My agency is going through a national accreditation review this week, which involves visits from the accreditation agency personnel and extensive reviews of our policies and operations. Everyone has been on edge. A positive review with few problem areas is important for us to continue to receive various forms of Federal funding and grants.
I giggled when I came to work yesterday morning to see, in the parking lot, the van for the business that stocks the candy and soft drink vending machines in the lobby. The workers were unloading boxes to bring into the building. The company is called Braun Distributing, and they stock vending machines all over town. They also are a wholesale vendor of alcohol. That is why Budweiser is emblazoned all over the delivery van that was in the parking lot. We provide both mental health and substance abuse treatment, and it sure looks odd to have the Budweiser van in the parking lot. I teased our clinical director that the accreditation reviewers would be pretty suspicious of how exactly we were keeping our employees and clients happy. It was a rather unfortunate, but funny, coincidence, I thought.
What are some awkward, funny, and/or unfortunate coincidences you can relate?
When we moved to our neighborhood in 1988, it felt as though we had moved to and outpost of the Czech Republic. The Karskys, the Knopiks, the Kovash family, and the Dvoraks all lived next door or across the street. They were all somehow related to one another. Mrs. Karsky described us as “a nice young couple with a young son” to the other neighbors, information she had got from our real estate agent. Everyone was excited when we moved in, as most of the people on the block were older and/or retired. There were no children on the block.
36 years later, we are the older people on the block happy to see new and younger faces in the neighborhood. Only the Knopiks remain as the Czech contingent. There are lots of young children, especially on our side of the street. A couple of houses south of us lives a hard working family from Zimbabwe. They have a teenager who walks back and forth past our house most days during the school year to get to the Catholic High School, as well as several younger daughters and a young son who are friends with the Hispanic family on the corner. The other day I was driving past those houses when I saw the three Hispanic little girls, their brother, and all the Zimbabwe children sitting in a row on the curb. They had exhausted themselves in the enormous jumper house that the Hispanic dad had inflated for them all to bounce around in.
We share surplus garden vegetables with the neighbors, and everyone gets along. It is so nice to see the neighborhood continue to be a haven for young families and for the more mature, longer term residents.
What was your neighborhood like to grow up in? Any “bad apples” or nice grandparent-types as neighbors? Who were your best childhood friends?
I have been struggling on and off over the past couple of years with sciatica down both my legs. The whole situation is complicated by my lumbar scoliosis. I have been in physical therapy for the past several months, and it has kind of helped, but I still have a lot of pain, or at least did until now.
My physical therapist changed her strategy a couple of weeks ago and has focused on what she calls the posterior chain, the muscle system that runs from one ankle, up the leg and across the lower back and glutes, and then down the other leg. All the muscles work together, so that I can feel the stretches in my right ankle when she manipulates my left leg. I figured out the source of the whole problem last week on my own, and I am proud to say and the culprit is my bifocals.
I realized last week that I walk consistently with my head down so that I can see where I am going and I don’t trip. I lowered my head to get a clear view right in front of me because of my bifocals. My lowered head was messing up the weight distribution up and down my back. The minute I started making sure I kept my head up. 75% of my leg pain disappeared. Some of my other back muscles have protested with the change, but that is to be expected. I haven’t tripped yet. It is a hard habit to break, though.
How is your posterior chain? What are your recent exciting discoveries?
What a week it’s been. So much going on and I pretty much hit the wall on Wednesday, but I powered through until Thursday when, after Wednesday night’s rain (2.06 then another .2″) I could stay home and have a lazy day. I may have drifted off a couple times.
We are REALLY excited about the hot and cold water faucets installed in our garage.
No more cold water dog baths! It’s kinda dumb how excited we are about this!
Plus got ‘SpongeBob, the Musical’ ready to open and that became a really fun, silly show with more witty one liners and dialogue than I realized. (When lighting a show, I’m not fully listening for the first few rehearsals; my mind is in other places. Yeah, I’m supposed to read the script first, but you, it’s only ‘Spongebob’…) The show opened last night.
Last week, I did finally finish cutting oats. I started Thursday, the swather ran for an hour and a half and died. An hour later it ran for half an hour and died. The next morning it ran for 45 minutes and died. (The generator isn’t working either, so I’d drive the gator up there and take the battery jump pack along and jump start it every time). I made some phone calls and googled symptoms for a while. This thing has a Chyrsler Slant 6 engine in it. If you know anything about cars, you know about the Slant 6. It was ubiquitous in Chrysler cars for quite a few years in the 1960’s and ’70’s. It might be the fuel pump, might be the ignition coil, hard to say. John Deere doesn’t stock any of those parts anymore, but I called a local auto parts place. The young man there– key words being ‘young man’, I knew he was too young. And when he said to me, “Is the coil that round cylinder thing?” I knew I had the wrong guy.
I called NAPA and I asked first, “Do you know what a Slant 6 is?” The guy scoffed. “Do I know what a slant 6 is!” OK, good. I can talk to this guy. He told me when he first started working for NAPA he was in a small farming town, and being a city boy, he didn’t know what a ‘swather’ was. He learned fast. THIS was the right guy to talk with. I replaced the ignition coil and a resistor, and it ran for 45 minutes and quit. But an hour later, it ran for 3 hours. And I was THIS CLOSE to finishing all the oats. It was 9:15 at night and dark and while there are two headlights on the swather, they don’t really light enough to see anything. And then, feeling optimistic and picturing being done, like the MN Vikings, it let me down. (Sorry for the dig. Courtesy of my brother in law, on Friday Kelly got to spend some time at the Vikings Training Camp with our daughter in law, Michelle.) The next morning, I finished cutting the last of the oats in about 15 minutes and drove it home. I guess I’ll replace the points, condenser, and fuel pump, and get the generator repaired, and maybe next year it will run better.
In places, it looks like the deer wrapped their tongues around the plant and stripped the grain right off; it was just stalks. In places it was broken off or down. And in some places it looked OK.
I’ll talk more about the harvest next week. But it wasn’t good.
I couldn’t find the ducks one morning. They have found the pond. They will do a good job cleaning up the algae. And we lost one. There was a carcass down there one morning. Shucks.
We’ve decided to have the barn painted. And I don’t want to do it, nor do I want to be climbing the ladder to the peak, nor should I be climbing up there. Twenty some years ago when I painted it last, I put the extension ladder in the loader bucket and put that up on the roof of this lean-to. And I still couldn’t reach the peak. I’ve done some dumb stuff, but not usually the same thing twice.
I happen to see a guy painting the building where daughter attends, and we’ve hired them to paint the barn. They’re out power washing the old paint off this week.
I had some good volunteers helping with theater stuff again.
One teenage padawan, Max, is back, so he and a volunteer met me at Menards and they loaded up 35 sheets of 1/4″ plywood (we call it ‘lauan’ which is kind of a general term) while I paid for it, and then I met them outside to load it.
The three of us carried it into the theater. Then two more helpers arrived and the lumber yard truck showed up with two guys and the 7 of us hauled 25 sheets of 3/4″ plywood inside. It was too dang hot to work much harder than that. Plus the sprinkler repair guys were there and they moved a sprinkler pipe that was in a sightline from the booth.
When we visited our daughter in Washington last April, we went to a cookware shop in Gig Harbor. I found a new pastry cookbook there, and last weekend was my first attempt at the recipes. I tried the dough for laminated pastries, and made croissants and Franzbrotchen.
The book New European Baking is by an American baker, Lauren Kratochvila, who was trained in France and runs a bakery in Berlin. The recipes look wonderful, although are pretty complicated. There were illustrations that were helpful, and the finished dough tasted wonderful. I don’t know how many baboons have made their own croissant dough, but the basic premise is that you envelope a 10 inch square of butter (about 9 oz) in a 10 inch round of dough, and then proceed to roll the dough into a 30 inch length, fold the dough in a specific way, chill it, roll it again to 30 inches, fold it again, chill it, and then roll it out into a 20 X 12 rectangle and cut the dough into rolls. The end product has hundreds of butter/dough layers because of the folds. This all has to be done really quickly so the butter doesn’t get soft in between the dough layers and ooze out. I was so irritable and stressed during all this that Husband was afraid to come into the kitchen.
I have made Julia Child’s croissant recipe in the past. This recipe was more complicated, but I am determined to try it again. My rolls turned out pretty good for a first try, although they didn’t have the perfect shape that the book author showed in the book photos. They were light and airy and buttery. The Franzbrotchen have a cinnamon filling and are supposed to look like squashed bicycle tires. You can see the rolls I made in the header photo. I considered this first try a learning experience, and I am going to try them until I get them as perfect as I can.
What have you tried to perfect and with what success? What pastry would you like to learn to make?
One of my high school friends is a rather successful composer and music teacher who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. I wasn’t too surprised to hear that my friend has decided to move permanently to France.
I can’t imagine what is involved in such a move. It is complicated enough planning a 500 mile move to Luverne in the next year or so. I don’t imagine it is at all financially possible to move one’s entire household to another continent. I marvel at how my ancestors left Europe, leaving what they had and starting over in a new place thousands of miles from home. There were a few precious items that were packed and transported, but everything else was left behind.
The last time we made a long distance move was when we moved to ND from Indiana in 1987. We didn’t have much then, and the move wasn’t too hard. We have a lot more stuff now. Husband has agreed that he has way too many books and is bravely starting to cull them. They will go to the local library’s used book store. He has agreed that his old college philosophy books will go to the landfill. He insists that we are moving the piano to Minnesota.
Every time I go in the basement or garage, I cast a critical eye on our possessions there. Do we move dozens of empty canning jars? What about the book cases if we are getting rid of the books? Do we move the bean poles, soaker hoses, and tomato cages, or buy new after we move? How about the snow shovels and rakes? In some respects, getting rid of it all and just starting over from scratch seems more simple, but I know it isn’t possible.
What is the longest distance you have moved households? What did your ancestors bring with them to the US when they immigrated? What country would you move to if you decided to immigrate?
Husband and I were contemplating the possibility that we would have a bumper crop of eggplants, and sat down together in the living room to search the New York Times Food app and other on-line sites for eggplant recipes in the event our fears came true. Husband commented that it was such a nice thing to be able to sit down with one’s partner of many years and do something as simple and as satisfying as hunt for recipes, and that this was a wonderful example of senior romance. He then told me that he ran across a You Tube video of a song by Holly Williams, and that it reminded him of my parents. He played the video for me. It was quite sweet. She wrote it about her grandparents.
This brought to mind the Nanci Griffith number that I have always loved:
Both my sets of grandparents were married for more than 50 years, and were pretty devoted, but also pretty crabby with each other at times. I remember taking care of my paternal grandfather while my grandmother was having gall bladder surgery, I was about 17, and he needed care as he had a stroke and was paralyzed on his left side and had his left leg amputated due to diabetes. He was always pretty stoic, but told me out of the blue while I was helping him get his prosthesis on that “She’s a pretty good grandma, you know”, which was his way of telling me that he was worried about her and he wanted her to come home.
Who are the most devoted older couples you know?Other examples of sweet senior romance in songs or stories?
One nice thing about living out here is that no matter how hot it gets during the day, it almost always cools down at night because of the low humidity. That means we can turn off the air conditioning and open up the windows after midnight. Our town is also really quiet at night, with the only the occasional train whistle breaking the silence.
On Tuesday night I woke up at 3:30, turned off the air conditioning, and opened the windows. I had just settled back in bed when it started. Somewhere in our neighborhood, very close to our house, a bunch of crows began making a hullabaloo. First one crow would give voice, then four others would chime in. They were loud and raucous, and it went on and on for an hour and a half. They sounded really upset. I didn’t have the energy to get up and close the windows and turn the air conditioning back on, so I just put a pillow over my head, I finally fell back to sleep after they quit.
I believe Husband and the dog identified a possible motive for the crows’ behavior. Yesterday morning on their walk they came upon the corpse of a rabbit on the sidewalk near our house. The rabbit’s head was missing, and it looked as though it had been there for a couple of days. There is a small stream and slough several blocks from our house where a mink or weasel would feel quite at home. Minks and weasels decapitate their prey. I think the crows were sounding the alarm that a murder was being committed in our neighborhood. The crows have been quiet since Tuesday night. The next time they start a ruckus in the middle of the night I will have more sympathy for them and wonder who is being murdered this time.
What are night noises in your neighborhood? Any mysteries in your neighborhood? Any other creative theories for the headless rabbit or the crows’ alarm?
I received a text from Daughter on Tuesday in a panic because it was 93° in Tacoma, her apartment was hot except for her bedroom, where she has a portable air conditioner, and her refrigerator had stopped working and everything in her freezer/fridge was melted. She had to throw out eight grocery bags of food. Only the cheese was salvageable.
I immediately went into problem solving mode, inquiring about rental insurance, repairs, etc. This was not what she needed or wanted. She just wanted me to commiserate and console. It turned out to be a problem with the fridge shorting out the fuse panel in her apartment. She just needs to keep an eye on it.
Very few people in the Pacific North West have air conditioning because it rarely gets that hot there. There have been unusual but increasingly frequent heat waves there. I am a person who is always cold, so no matter how hot it is, it rarely bothers me. I could probably do ok there. I remember how excited my parents were when we got an air conditioner installed in the dining area of our house when I was in about Grade 1. It only kept the livingroom cool, but it sure made them feel good.
I have never had to deal with a freezer or fridge that went on the fritz. I often wonder what we would do if we had an extended period of electricity loss given all the freezers we have in the basement. I think I would gets lots of ice to keep everything cold and get a gas powered generator to fill in for the loss of power.
When did you first have air-conditioning? Ever had to deal with a freezer or fridge that malfunctioned? What kind of help do you want when you are upset?
I really can’t explain how the idea for this post came together. All I can tell you is that I was sitting at my desk at work on Wednesday when The Song of Hiawatha, Lewis Carroll’s parody Hiawatha’s Photographing, and Husband’s plan to smoke a pork shoulder on the 4th all converged in my brain.
Husband has planned to get his smoker going for weeks, and he has been fussing about the fuels he needs, the type of rub and mop he would use, and the pork shoulder he intended to smoke. I guess that might have reminded me of Carroll’s parody of the photographer fussing to set up the camera and get the photo subjects to cooperate. My Uncle Harvey’s farm in Pipestone. MN bordered the National Monument where The Song of Hiawatha pageant was performed (my tall, blonde, cousins were often extras in the production), and my parents took me to see it several times.
I have never been a fan of Longfellow’s poetry. I also have a hard time reading epic poems like The Kalevela that have been translated into a sing-song cadence. It dawned on me that if I could write a parody of Longfellow, anyone could. Here goes:
Husband Chris got out the smoker,
Like an iron lung, the smoker
Filled it up with logs and wood chips
Double checked that it was perfect
Set the contents all on fire
Waited for the embers glowing
Then he made the pork roast spice rub
Covered all the roast with spice rub
Closed the lid and smoked the shoulder
Sat for hours by the smoker
Feeding logs and chips as needed
Doused the roast with special mop sauce
Drank some beer to pass the hours
I had to stop there. The eight syllable pattern was getting tedious. It could go on and on, just like Longfellow.
What are your favorite/least favorite epic poems? What activities turn you into a fuss pot?
Trail Baboon 