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?
Today is my last weekday off before I start back to work next week. I have to go in on Monday, start my work computer that has been returned to my office and reset, and “onboard” in Peoplesoft, which means I set myself up as an hourly employee instead of a salaried employee. That means I have to clock in and out, but I needn’t stay when I have nothing to do, and I can just go home. I haven’t had to clock in and out since I worked at Mr. Steak in Moorhead, MN in 1980.
I didn’t complete as much household organizing and cleaning as I envisioned at the end of January, but illness and travel and a sciatica flare-up got in the way. I expect all sorts of questions from colleagues on Monday about having a “fabulous” month off, and I expect they may be disappointed when I tell them how mundane it was. I look forward to work but more flexibility for being at work, and that will be a really nice transition.
What life transitions have been the easiest and most difficult for you? Have you ever had to clock in and out at work?
A couple of Sundays ago, Husband and I arrived at church to play bells with the hand bell choir and found, upon reading the bulletin, that there was to be a baptism. That wasn’t at all unusual, but what was unusual was the name the parents chose for their son. Yes, we were to participate in the baptism of a little boy who had been named “Tarzan”.
Of all the names to hang on someone, Tarzan isn’t one that immediately pops into my mind. We have had some unusual names for baptisms lately, like Coven, pronounced like cove and not like the name for a group of witches. Tarzan, however, really takes the cake. What would you call him for short? Zan? Tarzy? Tartar? Zanzan?
I really can’t imagine what could have led people to choose that name, and I can foresee a rough time for the child once he starts school. We didn’t get to see little Tarzan as the family all had the flu and they cancelled and haven’t rescheduled the baptism.
What are some unusual names that you have run across? If you had to change your name, what would you change it to?
In addition to a daily check of our local regional jail for the inmate list so I can see which of my little darlings are in the hoosgow, (There are several today) and the two funeral homes to see who died, I also check a history site to see what of importance has occurred on this day in the past.
I see that today is the anniversary of the US Congress in 1862 authorizing the printing of paper money. I rarely have any paper money in my purse. Husband usually has some, but it is hit or miss. I remember my dad being so happy to have some “Silver Certificates” in his possession when I was a child. I remember that the engraving was quite elaborate on those bills. I wonder, given the advent of all that is digital, if we will need paper money in the future. It seems the penny is also on the way out.
What is your favorite bank robbery movie, song, or story, or songs or stories about money in general? What is the largest monetary bill you ever carried?
Since I have been home full time after retiring on February 1, I have had time to sort through some closets, papers, and freezers that had been pretty well neglected over the past couple of years. It has dawned on me that we can either have a clean, organized home or work full time. We can’t do both. Husband is still working essentially full time and has been for the past several years.
Because of our harried work schedules and after work exhaustion, things like papers have been thrown on our work desk or filing cabinets to be gone through “later”. It is hard to see what you have in closets if it is poorly organized and things are just stuffed in. It is also hard when you live in a food desert and you love to cook and you run across hard to come by items that you get excited about and buy a whole bunch because they are scarce, and then you throw them in your poorly organized freezers and you sort of forget you have them as they get covered up with subsequently purchased groceries, and then you inadvertently buy more the next time you run across them.
I decided to start by sorting and organizing the freezer that has all the sausages, ground meat, lamb, and homemade brodo. I was rather dismayed to discover we have seven pounds of ground veal, five pounds of ground lamb, and four legs of lamb and a huge lamb rack. Veal and lamb are virtually impossible to obtain out here, so we bought a bunch when we had the chance, then forgot we had it. There will be meatballs and meatloaf on the menu for the next several months. I have plans for one of the lamb legs for Easter.
I also organized the linen cupboard, and found we have eight sets of queen sheets. We only have three queen beds, and we only sleep in one of them, and I have no idea why I thought we needed so many. The sheets are all in great shape. We will not need to buy new sheets ever again.
I have several closets to go through and a couple of freezers to organize. I am so glad I will only work part time starting in March so that I can finish sorting and organizing.
How do you fold fitted sheets? What are you prone to buy too much of? Any helpful home organizing tips?
And we thought it was cold during the last cold spell.
Not much happening on the farm this week. The sun is sure getting stronger, and the chickens stand on the south side of the shed, in the sun, out of the wind, against the white steel, and they don’t venture much further. They even laid a few eggs.
I’m having a hard time feeling motivated lately. Every now and then I get to a point where I feel like the Earth is going to fall into the sun, so what’s the point anyway.
Sigh.
And then I get up and go do something.
It could be the political climate, it could be the cold weather, it could just be the same old routine day after day. Have you noticed? Even though there’s a lot going on, and every day is different, the routine is still the same.
And coffee. Evidently, I’m a coffee drinker now. One day I bought a bag of coffee. Wait, back up—Why didn’t this group tell me there was different flavors of coffee?? I spent a day researching coffee flavors, and then I was determined not to buy a coffee maker because I wasn’t sure how committed I was to all this, so I tried various methods of making coffee without a coffee maker, and I researched egg coffee, and reusing the grounds, and strainers and filters, and I spilled a lot, and I made too many cups, bowls, and pans dirty… and then about the fourth day I bought a $10 coffee maker at Menards.
Sigh.
And a bag of small bag of Highland Grog coffee.
Sigh.
When we say we had “one cup”, are we actually referring to the volume measurement of one liquid cup? Because my travel mug is roughly two cups, and if I have two in a day, am I having four cups of coffee or two? This morning I made about three circles in the kitchen trying to figure out what I was doing first or next. I just haven’t gotten this whole coffee making process figured out yet.
Sigh.
There’s a spot in the yard where I get a real good echo off the barn and chicken coop. I stood there one day and yelled ‘Hello!’ a dozen times. I’d get two good echo’s off that and it was kinda fun and I enjoyed myself.
Out in the shed, I’ve gotten a cabinet mounted, and I’m working on the bolt storage shelves.
I saw a truck from a concrete company on the road the other day. I took a photo of it at the stoplight and was able to contact them for an estimate on adding more concrete in the shed. $13,000 for a flat slab 25’x50’. Well, that’s not a ton of money. I mean, it’s still $13K, but that’s hardly anything! Oh, it’s not going to happen this summer. I’ve said before, just because crop prices are up one year, doesn’t mean we should go crazy buying stuff, because you’d still have to make that payment next year. That’s how this whole shop project started: crop prices were really good in 2022 and I felt like I had money and I signed a contract for concrete in 2023 and began my shop. Here we are in 2025 and I’m still paying off the shop.
People may be curious about the agricultural environment in this administration…well, there’s lots of speculation. Prices are holding steady for the most part for corn and soybeans. They vary a few cents up and down every day based on talk of a trade deal with China, or good weather in Argentina. And I’ll say again, it’s such a global market, tariffs will send a price down, but bad weather in Brazil will bring it back up. It’s kinda crazy. I have a little corn in storage at the elevator, I put it there last fall, knowing I always need cash come spring, and hoping the price will have gone up enough to offset what I’m paying for storage of it. $0.06 / bushel / month. So, maybe today I win, and tomorrow I’ll lose. I’ll need the money either way.
This weekend at the college is the physics department club doing their demonstration show fundraiser. They physics kids are nerds as much as the theater kids are. They’re a good group though, and even though the show hasn’t changed too much in the 15 years I’ve been doing this, the audience kids seem to like it.
Aside from a mild bout of diverticulitis when we were in Brookings, I felt pretty good during the visit. Everyone else seemed to feel pretty good, too.
Grandson went home from school on Wednesday with a fever that had spiked to 102° by yesterday afternoon. Daughter-in-Law was also home with a fever, and Son was at home taking care of both of them.
Yesterday Husband started feeling puny, as the say out here, with fatigue and a a low grade fever, so he took a nap and decided to not go into the office in the afternoon. He chose not to take any Tylenol so as to give his immune system time to heat up and fight off whatever was plaguing him. By evening he felt better.
Thus far I have not started to feel “puny”, but I plan to engage in my self care, which is to stay at home, cook, sleep late, and not leave the house until Sunday morning when we sing at the 9:00 church service and play bells at 3:00 at the local If Music Be The Food Of Love concert at our church to raise money and donations to the food pantry.
What is your self care when you start to feel “puny”. What are your euphemisms for illness? What major childhood illnesses did you have?
My mother and her four paternal aunts (Lena, Meta, Bertha, and Greta) spent a great deal of time in the mid-1930’s filling my mother’s Hope Chest with patchwork quilts they sewed. They used cloth scraps from their own and others’ unneeded clothing as well as larger pieces for backing. Mom never really used them and just kept them in her cedar chest.
I started using them after Husband and I married. There were four of them. One is still in tremendous shape and we have it on a bed in the basement. The quilts worked best as blankets under the bedspread as they are all sized for double beds. Two of the quilts disintegrated after about 10 years. I decided to preserve the third one and patched it as best I could and put on a new backing. I hung it on the wall in my work office for many years until time and gravity started it to sag and tear at the seams.
It has been in a cabinet in my new office until I started to clean and get rid of stuff preparatory to my retirement. I took the quilt out to our van and left it there to be used as part of winter survival gear
Husband brought it into our son’s house when we were visiting there last week, and our grandson insisted that we put it on his bed, and he slept under it every night we were in Brookings. Mind you, it hadn’t been laundered in 25 years, and was probably full of dust, but grandson loved it and wasn’t happy when we took it home. I told him I wanted to patch it better and we would bring it back to him at our next visit. It dawned on me that the quilt is about 90 years old. My mother and her aunts would be pleased some of their handwork is still being used and loved.
What precious things do you have that have been handed down? What do you want to hand down for future generations? What do you think are essentials for “Hope Chests” these days?
I never imagined when I was in High School speech that it would come in handy when I was in my late 60’s and had to talk to a bunch of State senators. Serious Dramatic Interpretation actually came in pretty handy last week.
I was pretty anxious on the drive to Bismarck, mainly because of the cold weather and the fear that my sciatica, which leads my left leg to unexpectedly give out on me, would cause me to not only take the floor when I had to speak, but also put me on the floor. I was also anxious about the lack of parking at the Capitol and how far I would have to walk to get into the building. Just in case, I brought along a hiking stick we had at home to give me some stability. I was lucky to find a parking spot in a parking lot just outside the front door, and I used the walking stick for support on the way into and when I walked the long corridors to the conference room the committee I was speaking to met.
The committee was made up of about six senators, and there were various technical assistants in the room as well. There were about ten public members along with our board attorney and office manager. The senator who sponsored the bill we were opposed to presented the bill to the committee. Then the committee chair asked for those public attendees who were in support of the bill to speak. There were none. Then the chair asked for those opposed to speak. I jumped up at once took the podium.
There are strict rules of addressing the committee. You have to start out with “Chairman_______ and members of the committee”. If you are asked a question by a committee member you have to start out by saying “Chairman________. Senator_________, and members of the committee” before you answer the Senator who asked the question.
I had five pages of testimony written by a fellow board member. It had been sent to the committee the day before, and the testimony was live broadcasted on the internet and also recorded. I spoke confidently, but I know I spoke too quickly. Only one Senator asked me a question. I was able to have some witty and friendly repartee with the committee chair who has an even odder Dutch name than I have. It went well, overall. We will have to see how it goes.
Were you in speech or debate in high school? How do you feel you do at public speaking? What is the largest group you ever spoke to?
We have been at our son’s home since Friday, and the cold weather has made for a great deal of family time. Son, Daughter in Law, Daughter, Husband, me, and Grandson are all here together. There has been lots of time playing Uno, putting together jigsaw puzzles, doing art projects with grandson, cooking big meals, watching the first two How To Train Your Dragon movies, playing with the Westie and the cat and sleeping late.
I have been a nervous wreck since before we drove here on Friday. The cold frightens me more than it used to. I have developed great anxiety anticipating driving in this cold weather, mainly surrounding the van breaking down in the middle of nowhere and then freezing to death. We were supposed to go to see my 93 year old aunt yesterday in Watertown, SD, about 40 miles north of Brookings, and I was so relieved when she phoned in the morning to say she had a cough and a fever and we shouldn’t come. Husband has been going out to start the van at intervals and even drove it into town yesterday, so he is keeping the engine warm.
This cold weather is unprecedented in my experience, and I am really worried about the trip home on Tuesday. The subzero windchills aren’t supposed to let up until Wednesday, and I might try to convince Husband to stay another day and leave on Wednesday. We have lots of blankets in the event of a breakdown. The van is working well, but you never know!
What do you have in your winter survival kit in your vehicle? How are you coping with the cold? What are your favorite indoor family activities?
Trail Baboon 