All posts by reneeinnd

2025, Family, Health, Medicine, Uncategorized

Getting Along

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The anesthesiologist who gave me my cortisone injection Friday had very Middle Eastern first and last names. When I met him in person, I noticed that he looked very northern European and spoke just like a North Dakotan. and I knew then that he was from here. He is a graduate of the UND Medical School.

I don’t think it is very common knowledge that the first established mosque in the US was built in Ross, North Dakota in 1929. Ross is in northwest North Dakota south of Estevan, Saskatchewan. There were a lot of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants to the area in the early 1900’s, and they homesteaded and farmed there in harmony with their Norwegian neighbors. They fought in the US army in the First World War. They intermarried with their neighbors, and many became Lutheran or Catholic. Some remained Muslim, and there were Muslims with Norwegian last names. They all seemed to get along. I read a story by a woman in Ross with a very Norwegian last name who told of her father, a Muslim, who tried his best to maintain some rituals, and who prayed while butchering chickens on the farm. She said “Do you know how long it takes to butcher 50 chickens when you pray before each one?”

Many of the Middle Eastern settlers moved to larger communities during the Depression and Dust Bowl. By 1970 the Mosque had fallen into disrepair and was demolished. There is a small domed structure built on the site in commemoration.

Husband and I had several psychology colleagues who were ND natives with Lebanese/Syrian last names. Every so often you run across folks with Middle Eastern names whose families have been here for generations. What astounds me is how everyone seemed to get along back then, even those diverse groups up in Ross. If they could do it, I have hope we can, too.

How diverse was your community growing up? How about now?

2025, Health, Medicine, Uncategorized

Pain-Less

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I am a very healthy person. I am prescribed no medications and I only see my doctor once a year for my annual physical. For the past 5 years or so, though, I have struggled with intermittent sciatic pain, mainly in my left leg. I will be walking along and all of a sudden my left leg will give out, with pain at every step. My annual physical always seemed to coincide with brief respites from the leg pain, so I always could say it was better.

I have done four rounds of Physical Therapy over the years, which helps, but never lasts longer than a few weeks, even when I do the exercises. I really watch my posture while walking or sitting, and I stopped sleeping on my stomach, This has helped somewhat at times. Ibuprofen and acetaminophen did not help at all.

I had a really bad flare-up the end of January, and in June I finally went to the doctor and he ordered an MRI. That showed, in the fifth lumbar vertebrae, a bulging disc, spinal stenosis, and arthritis, especially on the left side. That vertebrae is where the sciatic nerve passes through. No wonder this had been happening. I also have lumbar scoliosis, which doesn’t help.

On Friday I drove to a pain clinic in Bismarck, and got a cortisone injection in my fifth lumbar vertebrae. The procedure took about 2 minutes The pain relief was instantaneous, and I walked out of the clinic with almost no twinges. I may need to repeat this procedure every 4-6 months, but it sure is worth it.

How are your relationships with your medical providers? What kind of a patient are you?

2025, Family, home, pets, Uncategorized

Breaking Good Habits

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My mother had a sign on the kitchen wall when I was growing up that said “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. That has always been my attitude, too, as we tried to find a balance between clean and clutter.

Since July 2, the day our house went on the market, our motto has been “My house is spotlessly clean to try to impress prospective buyers, and happiness is secondary”.

Boy, is it a pain to keep the house clean and uncluttered so that at a moment ‘s notice we can be out the door with the dog so an agent can show the house. I have become really insistent to make the bed pillows uniformly plumped and stacked, the bath towels evenly folded and hung, and the kitchen counters and floor spotless and gleaming. There are no newspapers, magazines, or mail left out. I dust twice a week. All the dog toys are put in the toy bin instead of lying about. I wash the panes in the bay window regularly to remove dog nose prints. Husband keeps all the waste baskets empty, keeps the kitchen sink clear of dishes, and keeps his bathroom clean and tidy. We both have been weeding the gardens and rolling up the hoses as needed. We are exhausted!

I hope this level of cleaning doesn’t become too ingrained, so that I feel as though I am being remiss if I don’t keep this standard of neatness once we move to our new house. This is one habit I want to break.

What habits have you tried to change? How long would it take you to prepare for a showing of your current abode?

2025, education, Family, Kids, Uncategorized

Welcome Back!

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Today is the first day of school here in our town’s public schools, the parochial schools, and all the schools in the neighboring smaller communities. It is, if course, one of the hottest days we will have all summer.

I believe that all the school buildings in our public schools here have air conditioning. We certainly didn’t have it when I was in elementary school or high school. The public schools here didn’t have it until after our children started school in the 1990’s. I don’t remember being really hot in my unairconditioned classrooms. Perhaps we were just more accustomed to functioning in hot buildings.

What I do remember about the first day of school is the excitement I felt the night before and being unable to sleep. My favorite elementary teacher was Mrs. Remme, Grade 3, who was a really energetic woman who loved bringing exciting things like butterfly cocoons into the classroom and having us watch them hatch. She also could have cared less about neat handwriting, which was a good thing for me since no matter how hard I tried, I could never write neatly in cursive.

My least favorite elementary teacher was Mrs. Peterson, Grade 4, a bitter woman who complained how she was bilked by door to door bible salesmen after her husband died. She also talked a lot about cooking lentils, and how it was a sad thing that we didn’t have more lentils in our diets. She went on to be an elementary principal in Iowa somewhere.

Who were your favorite/least favorite elementary teachers? How is your handwriting these days? Memories of first days of school?

2025, Food, gardening, Uncategorized

Pranking

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We had our first church handbell rehearsal last Thursday, and welcomed some new players. During some after-rehearsal snacks, the conversation started on gardening. Two of the new players, a married female couple, said the rains this summer really helped with their zucchini crop, but they had too many now. We advised them to take the excess to the food pantry. Another veteran bell player told the story of moving to a small Idaho town where her husband was a Luthern pastor. They were quite solemnly warned to keep their car doors locked at all times in the summer and fall because people would stealthily deposit unwanted excess zucchini if the doors were unlocked.

We have never been the recipients of excess zucchini until last Saturday, when I found a nice big one on the front steps. I highly suspect the new bell ringers of pranking us with the zucchini. Since it is a bigger one we plan to shred it and make zucchini pancakes. Just wait until our butternuts are ripe! The new bell ringers may be in for a surprise on their front steps.

When was the last time you were pranked or you pranked someone? What would you like to leave surreptitiously on someone’s yard or front steps?

2025, Food, home, Uncategorized

Stocking Up

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Husband and I order lots of foods on-line that are imported. We get quite a bit from a Spanish importer, such as tomato sauces, olive oil, dried beans, serrano ham, and Spanish cheeses and pancetta. We also order pasta and parmesan cheese from an Italian importer, and gallon cans of Turkish olive oil from the Syrian grocery store in Fargo. We get beans from Rancho Gordo. I like to have a well stocked larder. We are really spoiled.

I find myself in a quandary now, due to the threat and uncertainty of tariffs, the fact that we are moving soon, and the fact that this is the the time of year to stock up on dried beans and other items as it is harvest time. There is a special bean from Spain called Tolosa beans, for example, that is essential to a soup we love to make, and is hard to find in the States after autumn. We are also trying to use up as much food we have currently so we don’t have to move it.

After the threats of tariffs emerged in the new year I ordered two gallons of Turkish olive oil and two half-gallons of Spanish olive oil before the price skyrocketed. We will have a lot of olive oil to move. Yesterday I ordered eight pounds of Rancho Gordo beans as we were short on some beans we cook often. They won’t take up too much room on the moving truck. I don’t plan to order any more food on-line at this point, but I am feeling increasingly militant about not letting politics interfere with my cooking or my finances.

How might tariffs impact your budget? What imported foods do you purchase? What foods do you make sure you have on hand?

2025, Family, History, Uncategorized, work

They Don’t Make That Model Anymore

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Our last day of working for the State will be sometime the first week of October. The administrators at both of our agencies are scrambling to figure out who can do all the things we do, and it is turning out to be a challenge.

Husband and I are somewhat unique in that we are actually in-person at our agencies and don’t work remotely. Most of our State psychology colleagues live out of state and only test people via telehealth with the help of psychometrists. Very few of them even test children. We also are unique in that we know how to give IQ tests to children about to turn 3, and that is a rare skill indeed. Children with developmental disabilities need IQ testing before the age of 3 to determine if their issues are severe enough and will be long term. If so, they qualify for a host of services, as well as Medicaid and excellent case management. In other more populous parts of the state, there are enough psychologists in the private sector to do the testing. Not so out here.

We also know how to do IQ testing using the Stanford Binet IQ test, which has norms down to age 2, and which none of the younger State or private sector psychologists know how to use. You can’t test a 2 year old via telehealth. They don’t make them like us anymore.

Husband says he wants to be like a 1964 Chevy Impala. You can see it in the header photo. I identify with my Great Grandmother’s early 1920’s Reo. My father had vivid memories of playing in the car when he was small. Here is a similar model

What out of production car model do you miss? What else have they stopped making that you regret?

2025, Family, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Photo Finish

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One benefit of moving is the chance to go through things and decide what is good to keep and what is good to go. I spent part of Saturday going through a closet in the guest bedroom that has all our photo albums in it. That was a daunting task.

I am the photographer in the family. Over the years we have kept, organized in albums, most of the many photos I took during our early marriage and of the children as they grew up. We also acquired Husband’s family photos that included photos of his childhood as well as old family photos from early 20th century. We got a lot of those after Husband’s father died. I have my own old family photos organized in another part of the house.

I found I still have the scrapbooks my mother put together of a trip to Europe I took as a high school senior with America’s Youth In Concert in 1976, and my years at Concordia. I had forgotten we had those, since I shoved them in our closet after my parents died 11 years ago. I am glad I made an executive decision then to get rid of most of the volumes of my own baby pictures. I haven’t missed them at all.

The whole problem with the guest room closet is that we have been shoving things in there and forgetting about them. I got rid of empty photo albums and other useless things on Saturday. Why, I asked myself, do we have three pairs of binoculars? I didn’t have the energy to sort through the fifteen or so photo albums that remain. That will be done at our leisure after we move.

Snce the advent of smartphones I no longer use my camera. Those photos are in “the Cloud”. I will have to figure out how to digitize the photos in the albums I decide to keep. Our son assured me it is easily done. We shall see if that is so.

How do you store your pre-smartphone photos? Any Baboon scrapbookers?

2025, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Practicing Acceptance

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(This is written somewhat tongue in cheek.)

One of the challenges of sharing a kitchen with Husband is his extreme fussiness regarding the foods he cooks and prepares. He has many preconceived expectations as to what goes with what, and is unhappy if the combinations aren’t exactly the way he wants them. When he seasons a dish, he spends quite a bit of time tasting and adding this and that til it is just right in his mind. I can’t tell the difference.

The same goes for his fussiness in pairings of different foods. I can usually put up with his demands for just the right main course with just the right sides. It is a little more difficult now that we are trying to empty our freezers before we move. We have agreed, for example, that we aren’t going to buy any more sausage, brats, or ground meat until the stuff we have is gone. There are a lot of sausages to be used up.

The other day I was pretty exasperated with him for stopping at the butcher shop and buying some ring bologna and summer sausage. I reminded him of all the brats and other sausage that we had that would work just as well as bologna. He insisted that he had to have the bologna because that is always what he has with the particular side dish he was going to have that evening. I told him that we would never get through the food we already had if he keeps this up, and that he might have to change some of his expectations for meals if we are to reduce the food in the freezers. He sighed and stated in a somewhat martyred tone that he would just have to start practicing acceptance regarding our meals. Husband says he owns his culinary idealism.

I am fortunate to be married to someone who loves to cook and loves good food. I just hope he doesn’t get too distressed as he has to change his ideas, at least temporarily, regarding our meals.

What do you have to practice acceptance of? Do you have inviolable expectations for some meals and food pairings?

2025, Media, Music, Uncategorized

Esoterica

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For the last several weeks I have been plagued with an ear worm of Oh, Canada. Don’t ask me why. It is a nice enough tune, but it was getting annoying. I woke up at 3:00 am Sunday with another tune going through my head. I was sleepy and had to think for a minute but recognized it as Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromir Weinbeger.

I pride myself for an ability to identify pieces of classical music by ear. I had the advantage of playing the Schwanda piece in college concert band, so it wasn’t too hard to identify it. I challenge myself as I drive or listen to Classical MPR to name the piece or composer before the announcer does. I still have some trouble discerning between Poulenc and Milhaud, as well as all the Spanish guitar composers, but on most other composers I think I am pretty solid.

This knowledge, as well as $5.00, will get me a cup of coffee, but it is pretty satisfying to be able to say, if anyone asks “Oh, that is such and such by so and so”.

What area of esoteric knowlege or skill do you pride yourself on? What long running 1960’s television program made repeated use of a composition by Brahms? What classical music are you most familiar with?