All posts by reneeinnd

Family, The Baboon Congress

Scholar’s Mountain

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

Some time ago I submitted a post about a large piece of carved Chinese jade in my possession that my maternal great grandfather hauled from Hamburg, Germany to New York to Minnesota in 1914. I thought it was an incense burner, and couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the family brought it with them when they immigrated to the United States.

My son did a little research this fall and discovered that it isn’t exclusively an incense burner. It is called a Scholar’s Mountain, Scholar’s Rock, or Spirit Stone (Gongshi), and it was used to encourage wisdom and deep thoughts as it was gazed upon. The holes, some natural and some that were carved in it, are for calligraphy or paint brush handles, and the round basin is either for incense or for water for rinsing the brushes. Who’d have thought?

Most were naturally occurring rocks carved and perforated by water, sometimes embellished with carvings, sometimes placed in gardens as points for contemplation or else brought inside. They were chosen on how well they emulated the natural world of landscape, especally mountains and elevations.  Ours is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is carved with a stag, a bat, a bear, two ravens, and a honey comb or coral shape. Now that I know this, the shape and design and purpose make sense. I wonder what scholars or deep thinkers might have used this for inspiration.

I used to worry what would happen to this after I am no longer here, and now that son has taken an interest and we know what it is, I think it will continue on its journey with him.  He is a scholar and a deep thinker, after all.

Describe a sight or an object that encourages you to think deep thoughts.

 

 

The Baboon Congress

Hark, Hark the Dogs Doth Bark

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Today’s post is by Renee in North Dakota

The Saturday after New Year’s Day, our churlish next door neighbor stormed over to our house and told my husband that we had to keep our dog quiet. Did we know how many times she had barked that day? Husband just said “Ok”. and shut the door.  We were pretty puzzled about this, since she really hadn’t barked at all that day.

Our dog is 14 years old. She is a terrier. Terriers bark. We have tried our hardest to minimize her vocalizations over the years. We don’t let her out in the yard unsupervised, and she does her business on the deck in the back. Our neighbor has complained about her for years, and it seems that nothing we do is good enough.

There are plenty of other dogs in the neighborhood that we hear barking, but he seems to be obsessed with our little Maggie. He spends a lot of time in his family room, the closest room in his house to our deck, which is the only place she barks. He has even installed white noise machines.  There was a dog in the garage of the house on the other side of neighbor’s house that barked continuously for 5 hours the day he came over to complain.  We think that he assumed the noise was coming from our dog.

Now, to put Maggie’s barking into perspective, her barking never lasts more than 10 seconds  at any one time before we bring her in, and she doesn’t bark in the house. After this last visit from neighbor, we started collecting data on the times she went out, whether she barked, and the duration of her utterances, if any. We stand by the patio door until she is finished with her  business so that we can leap out and quell any barking that might occur.  Her barking, which wasn’t much to begin with, has been reduced even further.  Now we have actual data to use in the event neighbor complains to the police. The longest string of barks she has produced outside since we started data collection is 5 woofs long and lasted less than 5 seconds. She barks less than 3 percent of the times she goes outside. Ooh, I love being a behavioral scientist!

Our dog is getting frail and I think this is her last winter. I have a secret plan for when she passes that would be satisfying to implement, particularly if she dies before next Christmas. I plan to tell the neighbor that she has died. I want to lull him into a false sense of relief, and then I want to start broadcasting from our deck this musical selection that husband found on the internet.

One of my friends tells me that someone has to be the bigger person here. I suppose she is right. There is an entire album of Barking Dogs’ Christmas music, though! It is pretty tempting to do, especially since neighbor hasn’t thanked us for the nearly silent neighborhood in which he now lives.   Of course, he never thanks us for anything. Sigh.

 

When have you used data to win an argument?

The Baboon Congress

Double, Double, Toilet Trouble

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

The agency at which I work is housed in a six-story former college dormitory built in 1964.  There are sixteen offices on each floor along with a large secretarial office and central waiting room. The building has one elevator.

The bathrooms are located on the east and west sides of the building. There are 26 bathrooms in the building, four on each floor and two in the basement. The building is owned by our local college, which is responsible for upkeep and maintenance.  The age of the plumbing and water problems made the college completely upgrade the plumbing and the bathrooms. We have been set upon by construction workers and plumbers for the past two months.

20160124_120643Construction began on the west side of the building in November, with the complete gutting of all the bathrooms on that side and the removal of all the old pipes and oddly placed sinks and defunct showers  from Sixth Floor to the basement. We have to use the bathrooms on the east side of the building.  You can imagine the noise, dust, and commotion, and how the elevator has been tied up with carts full of debris and gross-looking iron pipes. It is hard to administer a test for attention and concentration when it sounds like dinosaurs are devouring the building and there are crashes and drilling and pounding above and below. The workers have been really great to work with though, and we have developed a nice camaraderie with them as we pack into the elevator together. It was with the arrival of the plumbers that things have become somewhat more challenging.

20160124_120354The plumbers don’t communicate real well with either the construction workers or Joanna, our administrator responsible for agency-construction company interface. She has had to contend with unexpected water outages, odd and toxic smells, client complaints, and recently, explosions. Last week the plumbers, for their own nefarious purposes, decided to pump air into the new pipes on the west side of the building. Somehow, the air also went into the old pipes on the east side of the building, with some pretty spectacular effects. When flushed, the working toilets responded with crashes as loud as rifle shots and rapidly swirling torrents of water. Joanna was in a bathroom on First Floor. When she flushed, the water exploded high in the air like Mount Vesuvius, drenching her and the walls and the ceiling.  The lead carpenter asked her how she liked the new bidet on First Floor. She was not amused. I don’t know what she said to the plumbers.

Once the west side bathrooms are finished, the east side ones will be completely removed and the space turned into storage closets. There is trouble brewing, though. The architects insist that the new bathrooms will be handicapped accessible. Our nursing staff tried to get a wheelchair into one of the unfinished bathrooms just to make sure. The space is too small to get a wheelchair in and close the door. The fixtures aren’t even in the bathrooms yet. I think we are in for a long construction season.

How have you navigated your way through construction zones? 

 

History, The Baboon Congress

The Palace

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Header image by McGheiver under Creative Commons Licence 3.0

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

I subscribe to my home town paper, The Rock County Star Herald, and I am constantly amazed by the positive tone and progressive activities the paper reports. For example, there is a $1,000,000 renovation to the library getting underway. The town just beautified the four corners of the major intersection in town to make it more appealing, and the community voted to extend some sort of special State financial assessment that benefits the public school system.  The town has three museums, a new hospital, and a beautiful Veteran’s Nursing Home. The Rock County Historical Society raised $150,000 from private funds to remodel its new building, and the newspaper recently referred to the director of the Historical Society (an elderly woman who taught with my mom) as “Rock County’s Sweetheart of History”.

I think one reason for all this good natured  progressiveness goes back 100 years to the building of The Palace Theater in 1915.  It is a grand structure in the Beaux arts style with 550 seats, built by Herman Jochims for traveling theater troupes, orchestras, and vaudeville acts. It has an orchestra pit and, after 1926, air conditioning and new decor in the Art Deco style.  Herman wanted the Palace to compete with any of the theaters in large cities , and spared no expense decorating it. The second story was used as a ballroom and eventually as Maude and Herman’s residence. In 1926 Herman installed a pipe organ which his wife, Maude, played during the silent films he showed. She was an elegant woman noted for her musicality and elegant dresses.  I watched movies at the Palace all through my childhood and adolescence. It was so posh inside. The first things I always noticed after walking in the foyer were the two large, round mirrors, hung directly opposite one another, so that they reflected the other in smaller and smaller images as though the images went on into infinity.

By 1977, the Palace had fallen on hard times and had been foreclosed by the bank down the block. My parents often talked about the travails of the theater at this time, and I got more details about the issues in a paper by Maianne Preble of the Minnesota Historical Society in 2009. Community members raised money and got grants, and volunteers helped with renovations, so that the theater opened again and was purchased by a local theater group. Some movies and live plays were presented, but there was trouble ahead when the theater group’s Board of Directors sold the building to one of its members in 2001.  There was a general uproar at this, and, eventually, a new and revised Board of Directors repurchased the building after it again went into foreclosure by the bank down the block. This bank gave the new Board of Directors a line of credit with which to buy the building back. More extensive renovations took place, and the building is now owned by the city, which partners with the theater group for its day to day management. Movies are shown, and live theater and musical groups perform regularly.

My hometown isn’t perfect by any means. There is the conflict and disagreement and hard feelings that you find in all communities. I think, though, that the live  performances  and movies gave people the opportunity to see beyond their current situation and dream of something better.  Many people have reported seeing the ghost of Herman up in the balcony, and the organ has been heard playing when it was turned off and even dismantled for renovation. (Maude, no doubt, wanting to play again.) I like to think that when there are hard decisions to be made in town, their spirits flit out of the Palace and start whispering in people’s ears “Do it right. Make it beautiful.”

What local landmark lifts your spirits? 

The Baboon Congress, The Future

Winds of Change

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Header image by reynermedia on flickr / creative commons 2.0

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

If you believe everything you hear from Moody’s and Forbes, North Dakota is rolling up the sidewalks and blowing away. That isn’t quite the case, but some people have lost jobs and are leaving the area. Conservative legislators are talking about State agencies needing to make cuts due to decreased tax revenue. (All they will have to do is not fill all the unfilled positions in State Government and they can make up the shortfall). The lines are still long in Walmart, though, and traffic can still be a problem in town.

Two weeks ago, our County Commission approved a conditional permit for the construction of a wind farm south of town between Dickinson and Schefield. A week later, the same County Commissioners ordered a moratorium on the approval of any other wind farms. The rationale was to see how the wind farm company treats the landowners and the communities that could be affected by the turbines.

The wind farm is a very controversial topic in our county. A few months ago, this same company tried to get a permit to construct a wind farm just east of Dickinson. Those turbines would have almost surrounded two small communities. There was such division and strife and upset among the people who would have been affected that the County Commission denied the permit. They reasoned that community peace and harmony were more important than the revenue that the company would bring to land owners and the county.  The land owners in favor of the wind farm reasoned that they should be able to do what they want with their land, and what right had the County Commission to tell them otherwise. There are fewer land owners involved in the wind farm that was just approved, but letters to the editor from those impacted indicated that division and strife is happening in this case, too.

The first modern wind turbines in our county were put in place by the Holy Sisters at the Benedictine Priory east of town. One of the nuns was an engineer who reasoned that if they could supply their own electricity they could save money heating and cooling their enormous convent. She designed and managed the construction of much of the system. The Sacred Heart turbines are smaller than the ones that are being built now.  I tend to think of wind energy as “good” energy, making less of an impact on the environment, but the controversy in the county has made me see that having a bunch of wind turbines on your property could be a real problem. I guess that they are quite noisy, they cast shadows that can be visually distressing, and they can be hazardous to migratory birds. Some of the landowners may have a wind turbine as close as 1700 feet from their front door.  It also seems that wind energy companies are no more ethical or easier to work with than are oil companies. This is what the County Commissioners wanted to assess before they approved any more wind energy production.

It is hard to know what attitude to take regarding energy production. Oil pipelines leak. Oil tanker cars on trains explode. Fracking can contaminate the ground water. Coal plants destroy the atmosphere, and now wind farms cause division and strife in communities. The City of Dickinson just got an award from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for its infrastructure prioritization policy for municipal building projects during our recent oil boom. Projects concerning life safety received the highest priority while those that affected all citizens and projects funded by outside grants came next. Someone made some good decisions at the right time, and I guess we will be ready when the boom comes again. It remains to be seen if our county becomes covered with wind turbines. I am glad I don’t have to make that decision.

Which way does the wind blow?

Family, The Baboon Congress

Tomte Trouble

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

I have always liked Scandinavian design in textiles and folk art, and I often shop at The Stabo, a Scandinavian store in Bismarck and Fargo. My daughter finds this embarrassing. “Mom, you aren’t Norwegian. You’re Dutch and German! Why do you shop there? Why do you like that stuff” I tell her that my ancestors are the people of Beowulf, and that something in the designs speaks to deep yearnings that must come from beyond the mists of the long distant past (well, not really, but if she wants to think I’m weird, I’ll play along).

My daughter takes particular exception to the tomte I have purchased-figures in different shapes made out of wool with luxurious beards and red hats. These are made from the wool of sheep raised on the Swedish island of Gotland. I keep them, along with a couple of Yule goats and straw girl, on top of our media cabinet in the living room all year long. Daughter warns me that I am to stow the tomte and goats in a closet the first time she ever brings a beau home to meet the family. I ask “What if he is Norwegian or Swedish?” She says it doesn’t matter, and the weirdness must be hid in favor of good first impressions.

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Imagine my surprise this Christmas when I received this hefty fellow from my daughter. Now, I like tomte, but this guy is almost too much, even for me. Unlike the others, he has hands and thumbs, and I blame him for the dishwasher breaking down after Christmas. I didn’t put out the rice pudding, you see, so I suppose he let me know his disappointment by preventing the water from draining out. I mentioned this to daughter and she said “Good. Serves you right”.

I don’t think I need any more tomte after this. I have no more room, in any case. I am touched that daughter purchased something for me that I like but that she professes to loathe. Maybe something in the design speaks to a deep yearning in her. If so, the weirdness may continue long after I am dead and gone.

What do you love that others can’t abide?

The Baboon Congress

A Festival of Four Pageants

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

“Are you ready for Christmas?” This has been the standard greeting between folks out here lately, replacing “How about those Bison?”, or  What do you think about the weather?”   In my world, being ready for Christmas means that the lefse is made the weekend before Thanksgiving, all the baking and cleaning are done soon after, and the house is decorated by December 1.

This year, none of this happened, and the Tuesday before Christmas my home was not decorated, the presents had not been wrapped, the tree was in a box in the garage, and I hadn’t done much, if any, baking or cleaning. Since the first week of December, husband and I have either attended or participated in four Christmas “pageants” that have taken us away from home and  complicated or enriched our lives, depending on our moods at any given time.

Pageant One was the traditional Concordia Christmas Concert in Moorhead to which we wore our Norwegian sweaters and heard lovely and perfect choral singing.  It didn’t take too much out of us, except that it took us away from home for a weekend and we couldn’t do much Christmas preparation. I managed to bake 12 dozen cookies for a cookie exchange at work, but that was about all I got done.

Pageant Two took place as week later in a much more modest venue on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Here we helped distribute Christmas presents and food to about 500 people at a mission called the Dream Center. We played music with our Native friends and I helped read the Christmas story at the gatherings. I don’t know how relevant they found the story, given that they are struggling with poverty, homelessness, and hunger, but the children loved the gift boxes and the elders loved the gift bags and hams that were given out. This took us away from home for four more days, and no Christmas preparations took place at home.

Pageant Three took place one week after the Pine Ridge trip in the Sodbuster Room at the local Elks Lodge for my agency Christmas party. In addition to being a member of the Social Committee responsible for planning this soiree, I played my bass guitar in our agency  band, and this, of course, meant evening rehearsals that also kept us from making preparations at home.  We played everything from Stephen Foster (Hard Times Come Again No More) to Mavis Staples (I Belong to the Band) to Bachman Turner Overdrive (Taking Care of Business), with a Diana Ross medley somewhere in the middle.

Two days after the party, we played in our church bell choir for both Sunday morning services and at an afternoon Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols service. I was asked by the bell choir director to design the bulletins, and this, of course took me away from Christmas preparations at home.

Well, Christmas is upon us. Our children arrived and they decorated the tree and the house. They helped shop, and planned and will help cook Christmas dinner.  The house is clean enough, and I finally got to sleep past 7:00 a few mornings this week. I am grateful that we are safe and together, and I guess that is the most important thing.

Merry Christmas, Baboons. Now, if I could only get “Stop in the Name of Love” out of my head, I could say that life was almost perfect.

Describe your role in a memorable Christmas pageant.

 

The Baboon Congress

Adventures in Smudging

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Header image of sage from lebensmittelfotos on Pixabay

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

I must start out by apologizing to the Baboons for the obtuseness of the following post. I had to leave out some details so that I could tell you the substance of something I did without incurring all manner of rannygazoo for my furtive act.

I recently went somewhere (I can’t reveal where, for reasons I can’t divulge) which is usually full of people, but was deserted during the time of which I write.

It is a place I really like going to. It is also a place, however, where I have experienced a great deal of interpersonal strife, some of which goes back more than a decade.  The strife ended suddenly and unexpectedly a short time ago. My purpose for going to this place was to heal myself and the place by smudging.

Smudging is something our Native American friends do to ceremonially purify and cleanse themselves and their surroundings by burning fragrant plants and wafting the smoke all over.  I consulted with some Native friends about my smudging idea. They thought it was quite appropriate and supplied me with a shell, sage and bear root that they had harvested from their Reservation, and a  braid of sweet grass.

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The sage and bear root purify and heal; the sweet grass provides a blessing and counters negative energy.

Early one morning I took my supplies to the place I needed to smudge, all the while thinking peaceful and healing thoughts and good Lutheran prayers. It was just sunrise. I lit the sage and bear root in the shell, got them smoldering, and wafted the smoke all over myself. I then went from area to area in the place that were heavily associated with the strife. In psychology terms I would say that the areas were “deeply cathected” or full of negative energy. There was very little smoke but incredible fragrance, especially from the sage.  I then lit the sweet grass braid and repeated the process. The whole procedure took about 30 minutes. I left the place and went  home.

This is one of the goofiest things I have ever done. I told  a few non-Native people what I was planning, and one of them said “That is so weird, Renee! I was just thinking, what would a shaman do to help heal this place?” Well, I am no shaman, but I took this as an affirmation from the cosmos that what I had planned was ok.

I had to smudge in secret because smoking and burning candles aren’t allowed at the place I smudged, and many people wouldn’t have understood why I needed to do this. Anger and strife are killers, in my experience, and I needed to put as much of them to rest as I possibly could.  I feel more at peace now, and that is a good thing.

How would you nullify bad feelings associated with a significant place?

The Baboon Congress, Travel

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

I am not much into dream interpretation, being a Dust-bowl empiricist sort of psychologist by training. My dreams are pretty understandable, not scary, just annoying and mundane, usually fueled by anxiety. My most recent stupid dream concerned the band in which husband and I play doing a gig at the Vatican, and I couldn’t get my bass guitar amp to play loud enough during Mass. How dumb is that?

Our sojourn into Indian Country has taught me, though, that when a person has a dream concerning American Indians, it is wise to sit up and take notice. Dreams are important means of communication in the Native community.  I have heard many a Native person say to someone “I had a dream about you last night. Thought I better come and check if you are ok.” I had a very strange dream a while back about Linda, one of our Native friends we were going to meet up with at a pow wow. The dream, which seemed strangely real, involved Linda, in great distress, trying to contact me to tell me that she wasn’t going to make it to the pow wow because she was ill.  In the morning we drove up to the pow wow grounds. I asked about Linda and was told that she was ill and was staying home. That was a really odd experience.

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The photo attached to this post is of the Hopi Corn God.  We purchased him at Mesa Verde, in the National Park gift shop. He isn’t made by the Hopi, but by Apaches for the tourist trade. I think that Kachinas are too sacred to the Hopi to make and sell. I set him in a place of honor in the living room when we got back home. One night I had enough of husband’s snoring (this was pre-CPAP) and I bunked up on the living room sofa. That night I had a horrific dream that the kachina was really, really angry. It seemed very real, and it was again hard for me to decide if it was a dream or if it was really happening.  He was about 50 feet tall and was moving toward me, stomping and stomping with his big feet.  It felt that he was going to stomp me to jelly. I woke up and found some dried field corn we had for the squirrels and sprinkled some around the kachina’s feet.  I haven’t had any more dreams about him, but I wonder what it was he was trying to tell me that night.  Probably that even Apache-made Hopi Kachinas are too sacred to be used as an ornament. I probably need to ask some our Native friends what I should do with him and how I should properly dispose of him if they think that necessary. Be careful if you have an opportunity to purchase Native artifacts.

You may have dreams.

What is your most worrisome artifact?

The Baboon Congress

The Dust Suckers

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My apologies, Renee and Baboons.  I was away from e-mail and the blog all day yesterday, and did not realize there was no comment box in spite of several polite attempts made by diligent readers to call my attention to that fact.  

I blame the dust.  In my brain. 

Comments are now open on this post, which will remain up through the weekend. 

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

Husband has terrible airborne allergies, particularly to dust and pollen and cat dander. I had hoped that when we installed new siding and windows in the house last year he would find some relief, at least inside the house, but it didn’t happen. We have HEPA filters running all the time and have dust mite proof mattress and pillow covers, and new carpets, but he still downs Sudafed and Allegra like candy and is always sneezing and clearing his throat.

I noticed that even when our new windows were shut tight, there was always a thick layer of dust on furniture and other surfaces. I know that it is dustier out here than in other places because of the winds we have, but, honestly, a person shouldn’t  have to dust twice a week when the windows haven’t even been opened.

It occurred to me that we must be recirculating dust whenever we ran the furnace or the central air conditioning. I replace the furnace filter at the approved intervals, but that didn’t help, either. We decided to call in the dust suckers, or, more professionally, Peterson’s Furnace and Air Duct Cleaners. They arrived today and spent 7 hours removing more dirt and objects from our furnace and furnace ducts than I thought possible. They have a 600 lb vacuum that gets connected to the furnace and cleans out everything. The hose is more than a foot in diameter.  They also go from the vents back to the furnace to make sure nothing is in the ducts, and then sterilize the whole duct system. Some of the more interesting things they removed included:

    • Pieces of lumber, presumably left by the construction workers who built the house in 1978
    • Chunks of drywall-ditto
    • Cassette tapes
    • Cat toys
    • Spoons (not soup spoons but spoons for feeding babies)
    • gargantuan dust bunnies

Mr. Peterson is a local, and his able assistant is from New Jersey and has the most delightful accent. They tell us that this procedure should be done about every 10 years. It evidently hasn’t ever been done here in the 37 years since the house was built.  It remains to be seen if husband’s allergies will remit somewhat, but getting rid of the dust certainly can’t hurt. I need to ask my children which of them stuffed cassette number 4 of Harry Potter and The Goblet of FIre down the heat vent, and why. Alas, though, now I know that none of my missing soup spoons are in the duct work.

What long-missing item might be hiding in your air ducts?