grinding them to a powder. Horn is apparently a good leavening agent and made some pretty good cakes. It takes a lot of laborious, time consuming grinding, though, and they found an even better leavening agent  in wood ash from the fire place. Who knew?

Plan a meal completely sourced from a 100 mile radius of your house. What would you serve?

 

Food, Stories, Travel, Uncategorized, work

Please Flip Your Wig

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Last Saturday we met a delightful young woman who was visiting the West Coast for the first time. She was a barrister from London, England, someone who argues cases in British courts, either for the prosecution or the defense.

We were  dining at a lovely restaurant and herb farm in Woodinville, WA. The arrangements were such that we were seated with total strangers and were expected to converse with each other for the duration of our 4 hour, 9 course meal. We had a very congenial bunch at our table, and the conversation turned particularly lively when I asked the barrister if she wore a wig to court. “Oh, yes indeed!” she replied, and went on to describe the process of finding just the right wig for her work.

There are apparently several places in London where one can purchase court dress and wigs, all ancient and venerable establishments. The wigs are made from horse hair. She said the first question she was asked was whether she wanted a wig made from the mane or the tail. I gather the mane hair would be finer and more expensive. I don’t know which she chose. Next, they  measured the circumference of her head, and then took her into a rather dark cellar full of cardboard boxes where they found the boxes with wigs in her size.

The next procedure sounds quite similar to purchasing a magic wand in the Harry Potter books.  Clothed in her court robes, complete with her white collar and tie, she tried on one wig at a time. I don’t know how concerned she was with the particular look or style.  It seemed that the distinguishing characteristic of the right wig was that it had to be one that did not slip or fall off when she bowed as low as she could bow. She said she got quite dizzy bowing repeatedly. She assured us that there were sparks and lightning flashes when she found just the right wig. She said hers was a short advocate’s wig with a  slight widows peak.

What are  the distinguishing characteristics of your work clothes?  What costumes would you like to wear to work?